Gerardo Cuadra earned his degree in architecture in Madrid in 1953 and received a prize for his Final Degree Project from the Carmen del Río Foundation at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. He was a disciple of Javier Sáenz de Oíza, Leopoldo Torres Balbás, and Miguel Fisac, architects with whom he shared his university years and his initial forays into the professional world, and his classmates included, among others, Javier Carvajal and Francisco Coello de Portugal.

From 1954 to 1960, he worked between Madrid and Logroño. During the following three years he studied for the priesthood at the Conciliar Seminary in Logroño, where he was ordained in 1962. In 1966, he completed his studies in theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, alternating them with the practice of architecture in Logroño.

The inquisitive spirit and interests Cuadro picked up during his education drove the Rioja native to continue learning, to expand his knowledge about the kind of architecture being built both in Spain and in Europe. Thus, at the beginning of the 1960s, during the years he spent in Rome, he made trips through central and northern Europe, which had a decisive influence on his early designs. On his travels through Scandinavia he learned about organic architecture and studied its play of volumes, the relationship of the constructions with their surroundings, the expressiveness of certain materials, and the definition of minor details. These are all design mechanisms he used throughout his work to create architecture with a very personal language.

Once he had settled permanently in Logroño, in 1967, the journals Arquitectura and ARA published several of his first works in La Rioja. In 1977 and 1981, he was elected president of the Logroño Delegation of the Official Architects’ Association of Aragón and Rioja and, in 1981, he became the first dean of the new Official Architects’ Association of La Rioja, a position in which he remained until 1984. For his valuable professional career and his great contribution to society, in 2004, he was awarded the Riojan Fine Arts Award, a recognition granted by the government of La Rioja.

Gerardo Cuadra represented, and still represents, the most avant-garde current in La Rioja. From his first projects, he opted for the use of new materials like concrete – a symbol of novelty in those times – not only as a constructive foundation but as a noble material to be left exposed, sometimes with a prominence and an innovative use that are surprising even by today’s standards.

It is also worth highlighting Gerardo Cuadra’s restoration work, with interventions that, on occasions, placed him at the centre of more than one controversy. His faithful commitment and his honesty, and the absolute respect he showed in approaching the restoration of historical monuments, led him to introduce contemporary materials, such as concrete, in interventions where elements needed to be substituted to remake what time had eroded. In other restorations where contemporary additions were not required, the buildings recovered their original appearance through his work, while he incorporated modifications derived from liturgical changes that demanded moving altars forward, shifting side chapels, or altering altarpieces, which 20th-century users, more immobile than those of past centuries, did not easily accept.

In these cases, Gerardo Cuadra’s interventions were respectful, but contemporary. From that perspective, he filled his presbyteries with clean, robust volumes, the same kind he designed for his new churches, translating his personal coherence into tangible forms: he was always an architect concerned with both container and content. With buildings and furniture. With large projects and small details. Because one without the other would be incomplete, and it would be unfaithful to the globalizing aesthetic sensitivity that inspired all of Gerardo Cuadra’s work.

Biography by Vanesa Marauri

Bibliography

• TÁRRAGO, Jorge, GARCÍA, Izaskun, Gerardo Cuadra. Síntesis de una vocación, Colección Lecciones/documentos de arquitectura, 17, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, March 2009.
• CUADRA RODRÍGUEZ, Gerardo, “El trabajo del arquitecto a lo largo de una vida profesional”, in El Hall: Boletín informativo del Colegio de Arquitectos de La Rioja 104, 2009, pp. 8-9
• CUADRA RODRÍGUEZ, Gerardo, “5 preguntas”, in El Hall: Boletín informativo del Colegio de Arquitectos de La Rioja 91, 2005, pp. 29-34.
• LEÓN, Mª Teresa, SÁNCHEZ TRUJILLANO, José Miguel, Gerardo Cuadra Rodríguez. Galardón a las Bellas Artes Riojanas 2004, Instituto de Estudios Riojanos/Consejeria de Cultura del Gobierno de La Rioja, Logroño, 2004.
• AA VV, Gerardo Cuadra Arquitecto [Exhibition catalogue], Cultural Rioja, Logroño, 2002.