Born in Santander in 1939, Juan Navarro Baldeweg has brought a fresh look to constructive practices, where work is perceived as an object of activation of the existing physical context. He graduated in 1965 from the Higher Technical School of Architecture of the Technical University of Madrid, where he also completed his PhD in 1969, and currently works as professor in the Department of Architectural Projects. He has been a guest lecturer in Philadelphia, Yale, Princeton, the Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and Barcelona. Between 1959 and 1960 he studied engraving at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. His works as an architect, sculptor and painter have been associated by some critics with the 20th-century artistic avant-gardes with archaic traditional lines. In his early days as a professor, he worked in the studio of the architect Alejandro de la Sota. In 1974, he got a scholarship from the Fundación Juan March to study a postgraduate program at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where he was a student of György Kepes. In the 1980s, he inaugurated his own architectural studio in Madrid. His architectural work has been associated with that of his contemporaries Álvaro Siza and Rafael Moneo. In 1998, he received the Tessenow Gold Medal conferred by Alfred Toepfer Stiftung FVS for all his work. He is a member of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008, he was awarded the Architecture Medal.