Juan José Olazábal Vedruna entered the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1922. He received his first commission in the same city: the Vedruna house, two adjacent buildings at numbers 238 and 240 on carrer Navas de Tolosa in Barcelona, which he designed together with Joan Baca i Reixach. At Christmas in 1931, he left Barcelona to return to Hondarribia (Gipuzkoa). After registering with the Basque-Navarrese Official Architects’ Association, he met various architects from the Gipuzkoa delegation, as well as Luis Vallejo and Juan Madariaga from Bilbao, and Joaquín Zarranz from Pamplona. Led by José Manuel Aizpúrua, they formed the Northern Group of the GATEPAC. Its founding document records the appointment of Olazábal as correspondent for the magazine AC. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea. In 1933, Olazábal designed a rationalist housing block at numbers 12 and 14 calle General Castaños in Portugalete, successfully resolving the disconnect between the irregular perimeter of the site and the aim of giving the façade a symmetrical composition.

In 1935, the Irun City Council asked the ministry to build a secondary school in the Lapice neighbourhood. The building, designed by Olazábal, José Antonio Ponte, Joaquín Labayen and Luis Vallet, ran lengthwise in an east-west direction, with a perpendicular volume to the east intended for the administration and another to the west to house a gymnasium; a tower was built above it for the astronomical science laboratories. However, the architect’s most significant work is the residential building on avenida de Gipuzkoa in Irun (1935). The plot was aligned with the avenue on the side closest to Paseo de Colón, although there was an easement to access the plot behind it. Olazábal made use of that fact to give the building a detached end, opening a void for the head of the building: a rounded overlook with an expressive form.

Olazábal collaborated with the defences mounted by the Irun War Council in response to the uprising of 18 July 1936. When the rebel troops took the city at the beginning of September, he was arrested and transferred to the Ondarreta prison. He was freed thanks to the intervention of his brother, a lieutenant in the Tercio de San Ignacio, and joined the Requeté at the beginning of November. In July, he was admitted to the Piarist Military Hospital in Bilbao. He returned to Irun in August and was met with a social-political purge. Witnesses attested to his cooperation with the Republican forces, his having displayed the ikurrina [the Basque flag] on the balcony of his house, and other charges. On 26 August 1937, the judge ordered him confined to the Ondarreta prison. On 20 April 1938, the General-in-Chief presiding over the High Court of Justice decreed that the accused was guilty of a crime of rebellion. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison and transferred to the Central Prison of El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz. However, in response to efforts by his family, in April 1940, the Sentence Review Commission of the Supreme Council of Military Justice proposed commuting the initial sentence of 30 years to three years and one day.

He regained his freedom but was unable to resume his professional duties since, by virtue of the Order of 24 February 1940 issued by the General Directorate of Architecture, he had been disqualified from practice for a period of three years. His initial years of freedom were marked by the impossibility of practicing architecture and the difficulties of settling in Hondarribia. Thus, after leaving El Puerto de Santa María, Olazábal settled in Granada, where he married María Valverde, a Granada native, in 1943. In May 1943, once his professional disqualification was lifted, he registered with the Architects’ Association of Eastern Andalusia and returned to professional activity that same year. The Irun native picked up his career in a radically different context than what he had known years before. His first work in Granada, a residential block located at number 59 on calle Reyes Católicos (1944), is proof of this: a corner building with curved balconies above moulded corbels, bar railings, and ornate windows. Shortly thereafter, he was put in charge of directing the reconstruction of the Church of Santo Tomás de Villanueva, in the Albaicín neighbourhood, which had been burned in 1933. His style had changed completely. One further example is the Redemptoristine Seminary of Santa Fe, an imposing building built in 1949 with a main façade designed in the style of El Escorial.

Olazábal worked as a scholastic architect, designing many schools on behalf of various religious congregations, such as the school for the Servants of the Gospel, on callejón de Nevot (1968). In these schools, there was no hint of the programmatic ambition that had characterized the GATEPAC’s designs. A series of residential buildings showing a marked austerity also date from that same period, developed under the umbrella of the Law on Low-Rent Housing from 1954. This is the case of the subsidized housing on Camino de los Yeseros in the municipality of Peligros (1967).

He also designed summer homes for the bourgeoisie of the time: small houses located along the coast of Granada, with Mediterranean elements like arches, tile roofs, and shutters. This Mediterranean style was far-removed from the vision Sert had developed after his visits to Ibiza, based on austerity and a purity of volumes. The chalet for Francisco Linares (1969) belongs to this group. In the late 1950s, Olazábal purchased a plot of land near the beach in Almuñécar to build a summer house for his family, which he called Toki Alai (1962). In that house, Olazábal returned to the rationalist style that had characterized his work before the war, designing a single-family home worthy of a GATEPAC architect. He worked actively until 1970 and died three years later, in May 1973.

Biography by Lauren Etxepare and Arantza Lekuona

Bibliography

• ETXEPARE, Lauren, SAGARNA, Maialen, LIZUNDIA, Iñigo, “El Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza en Lapice (Irun, 1935). Un proyecto malogrado del GATVPAC”, in AA VV, Arquitectura para la salud y el descanso (1914-1975) [Proceedings of the International Congress], Pamplona, 2024.
• ETXEPARE, Lauren, LEKUONA, Arantza, “Recomponiendo vida y obras de Juan José Olazábal, arquitecto del GATEPAC”, in ARS Bilduma 12, 2022, pp. 19-38.
• AA VV, Ruta del racionalismo de Barcelona. El GATCPAC y la arquitectura de los años 1930, Institut Municipal del Paisatge Urbà i la Qualitat de Vida, Ajuntament de Barcelona, Barcelona, 2018, p. 136.
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• CULOT, Maurice, MESURET, Geneviève, eds., Hendaye, Irun, Fontarabie. Villes de la frontière, Institut Français d’Architecture, París, 1997.
• PÉREZ DE LA PEÑA OLEAGA, Gorka, Portugalete (1852-1960). Historia de su Arquitectura y expansión Urbana, Diputación Foral de Bizkaia, Bilbao, 1993.
• SANZ ESQUIDE, José Ángel, “La arquitectura en el País Vasco durante los años treinta”, in MOYA, Adelina, SÁENZ DE GORBEA, Javier, SANZ ESQUIDE, José Ángel, eds., Arte y Artistas vascos de los años 30. Entre lo individual y lo colectivo, San Sebastián, Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, 1988, pp. 13-138.