Fernando Higueras Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Fernando Higueras (1930-2008) was a Spanish architect, also an accomplished guitarist, painter and photographer, whose bold, organic concrete architecture made him one of the most original figures of postwar Madrid. His best-known buildings are the Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute in Madrid’s Ciudad Universitaria, known as the Corona de Espinas (Crown of Thorns), and the Hotel Las Salinas in Lanzarote, designed with the artist César Manrique.

Madrid and the guitar

Higueras was born in Madrid in 1930. He graduated from the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM) in 1959 and, in parallel, became a skilled classical guitarist and a passionate collector and photographer. He won the National Architecture Prize as a young architect, together with Antonio Miró, for an artists’ residence at El Pardo.

The Crown of Thorns

In 1967 Higueras and Miró won the competition for a national centre for the restoration of art, later the Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute. The circular concrete building, with radiating beams and hanging gardens, took more than two decades to complete and became known as the Corona de Espinas. Higueras also proposed visionary projects such as the Rascainfiernos (Hellscraper, 1972), an inverted skyscraper dug into the ground.

Lanzarote and Madrid

With César Manrique he designed the Hotel Las Salinas in Lanzarote (1977), whose terraces of white concrete and gardens descend toward the sea. In Madrid his apartment buildings on Calle Princesa and houses in the Sierra show the same free, sculptural use of concrete and vegetation. He died in Madrid in 2008, and the Fundación Fernando Higueras now preserves his archive.