Few architects in the province of Alicante during the second half of the twentieth century have had such professional and critical success with their work. An extraordinary capacity for design was coupled from the very beginning with the possibility of executing major commissions with a strong urban impact that, thanks to the promotion of the most cultured layers of the industrial bourgeoisie of Elche, public institutions and the Church, contributed to the definition of the modern city of Elche.
He served as president of the Board of Trustees of the Misteri d'Elx (1988-1998), professor at the new School of Architecture of Alicante and member of the College of Architects. His activity as an architect was long and intense, facilitated by the premature death in a traffic accident in 1968 of his father, architect Antonio Serrano Peral. He knew how to use his youth and creative capacity to run a studio that, with numerous commissions and works left unfinished by his father, counted on the collaboration of excellent draftsmen and construction managers, had a well-organized professional archive and a substantial architecture library. The incorporation into it of his brother Andrés and his nephew Antonio (and, later, architects Fernando Valderrama and Beatriz Serrano), during decades of great construction activity in Elche, intensified its possibilities, developing an architecture rooted in the Madrid School, but related, somewhat eclectically, to the contemporary work developed in Europe. AWARD FOR PROFESSIONAL TRAJECTORY 2023
An architect focused on his city
Few architects in the province of Alicante during the second half of the twentieth century have had such professional and critical success with their work. An extraordinary capacity for design was coupled from the very beginning with the possibility of executing major commissions with a strong urban impact that, thanks to the promotion of the most cultured layers of the industrial bourgeoisie of Elche, public institutions and the Church, contributed to the definition of the modern city of Elche.
He served as president of the Board of Trustees of the Misteri d'Elx (1988-1998), professor at the new School of Architecture of Alicante and member of the College of Architects. His activity as an architect was long and intense, facilitated by the premature death in a traffic accident in 1968 of his father, architect Antonio Serrano Peral. He knew how to use his youth and creative capacity to run a studio that, with numerous commissions and works left unfinished by his father, counted on the collaboration of excellent draftsmen and construction managers, had a well-organized professional archive and a substantial architecture library. The incorporation into it of his brother Andrés and his nephew Antonio (and, later, architects Fernando Valderrama and Beatriz Serrano), during decades of great construction activity in Elche, intensified its possibilities, developing an architecture rooted in the Madrid School, but related, somewhat eclectically, to the contemporary work developed in Europe.
Quality public architectures
In Elche he created: the El Palmeral Public School (1969), based on isolated pavilions, with a graceful exposed metal structure and visible white concrete blocks, in one of the famous palm groves; the Cuartel Viejo residential-commercial complex (1971-1976), centered by a public plaza, with its dynamic Italianate volumes and its corner tower, finished in striking white, blue and maroon colors, which changed the toponymy, now known as Pisos Azules; two commercial and residential buildings in the Glorieta (1973), with delicate pink marble facades entrusted to an exposed metal structure that recalls Milanese neoliberty and Wright's prairie houses; various schools built as school architect and member of the Construction Board, including the Candalix, the result of rehabilitating an old shoe factory (1985), the Miguel de Cervantes (1979), awarded by the College of Architects, the CAM daycare center (Palas Atenea Award 1984), and others, formalized with various models that he intelligently repeats; the Pla de Sant Josep market (1974), a brutalist piece, unique in the province, unfortunately demolished.
Also very notable are his restorations such as the Town Hall (1970-1980), the Basilica of Santa María (1980-1997), the Hermitage of San Sebastián, the Altamira Palace for the Archaeological Museum (1980-2009), the Arab baths and the Nursing Home for the Elderly.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante whose collections are formed by works created fundamentally in the twentieth century. They range from the so-called avant-gardes to all the approaches and artistic manifestations that took place in the decades of the second half of the past century. They are expressed on different supports and materials, with diverse dimensions and techniques. In turn, the temporary exhibitions are related to these collections and allow for expanding or deepening some aspects of contemporary chronology. However, contemporary architecture is absent from both the permanent collections and those temporary manifestations.The architecture of the MACA itself, a project created and directed by the Sancho Madridejos Studio, is a beautiful building of great functional efficiency. The syncopated projection of horizontal and vertical spaces establishes a formal order based on the geometry and texture of the materials used in construction, while revealing a kind of tension resolved by the overhead passage of light, a kind of "felt" spirituality more emotional than real.The MACA proposes in a conversational format, meetings around art and architecture around the architect's table. In the MACA Library, the last Thursdays of each month, from January to May 2015.This first cycle will consist of different manifestations. The first and fundamental one will show works by an architect related through his vital and professional activity to the province of Alicante. The selection criterion will be conditioned by the modernity of the proposals, understanding that modernity, first of all, in a chronological sense, attending to those architectures and architects who were protagonists and participants in the advent of contemporaneity. The exhibition of some models will allow for offering three-dimensional models, reclaiming the model as such, as the authors of the Renaissance defended. And to illustrate the complete work process, sketches and preliminary drawings will be shown alongside the project plans and notes developed during the construction process. All of this with the ultimate aim of understanding and grasping in some way the constructed space.The architect's table, a table from 1912, real and present (deposited in the MACA by its owner Alfonso Navarro Guzmán), serves as an ideological foundation to link the exhibitions and will serve as the material support for the models so that we can traverse, while dreaming, the imagined space.
