Navarro Baldeweg Asociados are based in Madrid where José Luis del Cid Mendoza and David García Dieguez have a fixed collaboration with Juan Navarro Baldeweg (Santander, 1939).
Painter, sculptor and architect, a keen scholar of the architecture of John Sloane, Baldeweg oscillates between one artistic territory and another with a perspective of historical awareness that is also evident in his writing. This skilful and subtle oscillation between different disciplines together with a marked sensitivity towards the use of materials associated with studying engraving while young, have fed into the characteristics of scale and appropriateness, fantasy and allusion that run through the projects by the studio. Projects that, since 1976, range from an architectural scale to an urban one and an exquisitely artistic one. It is within this interpretative framework that the Conference Centre at Salamanca (1992) sits: the low, suspended dome that characterises it appears in the numerous paintings in which Baldeweg explores lighting effects.
It has already been tried out in the library in the centre of San Francisco el Grande (Madrid, 1985) and follows Sir John Soane’s illusionistic interpretations by overturning the notion of load and support. A solution that if in the 1980s and 90s provided a valid alternative to the weight of classical culture from the time of Franco, also indicates the continued approach of Navarro Baldeweg Asociados to look at the past as a source of inspiration that is never reduced to sterile and inappropriate imitation with respect to the theme or the time in which the work is carried out.
An approach highlighted in different ways by the Biblioteca Hertziana (Rome, 2013) or the Edificio de Juzgados (law courts) in Mahón, Minorca (1996) and that in the research centre in the National Museum and Research Center of Altamira Santillana del Mar, 2001) finds a further interpretation. Composed of istinct bodies marked by shed roofs, the construction is developed below the line of the ground to accommodate the copy of the grottoes of Altamira: the real grottoes are in front of this “museum industry” that respectfully faces them and gives form to the product of an era in which the industry of mass tourism assumed significant weight: ours.
