I have been working among architects for years and I have already met many generations of architects trained in our school at the University of Navarra and many others. Young or old, retired or recently graduated, Navarrese, Latin American, Spanish, European and Asian. And I recognize that there is something about this training that makes my admiration for it increase more and more as the years go by.

I confess that I could not be an architect. Although perhaps, because I have a comparable way of reasoning, I too need a pencil and paper to think. Perhaps that is what allows me to understand well the substance of this profession.

I plenary session of the Executive Council convinced that each person must study, develop and enhance the skills that nature has given him or her. Whoever knows himself well, will choose well. This is the guarantee of success that will lead a person to study and enjoy the training he or she chooses.
Likewise, this success in the choice of programs of study, in the academic training one receives and in the profession one chooses or finds, makes many of us privileged and even workaholics. This rate is multiplied a hundredfold in the case of architects, a profession that is as exciting as few others.

The architect builds, but how does an architect build?

First of all, we must teach him to look. To contemplate, to understand the proportions and measurements and to be able to capture with a simple pencil what he is imagining in his head. Then, he must learn to understand the human being, life and its needs, the client. Thirdly, he must know history: what has been done and has successfully survived the test of time and what has not. What better lessons for learning than those of success and failure? Fourthly, he must learn technique: to know how to erect resistant, comfortable constructions that provide wellbeing, to know how to choose materials and how to use them. Fifthly, he must know how to integrate all this to the place where his building will be located, in accordance with its environment, climatic particularities, etcetera. Finally, using his background, he will analyze, synthesize and understand the reality and information that he will have to transform into a work of architecture: a house, a place or a civic infrastructure.

How wonderful to understand and process all this! And to achieve it thanks to this training, which is unique and one of the most complete in existence. A creative discipline that integrates scientific and humanistic knowledge.

Let's delve a little into the brain of an architect. There we will find the creative process: the incessant twists and turns of each idea. The spiral of a process that only stops when it is forced to do so, because it is shaken by the conviction that every idea is always susceptible of being perfected.

I would like to leave two reflections by way of conclusion. The first is in fact a recognition to all the professors of the schools of architecture of yesterday, today and tomorrow, especially those of our School of Pamplona. We owe it to the latter that our architects, most of them trained in those classrooms, have created the wonderful city we have. Thank you!

The second stems from a phrase I once heard someone say: architecture is not a degree program to be studied alone. That's right, indeed. In architecture you always work in a team. Each member of the team brings the best he has to the whole set of knowledge, skills and attitudes so diverse that it requires, and that individually so impossible to master. And we must also keep in mind that architecture is not only studied. Architecture is lived, and it is lived as a whole: the city, the town, the place, the building, the park... are lived collectively, hence the crucial importance of becoming aware from the classroom of the duty of service, guided by a good sense of anthropocentrism, which must always be the foundation of the architect's activity.

For all these reasons, it is worth knowing, understanding and respecting architecture. With its virtues and its defects.