Félix Candela finished his architecture degree in Madrid in 1935, learned about concrete shells from Eduardo Torroja, served as a captain of engineers in the Republican army and reached Mexico in June 1939 aboard the Sinaia, one of the Spanish republican exiles. He took Mexican nationality in 1941. With his brother Antonio he ran the contracting firm Cubiertas Ala from 1950 to 1969, which drew 1,439 projects and built 896 of them, most of them industrial. His instrument was the hyperbolic paraboloid, a doubly ruled surface that can be built with straight formwork and, in his hands, roofed enormous column-free spans in shells a few centimetres thick. He taught at UNAM and later in Illinois, and died in North Carolina in 1997.
