Still shocked by the news and with the clear conscience of not being able to reflect here all the human and academic dimension of an unrepeatable professor of our university, the great Joaquín Lorda Iñarra, all of us who have known and appreciated him feel today a little orphaned. School of Architecture Joaquín Lorda Iñarra, all of us who have known and appreciated him feel today a little orphaned. Orphans who have lived with him, who have been his colleagues, who have attended him in his worries, who have been his students, who have traveled with him through Spain, Europe and America, who have been his friends.... The entire School is tinged with black at the disappearance of a professor who has drawn its walls, who has covered its spaces with color, baroque light and love for history, and who has enthused hundreds, thousands of students for architecture from the enjoyment and understanding of its spaces and its formal traditions through countless graphic, physical and now virtual journeys.

Joaquín belongs to the first generation of architects who received in our School the encouragement of Javier Carvajal. In that class that woke up "talking about architecture", Joaquín was the most brilliantstudent , also the most vehement and contradictory. Although it may not seem possible today, Joaquín was a devotee of the most experimental modernity in his projects, always at the limit, and this is how he behaved in his first years of professional degree program until he became, perhaps highly disappointed by the flatness of the market and its constructive results, a passionate defender and student of traditional architecture, especially classical, academic and baroque architecture. He returned to the School supported by Full Professor Carlos Montes and developed a brilliant thesis on Ernst Gombrich, which the British scholar himself defined as the best thing that had been written about him: That was our Joaquín. A man with no middle ground, a spirit without mediocrity.

A beloved and admired professor by all his students, he was tirelessly active, which undoubtedly affected his health, but did not prevent him from traveling throughout America, fascinated by our common baroque past and making countless friends for the University of Navarra in Mexico and Guatemala, in Arizona and California. Those trips that began in the nineties have been source of his passion for the Ibero-American, an emotion that he felt equally for Japan and China, for everything that meant update of the historical knowledge as source of creativity. The systematic invasions of the School's spaces by the innumerable objects and publications that he treasured have given good sample of his encyclopedic interests, of which he should leave a future testimony in an outstanding place of School of Architecture.

In his professional life he also had the opportunity to record his skill as a designer of architectural pieces as varied as the main altar of the cathedral of Pamplona or classical palaces for the royal family of Qatar, using computer media with the same skill and skill with which he drew, with two hands and on the blackboard, impressive sections of cathedrals. This image that today is present on the Internet and the unanimous testimony of pain and admiration of so many students and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, are the best tribute to a great teacher devoted to his students, to an upright person of unbribable conscience, to a wise man of Architecture.