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García Mercadal, Fernando
(b Saragossa, 5 April 1896; d Madrid, Jan 1984). Spanish architect. In 1919 he went to Paris and studied at the Institut d’Urbanisme, where his teachers included Jacques Gréber. In 1921 he graduated from the Escuela de Arquitectura, Madrid, with the highest marks in his year, and from 1923 he spent four years based at the Academia de España, Rome, as a result of winning the Premio de Roma. A travelling scholarship allowed him also to visit France, Germany and Austria. In Berlin (1925–6) he studied urban planning with Hans Poelzig and Hermann Jansen at the Technische Hochschule. During these years of international study he met several of the leading contemporary architects: Le Corbusier in Paris (1925); Peter Behrens (1920), Josef Hoffmann (1924) and Adolf Loos (1927) in Vienna. As a practising architect García Mercadal moved in two complementary directions: he took an interest in popular, mainly Mediterranean, architecture, which had been a focus of his studies in Rome and is reflected in his books (e.g. La casa popular in España), but he was also interested in rationalist architecture, an influence that is apparent in his Rincón de Goya (1927–8; remodelled) in Saragossa. This small pavilion, designed as an alternative to the traditional sculptural monument, is one of the first examples of Modernist architecture in Spain. Another example of his rationalist-inspired architecture is the series of houses he built in 1930 for the Colonia Residencia de Madrid, in the Calle Carbonero y Sol.
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