Joaquín Vaquero Palacios’ father, Narciso Vaquero, was a public works assistant who played a fundamental role in the development of Asturian industry through his work as a businessman. One of his most important projects was the water supply for the city of Oviedo. His son, Joaquín Vaquero, demonstrated a notable artistic sensitivity from the time he was a child. He chose a career in architecture for its role as a vocation with some connection to the visual arts, and he went to study in Madrid. The early years of his professional activity were focused on painting; upon finishing his architecture degree, he settled in Paris and later in New York, where he tried to make a name for himself as an artist and exhibited in various art galleries. With his former classmate, the architect Luís Moya, he participated in the competition for the Columbus Lighthouse monument, finishing third in the second round.

Upon his return from the United States, he continued pursuing his ambition of making a career in the art world, but began combining it with his first architectural projects, built in a marked rationalist style.

His first built works, mainly residential commissions from family friends, are characterized by a notable rationalism. In 1933, his only son, Joaquín Vaquero Turcios, was born in Madrid; he also became an artist and, years later, collaborated on his father’s projects.

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War caught him in Oviedo; from there he went to Galicia, where he lived for a few years in Santiago de Compostela. He did numerous drawings of monuments and worked on the restoration of important historical buildings in the city, as well as designing new ones, including the Santiago Food Market. In this period, his architecture moved away from rationalism in pursuit of a more historicist language, which, nonetheless, incorporated the use of technical innovations such as reinforced concrete. After the war, he again travelled through Europe and America until, in 1965, he was appointed director of the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he established his residence.

This career path – with art as its central element – took an unexpected turn when he received the commission to build a series of hydroelectric plants in his native Asturias. The company that awarded the commission, Hidroeléctrica del Cantábrico, split off from one of the companies founded by his father, the Junta de Saltos de Agua de Somiedo. The resulting projects offer an extraordinary example of the integration of arts and architecture: the marvellous Salto de Salime, the Proaza power plant, and the decoration for the Miranda power plant, with a 6×10 m mural on the inside and two eleven-metre-high figures on the outside, are one-of-a-kind examples in their combination of engineering, architecture and art.

Salto de Salime on the Navia River is a perfect illustration of the importance the Franco regime placed on large hydraulic infrastructures. This is evident in the extraordinary quality and detail of the project, beyond its engineering function; architects and artists collaborated on the project in an attempt to make it an emblematic, coherent, total work.

The Salime dam and the hydroelectric plant were built between 1946 and 1955. The dam creates the largest reservoir in the Spanish region of Asturias, on the Navia River, just 20 km from the Cantabrian Sea. In this case, because the region is humid, with ample water, the supply is used almost exclusively for electricity generation, which was very necessary for one of the most industrialised regions in Spain.

Despite the technical complexity of the work, the aesthetic aspects of the Salime dam were attended to with great care. The son of the architect Joaquín Vaquero Palacios assisted his father in this effort: the exterior concrete bas-reliefs and immense murals in the refined interior rooms – the turbine room is one of the jewels of the plant with a 300 m2 mural –  are combined with the expressive concrete forms of the overlooks or the elements that crown the spillways.

In Proaza, the whole volume of the turbine room is conceived as a colossal exposed concrete sculpture. The plant is considered one of the most emblematic works of 20th-century Spanish industrial heritage that is still in operation today.

Vaquero Palacios is renowned both for his career as an architect and for his artistic work. His landscape paintings are of special interest, some of which are exhibited at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. Through the end of his life, Vaquero Palacios received multiple awards and recognitions for his artistic activity, which, at least while he was alive, received much more attention than his built work. The work of Vaquero Palacios for the Hidroeléctrica del Cantábrico, for which he also built the headquarters in Oviedo, was displayed in a dedicated exhibition at the ICO Foundation in Madrid called La belleza de lo descomunal [The Beauty of Enormity].

Biography by Roger Subirà

Bibliografía

• AA VV, Joaquín Vaquero Palacios. La belleza de lo descomunal, Fundación ICO, Madrid, 2018.
• VAQUERO IBAÑEZ, Joaquín, “ʽRepresentación de la energía como motivo de abstracciónʼ: Joaquín Vaquero Palacios en las centrales asturianas”, in Arquitectura 375, septiembre de 2018, pp. 123, 125, 128-129.
• EGAÑA CASARIEGO, Francisco, “Joaquín Vaquero Palacios en Nueva York”, in Archivo Español de Arte 343, julio-septiembre de 2013, pp. 237-262.
• CAPITEL, Antón, “Modernidad y clasicismo: el siglo XX en Asturias a través de cuatro personajes”, in Arquitectura Viva 132, 2010, pp. 21-23.
• CAPITEL, Antón, “Expresiones plasticas: Vaquero Palacios, medalla de oro de la arquitectura”, in Arquitectura Viva 52, enero-febrero de 1997, pp. 70-71.
•  AMANN, Atxu, CÁNOVAS, Andrés, eds., Joaquín Vaquero Palacios: Medalla de Oro de la Arquitectura 1996, Consejo Superior de los Colegios de Arquitectos de España, Madrid, 1996.
• CAPITEL, Antón, “Joaquín Vaquero Palacios: tan arquitecto como pintor”, in Arquitectos 141, Consejo Superior de los Colegios de Arquitectos de España, Madrid, 1996, pp. 52-53.
• CHUECA GOITIA, Fernando, “Joaquín Vaquero Palacios: pintor infatigable”, in Arquitectos 141, Consejo Superior de los Colegios de Arquitectos de España, Madrid, 1996, pp. 54-57.
• PÉREZ LASTRA, José Antonio, Vaquero Palacios, Arquitecto, Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Asturias, Oviedo, 1992.
• AA VV, La obra integradora de Joaquín Vaquero, Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Asturias y León/Hidroeléctrica del Cantábrico, Oviedo, 1989.
• VAQUERO PALACIOS, Joaquín, El Alma del paisaje / discurso del académico electo D. Joaquín Vaquero, el día 14 de diciembre de 1969, con motivo de su recepción y contestación del Marqués de Lozoya, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, 1969
• RAMÍREZ DE LUCAS, Juan, “Joaquín Vaquero o el paisaje estructurado”, in Arquitectura 87, March 1966, pp. 50-54.
• “El Arquitecto y pintor Joaquín Vaquero: su historial y obra pictórica”, in Revista Nacional de Arquitectura 12, 1941, pp. 26-29.