The corporative headquarters of EDP in Oviedo, work of the architect Joaquín Vaquero Palacios, received today the plaque that recognizes it as part of the register of the Foundation DOCOMOMO Ibérico. The ceremony was attended by the President of the Foundation DOCOMOMO Ibérico, Celestino García Braña; the Dean of the Official College of Architects of Asturias, Sonia Puente Landázuri; the spokesman of culture of the Official College of Architects of Asturias, José Ramón Puerto Álvarez; the CEO of EDP Spain, Miguel Stilwell de Andrade; and the Director-General Manager of EDP Spain, Javier Sáenz de Jubera.

The building, ended in 1968, will be part of the register “Modern equipment”, within the catalogue of the Foundation DOCOMOMO.

The president of the Foundation DOCOMOMO Ibérico, Celestino García Braña, pointed out that “with the incorporation of this building in the catalogue of DOCOMOMO Ibérico, we recognize the architectonic value of the work of Vaquero Palacios, as we do with some of his hydraulic installations, constructions that are nowadays hardly acknowledged by the public”.

For her part, the dean of the Official College of Architects of Asturias, Sonia Puente Landázuri, explained that “the architecture of the 20^th century does not receive enough recognition” and has highlighted the importance of the architectonic intention of Vaquero Palacios when making the building of EDP’s headquarters. “He had just arrived from the United States and he reflected in this work the avant-garde that he had lived there”, she commented.

The CEO of EDP Spain, Miguel Stilwell de Andrade, indicated that “apart from the corporative headquarters, Vaquero Palacios’ work is much linked to EDP, as it extends to other installations, like the electrical substation of Carrió, the hydraulic plants of Proaza, Salime, Miranda, Tanes and the thermal power plant of Aboño. He integrated in them, masterfully, architecture, painting, sculpture and engineering”.

This month of May, the corporative headquarters of EDP turn 49 years old. The first conference that took place in the building was the Annual general meeting, where the results of the company in 1967 were presented.

Currently, more than 650 people work in the building, adding up the employees of the company, the collaborative firms and the students from the University of Oviedo that make their training internship in different areas of EDP.

The project of EDP’s headquarters was initially conceived as a skyscraper, vertical building exempt for companies’ headquarters. Nevertheless, the municipal bylaws limited the height of the cornice. For this reason, and because of the allowance to build floors without following the original alignment, Vaquero Palacios stepped back in height and distanced the building from the sidewalk.

“Like in all of his works, Vaquero aims for the integration of plastic arts, with mural contributions”, explains the website of the Foundation DOCOMOMO, where they add that “the structure is made of reinforced concrete, modulated with transparent glass curtain walling in openings and opaque black in panels, between steel profiles fixed to the structure, used as a compositional resource, but also to hide rainwater downpipes”.

DOCOMOMO stands for Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the Modern Movement, an international organization created in 1990, aiming to study and document the architecture of the modern movement, with the goal of achieving its recognition as part of the 20^th century culture, its patrimonial protection and its conservation.

In order to accomplish this, it has been indispensable to identify what buildings constitute this patrimony, getting to know the circumstances that gave origin to it, documenting the projects that generated it and evaluating its current conditions. This work constitutes the register DOCOMOMO Ibérico, in which around 1 200 works are found.

To complete the ceremonies of recognition of the building, today, at 19:00, in the headquarters of the Official College of Architects of Asturias, in Oviedo, the conference about the Foundation DOCOMOMO will take place, in the care of its president, Celestino García Braña, and in the corporative headquarters of EDP, by the architect José Antonio Pérez Lastra.