Sáenz de Oíza travelled to the United States in 1947 on a scholarship, came back with Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn in his luggage, and spent the next forty years arguing in Madrid that a modern building could be organic without being picturesque. The Arantzazu basilica of the 1950s, built with Jorge Oteiza’s sculpture and censured by the Vatican for it, was followed by Torres Blancas, the Torres de Colón, the black glass Banco de Bilbao tower and the long social housing blocks on the M-30. He was a demanding and famously talkative teacher at the Madrid school, where Rafael Moneo worked in his office as a young collaborator on Torres Blancas. His material is board-marked and bush-hammered concrete, worked as if it were masonry.
