I met José Antonio through Federico Correa, at the time when Lluís Clotet and I went to work in his studio. At that time, the reference was clearly José Antonio Coderch. The admiration for Coderch was not shared by everyone, although for some he was the absolute reference. I don’t remember the exact day I met him, but I do remember the circumstances. It was in Federico Correa's office, where we were working on some interiors for José Antonio's projects, a chalet, and the hotel in Mallorca. Meeting him was to fall in love with him. He was a handsome man, a character with a convincing charm. We got to know him better during a workshop for architecture students in Delft, attended by great figures: Aldous van Eyck, Bakema, Giancarlo de Carlo, and José Antonio Coderch. From the Barcelona School of Architecture, we were three students: Cristian Cirici, Pep Bonet, and I. We spent a week living together in this forum and got to know José Antonio a little better. At that time, he was building the house on Johann Sebastian Bach Street. He was a reference; I remember people wanting to live in those homes, not only Alfonso Milà but also Jacinto Esteva, a hunter, film director, dilettante architect, and fascinating character. He said, "My sensitivity does not allow me to live in another house." José Antonio even imposed a fantastic builder and carpenter on his projects. When Clotet and I started doing some projects on our own, like the renovation of the photography studio of Maspons and Ubiña, we did it with this builder. They were very experienced people, from whom we learned a lot. I visited him several times in Espolla. I visited his studio repeatedly, also attended some of his works, and together we went to the Ugalde house, which is now owned by Fernando Amat. It was a total discovery for me. I must have been about nineteen when I met him. He completely changed me. Even now, sometimes, Lluís Clotet and I comment that Coderch's teachings, through Federico Correa, are condemning us. Because nowadays, thinking this way makes no sense; following his teachings today is absolutely anachronic. Currently, one must create the most spectacular and marketable designs, in the style of Zaha Hadid, not the simplest ones. I often have Coderch in my mind when I design, and I ask myself what he would do in this situation.

José Antonio was a contradictory person. He would say, "One must not be authoritarian," and he said it while shouting, with those eyes. In this regard, he was a total contradiction, but he was also a wise, cultured, and very unique person who, despite having read a lot, was against architectural theories. I remember one of his phrases: "One starts riding a bicycle without knowing the static laws that support it. You can’t have this theory to design. What you have to do is escape from the crap, and then you’ll achieve excellence."

He was a bit crazy. Alfonso Milá and Federico Correa were very scared the day he came to the studio and said, "I’ve thought about it deeply and I think I should kill my children now. Yes, because I see they are completely innocent. Since they are innocent, they will go to heaven. I’ll condemn myself, but I love them so much that I think it compensates for my condemnation if they go to heaven." After that, they took him to a psychiatrist, who even subjected him to some electroshock therapy, although, on second thought, I believe this temptation is totally coherent if you are a devout believer.

And he was, very religious and a faithful reader of the Bible. He was a unique character, one that I truly miss. When he was very ill, we went one day to visit him in his studio at Plaza Calvó, and he said to us, "The other day, Trias Fargas came and asked me if I would accept the Creu de Sant Jordi." When we asked him what he had answered, he told us, "Well, obviously, I told him that if I deserved it, they should take the risk of me not accepting it, and if I didn’t deserve it, they shouldn’t give it to me." How few people would do something like that today! I believe he is the best architect since the war, by far.

His attitude wasn’t rough, but it was aggressive. There’s a famous anecdote where he tells that one day he was at the office and received some notes from the municipal architect, the famous Bueno, corrupt like all the ones from that time, with twenty reasons why he didn’t approve the project. At that time, municipal architects built a lot, which is totally incompatible. And that day, when the objections arrived, Coderch stood his ground. “What does this guy think he is? I’m going to slap him.” He left, took his little car, parked at Plaça Sant Jaume, and said he “wanted to speak with Mr. Bueno.” He waited in line for an hour, which was normal, and when Mr. Bueno came out and greeted him... Paf! Coderch slapped him and left. When he returned to the office, they asked, “What did you do?” and he said, “What I said: slapped him.”

To understand how little regard he had for architectural theories, you have to see how he designed. A marvelous project like Torre Valentina, for which he left behind a series of other projects, would have been historic as a tourist project. It included a central hotel, where the floors were connected by ramps. One day he said, “This ramp thing… when they bring the food to the rooms with the cart... what will happen? Let me prepare some tea and let’s find a little thing with wheels here in the office.” They brought a table with wheels. “Let’s go outside,” he said. Plaça Calvó is quite steep, so we went up and down the street with the tea. He wasn’t about consulting a book, he was about checking if the tea would spill or not. That’s how he designed; it was absolutely refreshing to think like that.

Aside from the projects we followed as observers, such as the one on Johann Sebastian Bach Street, there were projects in which we collaborated. Of course, the most important one was the hotel in Mallorca. Solving the possibility of a third bed in the room was quite a story. “We need to put a partition for the third bed,” he said. “Well, José Antonio, if three people are sharing a room, the third bed is for a baby, a little child, or the grandmother… how are you going to isolate it?” “Nononono, but they’ll see her naked.” He was primarily thinking about his daughter, whom he was understandably in love with because she was beautiful. There was no way to convince him. In the end, there was a ridiculous curtain to isolate the hypothetical bed. Anyway, the Mallorca project was interesting. He was obsessed with isolating the rooms, offsetting them so the noise wouldn’t pass through. For example, one of the reasons for his hatred of roller blinds was that they make a lot of noise. Instead of saying they don’t work well, especially when the opening goes all the way to the floor, or that they always stay halfway up and look ugly, what bothered him was the noise. He had total quirks and a deep love for certain materials. When he liked any material, he always used it. He often said, “There are no good or bad materials. There are materials used well and materials used badly. Reed, mosaic... everything can be used if you do it right.” Being close to his studio and collaborating with him was a great learning experience. We followed his projects very closely, like the Trade buildings and the drama of Torre Valentina when the client backed out.

Coderch became a professor at the university, replacing Federico Correa, who was expelled for political reasons. Terradas, the director of the school at the time, thought that the best person to replace Federico Correa, who had so much prestige, was his teacher. I remember very well the day the news arrived at the office that José Antonio had agreed to replace Federico. He couldn’t believe it and called him. José Antonio told him that he had thought about it carefully, and since Federico was a fellow traveler of the communists, he was willing to replace him.

I don’t know if he was a good professor for the university, as he did such extravagant things as bringing a flask full of whiskey and drinking it in front of the students in the middle of the afternoon. But as a private tutor, he was irreplaceable, and he would say fantastic things like, “Where there’s iron, there’s error; an engineer taught me that.” He was quite right; when you put iron into architecture, you have to think carefully about it. If all the modernists had followed this maxim, we wouldn’t be restoring the Palau and La Pedrera with so many problems.

Coderch remained deeply anti-communist until the end, but I wouldn’t say he was a Francoist. He was one of those who won the war, that’s evident, and he was proud of having won it. But he was very quickly disappointed by the national-syndicalist revolution. At first, he had positions, such as municipal architect of Sitges. And at first, this encouraged him because he thought he would build houses for the poor, like those in Barceloneta, at affordable prices. He approached it with this naive mentality and quickly realized that the Francoist bureaucracy was swallowing him up. He was an absolutely honest man, and he saw that the revolution of the Movement didn’t lead to what he had thought. The proof of this is that Coderch practically never received any commissions from the regime, maybe a few minor ones in the first two years, but after that, never again. He did the extension of the School of Architecture through a direct commission from Oriol Bohigas, who was the director at the time. He did not speak well of the regime, at all; he spoke very badly of politicians in general, and history has proven him right. But yes, he was absolutely anti-communist, and this is something that is now said with a whisper.

We can affirm that his work is of high quality but low quantity. Coderch could make a family wait four years for the project of a house, and after that time say, "I can’t do it" and abandon the project. He had his phobias; one of them was Francesc Mitjans, whom I consider a great architect, but an architect who could show up at a landowner’s house and tell him, "You have a magnificent plot: I’ve already made a sketch of what you can do with it." And he would manage to get the project. Coderch was the complete opposite. And, of course, between an architect who made you wait five years and another who gave you everything ready, Mitjans won, as he got a lot of work. Coderch hated him for that.

In his office, he had a list of contractors he would never work with again. When a contractor pulled a stunt on him, he would write their name down and say, "We’re not working with this guy again." You have to understand that at the time, the architect had some power and could decide with which contractors to work. Nowadays, it's the contractors who can marginalize the architect.

Many years ago, all the relevant Catalan architects, including Coderch, created an urban planning project for the entire Catalan coast, in opposition to the one officially commissioned to Doxiadis. The day we presented the project, we were all there, and Joan Bosch began explaining the urban planning part, which he was in charge of. Coderch said, "This Bosch, isn’t he from the Bosch family of Girona?" And Federico Correa, who was next to him, replied, "Yes, yes, but he’s very different; he’s estranged from his father." "Ah, no, no; families are families; nothing, nothing." He stood up in the middle of the meeting and left, saying, "I’ll never work with the Bosch family of Girona." That was Coderch!

I think that in Barcelona, there has always been a much higher level of unity among architects compared to Madrid, for example, or New York. In Madrid, architects have always fought to get clients, to be directors of the School, while in Barcelona, no architect would want to be the director of the School, not even with a gun to their head. Despite this, there were factions. And Coderch was quite unique; he had followers and fans, but always had a conflictual relationship with some colleagues. At that time in Barcelona, it was unthinkable for a public work to end up in the hands of a quality architect. Therefore, quality architects worked on villas, interiors, single-family houses... Bohigas, for example, chased after builders to be able to do a building between party walls, and José Antonio spent many years working on villas. Later, he was able to do the hotel in Mallorca and larger projects.

I often think that experience allows you to face bigger problems, but it doesn’t make you better. A poet can be great at seventeen, like Rimbaud, but at seventeen, it’s impossible to write War and Peace, a novel with twenty characters. Experience and knowledge allow you to tackle more substantial topics, but quality can be found in early works. The Ugalde House, for example, which is one of José Antonio Coderch's very early works, is wonderful. The luck was that the client was exceptional, because Ugalde was an engineer, and between Ugalde and Coderch, they would go to the site and destroy what they didn’t like. It was unimaginable in any other situation. No budget or excuses: "We didn’t get it right. Let’s lower this, and redo it." With this trial-and-error approach, you can’t create major works like the Cotxeres block.

Then he suddenly designed the Trade buildings all in glass. "I’ve decided that a building over four floors can’t be made of brick, it has to be made of glass." I remember the radicality of these decisions. The Trade buildings, if they had been better constructed—Figueras was the developer, and he wasn’t focused on doing things well—are a project of interest. When I revisit Coderch’s houses after many years, I think they hold up wonderfully. There are many of Coderch’s works that I really like, and I would almost say there’s none that I don’t like. Coderch is very consistent; he doesn’t have dips. He’s always good. When I was tasked with designing a restaurant on the land of La Balsa—the restaurant was called La Balsa because there was a 19th-century pond that irrigated the whole Güell estate—I knew there was a project for a villa by Coderch that never came to fruition. I called him to tell him that I’d been offered the project and that I knew he had a design. He replied, "Well done. Any of these bastards would’ve done it without telling me anything." I explained that I was thinking of keeping the pond because it was so well built, with 60 cm thick stone and brick walls, and I wanted to place the restaurant inside. "If you can drain it, it could work, because you need to be above the sidewalk level, otherwise, the day it rains a lot, it could flood." His advice was always spot on. It was a very gratifying relationship. He was one of the most important people I’ve ever known in my life, and I miss him a lot.

This respect for colleagues, if it ever existed, has been lost. One day I called an architect from Madrid about a similar issue, and he said, "Let’s see. You Catalans: you call me because I had already done a project at this site. What you should do is steal it. Yes, yes. Do whatever you want."

At that time, all of us were fighting to have a Coderch lamp. Back then, they were being made without his consent; when he found out, he had a fit of anger and said it needed to be improved. Pep Bonet spent many years in the studio, trying to improve the Coderch lamp, because it had to be supported only by the blades. When mine broke—like all of them, because the Coderch lamp has a problem: there’s a point when one of the blades always splits along the grain because it’s cut in the opposite direction—and I had to take it to the scrapyard, I asked José Antonio to sign a blade for me. The dedication, which is now almost completely faded, said: "Despite everything, playing fair is worth it. With all my affection, José Antonio Coderch." This idea of playing fair was very much his, it was his obsession. He had a drawing of the lamp by Picasso, quite beautiful. He gave the lamp to Picasso, and Picasso thanked him by drawing it on a postcard and sending it to him. "Imagine a drawing by Picasso; I could use this in the advertising. Imagine what it is for a lamp to have been drawn by Picasso, but that’s not the right thing to do. I can’t use a personal drawing that Picasso sent me to promote the lamp." And I thought to myself, if Picasso had reasoned like that throughout his life... "I have the postcard here but I’ll never use it for commercial purposes, I haven’t even photographed it." He was a kind of Don Quixote figure.

I think for many architects, he was decisive for the generation, mine and that of Josep Llinàs, Elias Torres, etc. Surely there were people who thought he was pretentious; it’s true that he was extremely individualistic, but he wasn’t isolated from international culture, after all, he was a member of Team 10, spoke French and English quite well, and read them; he wasn’t an isolated Spanish gentleman who didn’t know what was happening abroad, he had designed the Spanish pavilion at the Triennale di Milano and knew all the Italian architects… he was an informed figure. He didn’t follow what the critics said. He had his quirks, but they were his, and I think that’s decisive for being someone.