Francisco Gómez Canales

"Five experiments made by prestigious architects on their own homes during the dark days of the Second World War. Canales - Lombardero is an office of architecture and urbanism founded in 2003 and based in London (UK) and Seville (Spain). The office develops its work through designs interested in a critical understanding of the context, carefulness regarding the inhabitation of interiors and attention to materiality and construction detail. Most of their designs are located in Andalusia-Spain.Lately, the office has expanded its work internationally to Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The office has also developed a substantial academic work in field of history and theory of architecture and the city.In most books or manuals on the history of modern architecture we found a large number of pages devoted to the avant-garde movement that took place in-between wars and to the reconstruction and expansion after World War II. Therebetween, as a misunderstanding or an agreed silence, is a big gap of dark years, wars and exiles of which you can hardly speak about. It is precisely in those dark years when the most experimental and inspiring projects had place. Architects and artists relegated to the margins of civil reality began to present a picture of reactions to a cultural situation unsustainable. Francisco González de Canales analyzes a constellation of scattered cases between late thirties and late fifties of the twentieth century he calls domestic self-experimentation."

El trabajo de la cantería ha sido una de las faenas más duras pero más apasionantes, emotivas y creadoras del hombre, pues ha contribuido a dar permanencia a casi todas las expresiones, sentimientos y actividades humanas. Actualmente el oficio de cantero es una actividad casi olvidada, hasta el punto que resulta verdaderamente difícil encontrar artesanos que conozcan los recetarios tradicionales y que sepan manejar con maestría las herramientas. Se hacía necesario, por tanto, la publicación de un manual en el que se recogieran de forma clara y didáctica todos los principios básicos de esta técnica, acompañados de abundantes fotografías y dibujos aclaratorios. Uno de los valores más notorios de este Manual es que está todo él basado en las experiencias individuales de su autor que, entre otras actividades, ejerció de maestro de cantería en las diversas escuelas-taller que se sucedieron en el monasterio de Santa María la Real de Aguilar de Campoo.