“Architects reveal the keys to Architecture in their drawings, their floor plans, sections and also in their writings. It is important to appreciate the concise texts of Mies Van der Rohe or the more passionate expressions of Le Corbusier. And that is how I would like these texts, published here today, to be understood.” Alberto Campo Baeza (born Valladolid, Spain, 1946) is one of the most important architects of the modern period. The Built Idea presents a series of seminal texts in which he conveys his most deeply-held architectural ideas and convictions, exploring and explaining his foundational influences and subjects such as the importance of light, the work of his contemporaries, and the future of architecture, as well as accounts of his own work and personal anecdotes from a rich and successful life in architecture. “To use words that express one’s intentions clearly is not just a convenience for architects. One wants to let people know the meaning behind the things that are being made. My aim in publishing these texts is precisely that.” This book also includes a photographic documentation of Campo Baeza’s greatest works along with architectural sketches, plans, and models to provide a privileged insight into one of the greatest architectural minds working today. “And the reasoning on which one bases one’s work in their attempt at Architecture is what is going to be reflected here in these texts, some of it consciously, some unconsciously. Realizing the ideas expressed in these words in built works is of course the best proof that the ideas are valid and the words true.”

• Text by Alberto Campo Baeza

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Contributors Biographies

Alberto Campo Baeza is an architect (Escuela de Arquitectura de Madrid). He wrote his doctoral thesis with Javier Carvajal and was a professor at the ETSAM for more than twenty years. He has taught at the ETH in Zurich, EPFL in Lausanne; the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; the BAUHAUS in Weimar; Kansas State University and other institutions in Dublin, Naples, Virginia, and Copenhagen. He spent a year as a research fellow at Columbia University in New York (2001). He has published two collections of writing: La idea construída and Pensar con las manos. He has also received many awards including the Torroja for his Caja Granada building, and The Buenos Aires Biennial 2009 for his Nursery for Benetton in Venice and his MA Museum in Granada. Recently, the American Academy of Arts and Letters nominated Alberto Campo Baeza for the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize of 2010. His work has been exhibited at the Crown Hall by Mies at Chicago’s IIT, the Palladio Basilica in Vicenza, the Urban Center in New York, the Saint Irene Church in Istanbul, and the MA Gallery of Toto in Tokyo. In 2010 his work was exhibited at the MAXXI Museum and in San Pietro in Montorio, both in Rome. He believes in Architecture as a BUILT IDEA, and that the principle components of Architecture are GRAVITY, which builds SPACE, and LIGHT, which builds TIME.