Miguel López González: Modern Movement as a Matter of Principle

His professional career can be divided into three periods:

Early Modernity: 1932-1942

Miguel López joined the Alicante City Council as an assistant architect in 1932; that same year he designed the Parador de Ifach (defunct). During this decade, his architecture, abundant in residential buildings, was characterized by the formal, functional and technical characteristics of the modern movement, apparent in simple volumes, a transparency of programme, and frame structures. The envelopes of his buildings, between party walls, made an impression at the time with their stark, bare walls. Two types of formalisms can be detected in their façades: those with an expressionist quality (Galiana, Roig, Adriática and Montahud) and those with a cubist appearance (Borja, Barón de Finestrat and Rambla de Méndez Núñez). He designed various public schools across the province and housing for teachers, as well as flour factories, such as Cloquell and Bufort.

Autarkic Resistance: 1942-1952

Miguel López was the victim of retaliation between 1942 and 1948, a period in which the cultural mandates of the dictatorship were imposed, and which he incorporated in the form of historicist, classicist and traditional references. The best example is his design for the Plaça de l’Ajuntament – a “central square” – which won the national competition and was published in the Revista Nacional de Arquitectura in 1945. However, his intellectual resistance is apparent in the projects for the Instituto Provincial de Higiene (1935-1945) and the Sanatorio y Casa de Reposo Virgen del Socorro (1942-1948), the latter of which was published in Arquitectura in 1950. Both health centres take the form of hygienically white prisms, with adapted distributions as a result of their functional articulation – the former based on a metallic structure and the latter relying on load-bearing walls. He rounded out the decade with his participation in the first social housing developments, such as the División Azul complex in the Benalúa neighbourhood, formed by blocks without interior courtyards and with minimal programmes.

Reuniting with the International Community, 1952-1968

With the new era that began in 1953, Miguel López returned to his modern principles, embracing the currents of international architecture. Two works from 1954, contrasting in their size and representative quality, are emblematic of this turn. The Aluminio Ibérico factory, on the outskirts of Alicante, with its serrated concrete frame structure and skylights, emerges as a paradigm for the large scale. The bandstand – nicknamed the Concha [shell] – is an iconic structure with a graceful organic layout; it served as the jumping off point for the renovation of the Explanada promenade, a symbol of the city’s cosmopolitan image with its sensual wave-patterned pavement in three colours. Schools and other institutions were common designs during this period, often including adjacent chapels notable for their uniqueness: Padres Jesuitas in Alicante, Juniorado Marista in Guardamar and Sagrada Familia in Elda. The latter articulates its floor plan in a Y-shape, with a curving point of intersection containing a ramp. The final project in this summary is the Casa Sacerdotal, with free-standing volumes above a garden that differ in scale and orientation: the housing unit and the church, both prismatic in volume, incorporated collaborations from visual artists.

Miguel López was an architect who was faithful to the modern principles that he acquired during his education, and which he implemented throughout his career – one that was peripheral on two fronts, both geographically and culturally.

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