Reseña de libros
Book Review
Given that there are hardly any publications on Madrid’s 20th-century archi-
tectural heritage, the launch in 2024 of the COAM’s new collection of “archi-
tecture books” will seem like an extraordinary event. And in more ways than
one, it is. The first volume of the series is dedicated to the housing projects
for the Military Housing Board designed by Fernando Higueras and Antonio
Miró and built between 1966 and 1974. This well-known but little-studied and
even less-understood complex is Madrid’s finest example of the realization
of those utopian ideals of the 1960s and 1970s that we associate with names
and concepts such as Archigram, Metabolism, the era of megastructures, etc.
Unlike the somewhat sparse and clumsy guides and catalogs that are
occasionally published on modern architecture in Madrid, this book is, above
all, a well-crafted and thoroughly researched publication. With an almost square
format, lavishly illustrated, and bilingual, the book’s design is also executed with
unusual rigor; the layout is excellent and elegant, and the illustrations (many
of them in color) are of high quality. It’s worth noting that holding this publi-
cation in one’s hands is simply a visual pleasure, regardless of the significance
we might attribute to its critical and written content. Undoubtedly, this volume
has already become one of the essential publications on the work of Fernando
Higueras, an enlightened and visionary architect who should be better known to
the general public, but who needs to be explained with care, since his work—as
acknowledged here and there in the pages of this very monograph—might
seem somewhat sparse and austere when one passes by it in a hurry, without
observing its baroque nuances.The excellent documentation provided in the
book is complemented by a series of informative, critical, or opinion-based
perspectives on the built complex under examination, some more substantial
than others. The question of Higueras’s elusive expressionism is suggestively
addressed here in an intriguing essay by architectural historian and ETSAM
professor Alejandro Valdivieso, who is also one of the general editors of the
collection and of the College of Architects’ journal.
COAM
Madrid, 2024
ISBN: 978-84-128168-6-0
229 | Constelaciones nº 14, 2026. ISSN: 2340-177X