Arquitectura Viva reports the death of José Antonio Corrales, 88, one of the pioneers of postwar Modernism in Spain (in Spanish). I was lucky enough to interview him a couple of years ago in his Madrid studio in Bretón de los Hereros, where he was still working at his vertical drafting table with a parallelogram, full of energy and ideas.
Years ago Manuel Gallego took me to see Corrales' School of Arts and Trades in A Coruña (Escuela de Artes y Oficios Artísticos), then recently completed, and he remarked that in the boldness of its forms it looked like the work of a youngster, and yet the detailing was obviously the work of a master.
His social housing development of the 1960's in Elviña, A Coruña (Unidad Vecinal No. 3, Barrio de las Flores), like many of the works he realized with Ramón Vázquez Molezún, matches the compositional pyrotechnics of British or American Brutalism but with forms that appear to have been machine-tooled rather than poured-in-place.
Corrales remembered by Rafael Moneo en El País (in Spanish).
