The resounding presence of the excavated checkerboard of his elegant Library Services General presiding over the campus of the University of Navarra will always remind us of the figure of the architect and professor Javier Carvajal, who has just passed away. Carvajal meant for our School of Architecture a renewing impulse: he transformed the pragmatism professor into a daily adventure and the teaching of architecture into an option staff that is only worth living passionately, with the coherence of the one who thinks and works without double languages, of the one who strives for architecture without making it a means for profit or fame.

If dedication to his students is the first gift Javier Carvajal gave us, the second and no lesser gift is his exemplary work. It is enough to contemplate how much we can and should learn from that first architecture of the 1950s that, determined to modernize Spain, incorporated modern architecture into the movement that, with painters, sculptors, writers and filmmakers, opened the postwar panorama to the true modern transformation of Spain.

Contemplating the Escuela de Altos programs of study Mercantiles in Barcelona or the Pantheon of the Spaniards in Rome is no less exciting than discovering the meditation on modern architecture contained in the incorporation of traditional values of our architecture within the New York Pavilion or its Somosaguas houses.

And what can we say about the complex expressive force and the demanding constructive neatness that characterize it, and that have thrilled architects as diverse as Peter Eisenmann or Tadao Ando, in Madrid works such as the aforementioned Torre de Valencia, or Montesquinza, or the Zoo, or the Adriatica, or the Banco Industrial de Leon, or the Sobrino house, whose sister in Ondarreta has been barbarously demolished as it happened before with the Loewe store in Serrano. These are works that, by themselves, would deserve to present him as one of the greatest figures of architecture. Among other distinctions, they earned him the Gold Medal at the XI Milan Triennial (1957), the award of Architecture of the AIA in New York (1964), the award Schumacher to the best architecture in Europe (1968), or the recent -and inexplicably delayed- Gold Medal of Spanish Architecture.

With gratitude, admiration and respect Javier Carvajal will remain in our report as one of the people who taught us to love, enjoy and respect the noble art of architecture. Farewell, Maestro.