Using raw primary materials such as concrete and galvanized steel, simple forms, and an adroit manipulation of scale, the Madrid-based architect Héctor Fernández Elorza gives even small projects a monumental authority. Two horizontal glass slashes across the facade of his Faculty of Cellular and Genetic Biology at the University of Alcalá, for example, transform the rows of diminutive offices and seminar rooms behind them into a mysterious, iconic mask, while deeply projecting concrete planes shade the interior spaces from the western sun. At a larger scale, in the Valdefierro Park outside his native Zaragoza, long concrete retaining walls emerge from the hillside like the ruins of a lost city.

After graduating from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, Elorza spent two years in Stockholm studying the work of Gunnar Asplund and his disciple Sigurd Lewerentz, and he credits particularly the latter for showing him how the tactile quality of materials can become the protagonist of a design. But he translates this lesson from the Swedish context of fine craftsmanship in wood and masonry to the more brutish realities of low-budget public construction in Spain. Valdefierro is a case in point, where he saved money by reusing the tons of demolition rubble that filled the site as aggregate for its concrete walls and then raked their surfaces with a trench-cutting machine to create a coarse, irregular finish that vibrates under the strong local light.