Julio Cano Lasso

Julio Cano Lasso was a Spanish Architect, considered a master of Spanish architecture, alongside his contemporaries in the Madrid Rationalist school. He began his architectural studies in 1939, following the Spanish Civil War, and completed his studies in 1949. In the 1960's, he was architectural advisor to the General Directorate of Urban Planning. In 1987, he won the Antonio Camuñas Prize for Architecture. Beginning in 1990, he was a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. In 1991, he earned the "Gold Medal in Spanish Architecture Award" from the Consejo Superior de los Colegios de Arquitectos de España. Cano Lasso said that he was influenced largely by Willem Marinus Dudok and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Today, his children Lucia Cano Pintos, Diego Cano Pintos, Gonzalo Cano Pintos and Alfonso Cano Pintos, are all architects. Lucia is the most prominent of the children, having won awards for architecture, and owns the architectural firm SelgasCano with her husband Jose Selgas. Diego, Gonzalo, and Alfonso manage the firm Studio CanoLasso.

The architectural historian Antón Capitel writes of Cano:

"Cano, apparently a true eclectic, mixed almost from the beginning the rationalist and organic attitudes, either because he used them at the same time or because he combined them in the same work, thus approaching almost all his colleagues, even the erratic trajectory of Oiza, without resembling any of them. Without the enlightened metaphysical attitude of Sota or Cabrero, without the obsessive analytical condition or the late-youthful attitude of Oiza, or without the passionate plasticity of a Fernández Alba, or a Higueras, Cano belongs to an attitude of a much more moderate character, moderation armed with a powerful plastic sensitivity, as well as with the force of a professional skill and good sense capable of weighing and measuring the appropriateness of the subject and the place, and choosing, or mixing, accordingly, his resources. In this sense he was more modern than the others, if you will pardon the paradox —in the sense of being more contemporary now, advancing then what was later to happen— which explains his lack of real prominence in the first decades and, as I said, his stronger rise in the last decades."

On the Centenary of Cano's birth, the Madrid Institute of Architects and the Ministry of Transport, Mobility, and Urban Agenda published "''Julio Cano Lasso. Naturalezas,"'' a collection of photographs and biographical information about Cano.

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