Jos de la Sota Rus

P O RT R A I T O F
A L E J A N D RO D E L A S OTA
BY ONE OF HIS SONS

In my fathers case, life and work were

interwoven to an unusual degree, so much so
that even today it is impossible to separate
them. Beyond a certain point, only the
memory and the works endure; later, just the
works. Today there are still those of us who
can remember, who can tell a stor y that
resembles the life, with what remains in our
memory after the passage of time; in short,
who can transmit a plausible and intimate
likeness that perhaps permits a better
understanding of his work.

In this stor y I will describe two images, two

recollections, one from the beginning, when I
was still a young child and another from the
end, when he was old. One day at school they
asked us about our fathers professions. One
classmate told how his father, who was a
doctor and dressed in a white smock, healed
the sick in the hospital: when he grew up, he
would also be a doctor. Another, whose father
was a lawyer, spoke of his office with the huge
shelves full of books; and the other children
spoke about other jobs.

When it was my turn, I said my father was an

architect, and was asked how he worked. So I
explained how he spent the mornings in his
pyjamas, playing the piano, and then in the
afternoon he went to his practice where he
would make sketches on ver y thin paper that
he gave to Fermin, the draughtsman, who
would then draw it with ink on onion paper.
Ever yone in class found it ver y funny:
imagining a classmates dad in his pyjamas at
12 in the morning, playing the piano and
sketching on onion paper, no less. But for me
this was just normal. My father would go late
to the studio, returning even later. Often
when we were leaving for school in the
morning, we would find him whisky in his
hand, chatting calmly with my uncles or his
friends in the living room - as if it was eight in
the evening and not eight in the morning.
Another version of this recollection is my
father humming while imagining playing the
piano in his bald head, sitting in a chaise-
longue, thinking of his architecture: what
else? This would have been more difficult to
explain than the piano and thats probably why
I opted for the first stor y. It was all normal,
there was nothing that was not part of the
freedom of being and doing in the world, of
being ones own boss, the almost perfect
match between what one does, what one
wants to do and what one should do; taking
his time, without the slightest anxiety, neither
the anxiety that marks this vocation nor,
worse still, that dogs the exercise of the
profession. Ever ything contrasted with the
image of obligations and duties that the adult
world projected onto children. It had nothing
to do, either, with the image of the bohemian,
anarchist artist. I insist, it was all very normal.

He was at home a lot, and home was a very

important space to be in. The living rooms in
the three houses in which we lived were
carefully detailed to be good, to be
comfortable, and to be light, and so that
ever yone would feel at ease, our parents
friends and ours too. Naturally with seven
sons the level of deterioration was quick and
difficult to repair, but still those were places
where time passed unnoticed. The
importance of architecture is none other than
the creation of an environment, an
environment that shapes behaviour: this is
something my father used to say that reflects
through architecture an idea of the moral
utopia in which we were raised, and that was
reflected and lived in those houses. The walls
and ceilings of Armstrong cork and acoustic
isolation allowed us to stay listening to music
until the small hours without bothering or
being bothered, and to chat for hours on end
without tiring echoes.

We listened to lots of music at home. As I said

before, my father played the piano and had
played it, albeit irregularly, since he was a
child. Possibly he would have liked to be a
pianist and was talented enough to become
one, but when he was about to finish high
school and decide his future, his father and
the school director thought that since he drew
well and had no problem with maths, it was
would logical that he should study to be an
architect. And so it was. Two years of
preparation in Santiago, and then, definitively,
in Madrid.

But music was always present. He

remembered that when he had no piano, he
would spend long hours reading musical
scores, from Beethoven sonatas to the piano
syntheses of great symphonies that were
common amongst music fans. Later in his
moments of professional inactivity, either
sought or forced, he would return to the
piano. Mainly Mozart. The precision and
freedom that playing Mozart demands were
qualities he felt close to, together with the
sense of humour to be able to see the surprise
and the apparent simple simplicity,
unachievable. We still keep a recording of him
playing the K.265 variations ver y well, with, I
repeat, precision and great freedom. He would
also regularly play Beethoven sonatas, which
brought the rigour of a moral ideology and
faith in his own work, in his personality, in his
role, and in the world. And Bach, all better or
worse played in the measure that his
technique permitted, but read and deeply
understood. From the Goldberg Variations to
the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Italian
concerto and all the partitas and the English
and French piano suites formed a constant and
repeated repertoire. Bach brought the
theology of reason and of the heart. A little of
Bartoks Microkosmos, a bit of Schubert and
Chopin (the nuptial march of my parents
wedding was a Mazurka) completed his
repertoire. At home we embraced Edy, a
Belgian pianist who didnt want to take part in
the colonial conflict in the Congo and sought
exile in Spain. He rehearsed at our house in
the morning and in return gave piano lessons
to all seven of us, with little result, in all truth.

Records occupied an important place in the

living room. Contemporary music had its
place, more as a surprising discover y that
generated strange enthusiasm, than out of any
desire to be up to date or any sense of
intellectual obligation. We brothers still
remember how, shortly after it premiered in
Germany in 1968, he would make us listen to
Karlheinz Stockhausens Stimmung for six
vocalists and six microphones. Laughing at
those electronically modulating voices was
not permitted, and patiently and obediently
we listened more than once to all seventy-
eight minutes of the piece. Another spiritual
exercise he would submit us to was Toms
Luis de Victoria and his Officium
Defunctorum, which we would listen to in
silent and sacramental darkness. He had an
ephemeral enthusiasm for the minimalist
music of Steve Reich. No twelve-tone music,
and more Satie than Ravel, more Stravinsky
than Debussy. I dont believe the gaps in the
above list can be attributed to my memory.
No operas, apart from a little Mozart. In Jazz,
also ver y present, there was no place for bebop
or for Miles Davis more experimental works,
but mainly for the very young, at the time,
Jaques Loussier and for Dave Brubeck. Much
of this music is still in the family. Thats
education by osmosis.

We were friends with pianists like Pedro

Espinosa, Jos Mara Colom and Carmen
Deleito and my father attended since the
beginning the concerts Helga Drewsen
organised at her house during and after World
War II to help central European musicians
who passed through Spain on their way to
exile elsewhere. Those concerts gave way over
the following three decades to the Ciclos de
Msica Cantar y Taer which Im sure remain
in the memor y of all the enthusiasts from
those years. From there came a big affection
and emotion towards live chamber music. To
illustrate what those concerts meant at the
time, I quote the last paragraph of one of the
chronicles of Father Federico Sopea for
ABC: between early music, Bach, Debussy
and Stockhausen, (Cantar y Taer) perfectly
pursues the mission of playing unfairly
forgotten music and drawing the more open-
minded into discussion. One more step, a
larger room and we could have the following
year, for the next course a full Concert
Society, if it wasnt for the fact that those who
should create it are too lazy. ABC, Decembre
7th 1961. I was six months old.

As we brothers grew up, we would take part in

the adult conversations in which painting,
exhibitions or photography were discussed.
My mothers father, my uncles and my father
were exceptionally interested in photography,
and it was common to have long sessions
projecting the familys slides. These evening
sessions were ver y familiar, my uncle Jess, my
aunt Amparo Cores both exquisite, discreet
painters, recreating the world from their own
standpoint - and a few ver y close friends or
young collaborators from the practice. They
were not intellectual gatherings like those
that form a part of our histor y. There was no
desire to create a group, nor the feeling of
belonging to any sort of resistance, even
though his works both then and later were
combative against successive trends. My
father lived all his life outside groups and
tendencies: they simply did not interest him in
the slightest. So, after his forced departure
from the School of Architecture of Madrid in
the early seventies, after he had lectured there
for sixteen or seventeen years, he shut himself
up yet more in his home or at his studio. His
departure from ETSAM marked him deeply
and, as on so many other occasions, he refused
to negotiate. The day after his suspension, he
resigned and never returned to the School of
Architecture.

He continued at home and at the studio. He

could give lectures about his work to young
architects for four or five hours, but he would
hardly be found at public or private gatherings
with other architects. He refused, with
humour, attempts by some of his friends to
make him Master of Fine Arts or Doctor
Honoris Causa of several universities, and
only at the ver y end of his life he accepted
some recognition and awards.

Taking architecture very seriously, he

paradoxically turned away from his colleagues
and he didnt seem to make a career out of it -
if by that one understands the growing and
successful culmination of external obligations.
Jos Llins, an architect who got to know him
well in his last decades, talks of his
architecture as a pastime, in the sense of an
intellectual game that involves the resolution
of mental problems with several variables.
From the moment the architect faces the
project in his head, with his pencil and paper,
with all the unknowns open, the process of
making architecture thickens, objectifying
with the participation and agreement of
others, with the material in itself and its
properties, with regulations, with the opinion
of colleagues who watch you, with the ever
changing opinion of the client or the
contractors self-interested one. Of the
original impulse, of the enjoyment of
resolving it, ver y little remains - and then
melancholy or pride assault the architect.

My father was able to combine this inevitable

process of objectifaction and the weight of
architecture he would doubtless have said
pesadez in Galician - with a simple
simplicity. He enjoyed ever y step, until the
very end if he was allowed to furnish the
building. He had an enormous resistance to
dogmatic architecture and he considered
sensibility, and being open to the surprise that
characterises each project, more important
than erudition or being up to date that
architectural magazines provided.

Ever ything had to be clear in his mind long

before drawing the first line and although an
exceptional draughtsman he always insisted
that drawing should come after thought. His
sketches and plans have an internal coherence
focused on clarity, on not putting anything
that wasnt necessar y for the understanding of
the idea that had to be built. The sketches and
the constructional details that since I was a
child I used to watch him draw, on paper
napkins in the caf or on the back of an
envelope had more constructional intent than
the official plans sent to the Colegio, the
order of Architects. The draughtsmen in the
office were magnificent and faithfully
 translated that spirit to the plans required for
permits, estimates and construction.

Many times next to details of balustrades or

meetings between wall and window, he drew a
caricature of the person to whom he was
explaining the detail. Since childhood, and
alongside music, drawing caricatures was a
constant in his life. He would tell how he
knew Castelao [Galician nationalist,
republican, writer and cartoonist] from his
childhood, precisely because of this hobby.
His caricatures didnt exaggerate a persons
features, but rather exposed their intentions
and that hurt a lot, which is why almost no
one appreciated their own. For me, of whom
he drew so many, they bothered me then, and
now, Im afraid, I really look like them.

His few built works, his public silence, the fact

that he was always where he wanted to be
chatting with students in his office or sitting
on a jur y in endless competitions throughout
the geography of Spain gave him a presence
that was attenuated but constant, that without
doubt meant that he was always followed with
interest. The fascination his work still
produces and few faithful students did the
NEW I rest.
N D EWhen
X A Bhe died
OU T hisS Ufamily
B S C R Icreated
BE a ver y
small foundation so that his archive wouldnt
end up lost and would be available to those
students with whom he always enjoyed to be
(www.alejandrodelasota.org).

The second image of this portrait. In the early

eighties my father had to close his practice for
the second time. In his fifties and according to
his own confession without shame, he did it
because he wasnt interested in what he already
knew or in the easy, learnt way of the
profession. The Civil Government of
Tarragona and above all the Maravillas
Gymnasium showed him a possible path. In
reality, his built work is scarce and most of it
is public, hard-earned in competitions or
through his position as a civil servant, apart
from a few minor works for family or close
friends. Neither the post-war reconstruction,
nor the economic development of the
seventies, nor the real estate boom in the
nineties really caught him and all these great
moments for the profession passed him by
without a single commission. He was always a
public architect and won his work through
competitions. The freedom of the public
competition attracted him enormously. The
demanding and responsible nature of
institutional work, and the absence of the
developers nonsense and caprice, fitted his
way of being. The Civil Government of
Tarragona, one of his emblematic works, was
won through a public competition and thanks
to this neither His Excellency the Civil
Governor at the time, nor even Her
Excellency, his wife, were able to prevent its
construction. That is what they tried with all
the power of their positions putting pressure
on the drawing board. My father told us that
at a certain point the Civil Governor took his
pencil out in order to explain his view about a
certain plan. Calmly my father stopped him
and, smiling, explained that the pencil is the
instrument of the architect exclusively. Later
during the furnishing of the building the
Governors wife, seeing the fine and delicate
Jacobsen chairs my father imported for the
first time into Spain, climbed up on one to
demonstrate its fragility. After tr ying
unsuccessfully to break it, the chairs became
part of the furniture both of the official
residency and of the offices. Furniture he
designed entirely with his brother Jess. One
has the feeling that this spirit of public work
has been lost, and nowadays politicians still
act with the same whim as that Tarragona
governor. My father wasnt happy about not
winning competitions but, in that sense like in
many others, he had sportsmanship and
turned up again. As he would often say, the
architect should tr y to give clients hare
instead of cat [an inversion of the colloquial
phrase dar gato por liebre, so a reverse
swindle, substituting something of better
quality than what was asked for] especially in
jobs for the State.

In this extreme situation, without work for

months, with debts to pay for closing the
practice and a large family, a good friend
advised him to go back to being a Postal
Service architect. At the beginning of his
career, my father had worked for the National
Institute of Colonization and also for the
Postal Service, working enough time to give a
steady income, but devoting himself to
competitions with any time left.

About to reach retirement age, going back to

work for the Postal Service meant a minimal
wage and a pension later. Thus, over sixty
years old, playing the piano in his pyjamas in
the morning and working nights, he had to go
back to waking up early and signing in.
Waking up early, considering his routine was
very hard for him and in few months he got
permission to start work a bit later. My
brothers and I would drive him to Plaza
Cibeles before going to university. His work
consisted in refurbishing a multitude of post
offices scattered throughout Spain. Starting
with a bad building and making it decent with
no budget for small local offices would have
been a very unattractive job, even for someone
who had just finished his diploma. But the
truth is he never complained about this. Very
often we drove him to site visits in those
small villages and he enjoyed wandering
around those dirty offices, designing the
counter or the waiting room, the post room or
the entrance hall with the same interest as if it
were a great building. An example: in the
Len post office the filing cabinets have a
slight slope that prevents records from piling
up in public view, something otherwise ver y
depressing because inevitably you think where
your envelope might end up. With those
details he kept himself ver y entertained. It
wasnt optimism, it was the enjoyment of
solving architectural problems, thinking about
the offices public spaces, the work of its
employees, the light or visual order that
ever ything had to have; giving a different
appearance to post offices in Spain, seeking to
dignify the important presence of the State in
those villages. We went back and forth, with a
quick bite at the bar in the main square, with
the quantity surveyor, the draughtsman or a
young architect from the office who could not
believe how fortunate he was to have Don
Alejandro so close. Making each question an
important one and bringing it to a point was
an attitude, a stroke of fortune, a pleasure.

One day, on his way to Central Post Office, he

told me he had been commissioned to design
a large building, the provincial postal
headquarters in Len and he was worried
because he had no idea, nothing with which to
start a project of that type - located,
moreover, in the historic centre of the city.
Nothing. I told him I could not believe he did
not have the resources, after forty years of
profession, to start that job. My words
sounded like I was suggesting he should
complete a boring task just before retiring.
He looked at me, not without some
disappointment I believe, as if I did not
understand that experience doesnt matter, it
is just an encumbrance one needs to shed.
Feeling the loneliness no, the insecurity -
was part of an attitude, playing always in the
opponents half, without even falling back on
the comforts of experience. Not making
A rchitecture would help achieve a better
outcome.
Those doubts soon disappeared and he then
started one of the most complex, laborious
jobs of his life. A building coated in industrial
metal sheet, Len-coloured, crafted with
enough aplomb and elegance so that it wasnt
offensive in the vicinity of the historical
centre. We brothers also drove him to the site
visits in Len. Those trips were always a
mystery. A building I believe no one really
appreciated until it was finished and that had
against it a multitude of small restraints, with
the Municipality, the contractor, the
provincial delegate, the provincial sub-
delegate, the head of the post office and his
wife who would live in the building He had
no clue what he would find after one month
away. The contractors would always end up
being allies of the owner, represented
paradoxically in this case not by my father, but
by the local postal officials, and they used
these inevitable absences to speed things up,
making changes to the project, without
waiting for an architecture that shaped and
rectified itself in the heat of the site. Once
there, reviewing every detail, the challenge
was trying to amend the botched job without
causing a delay or additional cost.

Sometimes other architects joined us. One of

them, already quite well known at the time,
took him aside and, surprised, asked my
father: Is it true that you have done this job
on a civil servants salary? I cant recall his
answer, but I do remember what he said to
another architect when talking about his own
work and justifying some bad projects as
being alimentar y, like Buuels Mexican
movies. My father looked at him and told him
with a half-smile, there is always the
possibility to eat less. He wouldnt have
appreciated that I tell you these things,
because such things are not to be spoken of. I
am sorry.
Such radical life has sometimes been
interpreted as an act of artistic purity
[impostacin singing without vibrato or
modulation]. But that is not to understand a
thing. He was an architect with the same ease
and self-assurance, with the same enthusiasm
and consistency and therefore with the same
restraint in many other things, as when he
played the piano in his pyjamas in the
mornings of my childhood, or when he drew
caricatures, or dedicated so many hours
designing an universal door frame that
allowed an effortless change of the door swing
direction to cheapen construction, or a
mattress that allowed to sleep on your side
without getting your arm numb (an invention
which gave him great disappointment when he
learnt that it had already been patented in the
United States). He used my mothers hairpins
to build tubular steel chairs convertible into
deck chairs with a simple movement that kept
us entertained for years. Looking for the right
metalworker and upholsterer to build them
filled his time with the same enthusiasm and
perseverance of any more ambitious project.

Engaging with such intensity with the things

he was passionate about saved him from
ever yday life, with its small joys and great
sorrows: I always liked to talk about
Architecture as a pastime; if you dont do it
joyfully it is not Architecture. This joy is,
precisely, Architecture, the satisfaction one
feels. The excitement of Architecture makes
one smile, makes one laugh. Life doesnt.
Only my mother Sara made this possible.

Translation by Nuno With thanks to Jos de

Castro Caldas and la Sota Rus and
William Mann. William Mann.
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