Eduardo Torroja, this was the grandfather of Ana Torroja that Franco made marquis

In the heyday of Meccano, Ana Torroja he tiptoed past when the press asked about the family. What if it was his prop, what if his greatest support. And from there it did not happen. A very detailed account did not fit with their androgyny ‘new anger’ at a time when the Movida looked down on them. The reality is that Ana was the daughter of a civil engineer and a sister of the former prosecutor of the National Court Eduardo FungairiñoHe grew up in El Viso –the richest neighborhood in Spain–, studied at the Teresianas, spent the summer in Mallorca and enrolled in Economics. Now, about to turn 62, free from other people’s prejudices, he claims the title of Marchioness of Torroja (“my father told me that he wanted the title to remain in the family and it will be an honor to fulfill his wish,” explains via ‘ mail ‘).

The marquisate was granted by Franco to his grandfather Eduardo Torroja, a superstar of reinforced concrete of the first half of the 20th century that democracy does not wave because of having exercised in the dark ages. Something a bit arbitrary, because In the Second Republic, Torroja had already designed the Algeciras Market (1933), the cantilever over the bleachers of the Hipódromo de la Zarzuela (1935) and the vault of the ultramodern Frontón de Recoletos (1935), destroyed by bombing. Not only did he “move to France with his family throughout the war,” he explains. Pepa Cassinello, director of the Eduardo Torroja Foundation, but gave lectures in the US, was included in the book ‘Art and Artist’ (University of California Press) next to Henry Moore, Jean-Paul Sartre Y Jean Renoir; and approved the hiring of purged, such as Fernando Sánchez Dragó, fresh out of jail for (yeah yeah) communist.

The Spanish Bauhaus

“He was the Steve Jobs of the time”, defines Cassinello. His ideas were so clear and Spain was such a wasteland that he founded the Technical Construction Institute, a connection center with foreign engineering, architecture and art professionals that “reminded us of the Bauhaus.” There was a swimming pool and tennis for families, training courses for workers, costume parties and a magazine. Through the headquarters, presided over by a concrete dodecahedron (in the photo above), friends like Richard Neutra, Pier Luigi Nervi The Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, the latter kicked the Institute’s circular ramp a few times and a very similar one ended up being the singular element of the Guggenheim in New York. In exchange – for inspiration? – he gave her a watercolor of his famous Cascade House in Pennsylvania.

Ceiling for culés

Among other prodigies, Torroja designed the roof of the grandstand of the FC Barcelona stadium in Les Corts: 26 meters wide by 104 long, without any support. It literally flew over the heads of the tufted culés! It was inaugurated in 1945, in a friendly before the Nàstic de Tarragona, who bought the old tribune for 50,000 pesetas (300 euros) with the commitment to dismantle it and take it home. His footprint in Catalonia was also imprinted on the Open Air Chapel of the Holy Spirit, in the Parc Nacional d’Aigüestortes (1953, disappeared due to neglect), a shell open to the Sant Nicolau river. “Norman Foster was struck by the resemblance to the shells that Jørn Utzon designed for the Sydney Opera House,” says Cassinello.

Your spirit lives on

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His son José Antonio, second Marquis of Torroja, said that he was “an introverted and silent man.” A studio was built in Portals Nous, a few kilometers from Palma de Mallorca, to be alone with his ideas. The only thing that distracted him from his huge constructive and pedagogical agenda was “music and poetry”, the genetic lot that apparently his granddaughter Ana got. “I was 5 months old when my grandfather died –explains the singer–, but my father He told about his passion for the profession, and the importance that not only the technical part had for him, but also the aesthetics. There was no one without the other “.

Such was the intensity of his dedication that, if we pay attention to the ineffable Iker Jimenez, did not stop after his death. “Fourth Millennium” included in a program the anguish of the night guards of the Technical Construction Institute and of a laboratory worker due to the presence of “an entity”. “It is like a dense smoke, like a pure one, that just as it is formed, it disappears”, they defined the paranormal phenomenon. And they suspect that it is the spirit of Torroja, who died in 1961 in his office as a result of a heart attack. “The watchdogs’ dogs are stuck at his door and there is no way to move them,” Jiménez said. If true, the leader of Mecano would inherit title and ghost.