Lamela was born in
Madrid. He graduated from the Technical School of Architecture of Madrid (ETSAM) in 1954 and received his doctorate in 1959. From the beginning of his professional career he proved to be a visionary and innovative architect, the result of his great professional curiosity and much global travelling. • In 1954 he founded
Estudio Lamela, the architecture firm where he has spent his entire professional career. • Between 1956 and 1958, he built the first residential building in Madrid that had air conditioning, individual rubbish chutes, interior ventilation shunts, mobile partition walls, complete exterior lighting, garden terraces, raised portals and suspended light façades. These elements, structures and design were absolutely new in those years. This building was followed by other modern buildings and residential complexes in the capital, and even entire neighbourhoods for thousands of inhabitants such as San Ignacio de Loyola. In 1960, he designed the first supermarket in Spain. • A pioneer in the area of Spanish tourist architecture, he designed the first motels and hotels in the country that had a contemporary conception and design. He participated in the tourist boom that began in the 1960s and created new residential complexes in coastal zones of the island of Majorca and the Costa del Sol. • He was the first architect in Spain to develop the concept of "
Office landscape", which applies to the headquarters of Estudio Lamela itself, then located at number 34 O'Donnell Street in Madrid. This work place introduced, among other novelties, the suppression of enclosed spaces and the incorporation of continuous ceilings with lighting and sound absorption panels, carpeted floors and walls and broken facades – a set of techniques designed to achieve better solar and light control. • Lamela introduced in Spain the concept of "suspended architecture" with the
Torres Colón project in Madrid, undertaken together with the engineer Fernández Casado. The
structural system of the towers was completely designed in
reinforced concrete using high strength
post-tensioned concrete. In this way, it departed from the most widespread technique of constructing "hanging" buildings, which usesheads of structural steel, to instead adopt a "suspended architecture" solution: the floor slabs are supported at their perimeter by the outer tie rods, which are not tensioned as in the case of the "hanging architecture", but compressed against the post-tensioned concrete structure of the head-beams. This upper structure, within which the installation machinery is located, receives the load from the 21 suspended slabs and transmits it to the core, through which it finally descends to the foundations in the ground. When they were built, the Colón Towers heldthe world record for the number of suspended slabs, 21, using the
pre-stressed concrete technique. The result is a building one hundred metres tallwith twenty suspended floors. The
Eduardo Torroja Institute presented this project as a Spanish technological contribution at the World Congress of Architecture and Public Works held in New York in 1975, and it was considered "the building with the most advanced construction technology until 1975." as they looked when finished in 1976. • That sense of innovation and modernity led him to create in 1973 the first company of Integrated
Project Management. It was called Gestión y Control and with it he sought to respond to this idea that he has explored from the beginning of his professional career: to propose a practice in which the architect controls all phases of the project. Responding to this same philosophy, he founded other companies related to his professional field such as ADI (Architecture, Decoration and Engineering), which offered services in which all three disciplines were integrated.
Innovation in materials In 1965 Antonio Lamela introduced ready-mixed concrete to Spain through the Prebetong brand. The company soon expanded into different geographical areas (Madrid, Aragon, Costa del Sol, Baleares and Canary Islands). In practice, they were the first concrete-mixer trucks to circulate on Spanish roads. In 1968 he started the company Shockbeton, dedicated to making pieces of architectural concrete. It was the first time in Spain that concrete prefabricated structures for facades were created, with results of great technical and aesthetic importance. Another of the leading companies that he launched in those years is CTC, a pioneering firm in the industrial supply of packaged bricks.
Santiago Bernabéu Stadium and Terminal 4 of the Barajas Airport In Madrid, Antonio Lamela concluded two reference works. The first was the remodelling and extension in 1988 of the
Santiago Bernabéu Stadium (Lamela holds membership number 59 for
Real Madrid Football Club). The second is the award-winning Terminal 4 of the
Barajas Airport (since 2014, the Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport), along with
Richard Rogers.
International organizations and publications In 1976 Lamela founded in Spain the
Club of Rome, an international organization that seeks to improve the world with tools such as education, social integration and the fair and equitable development of the planet. Antonio Lamela has written several books and publications, as well as numerous papers, writings and essays on land use, water policies, conservation of the environment, and even on the protection of the Spanish language. The architecture of Antonio Lamela is also a history of more than 1,500 projects and achievements of land use planning. Some have been collected in the book "Lamela: Urbanística y Arquitectura. Realizaciones y Proyectos 1954-1992"as well as in the supplement "Proyectos y Realizaciones 1990-2003". His architecture narrates by itself an entire epoch of the history of Spain. Architecture has been for Antonio Lamela a path towards other disciplines. Humanist and thinker, he is the inventor of the new sciences "Geoísmo" and "Cosmoísmo", which he developed in the 1975 book of the same name. These new disciplines constitute a synthesis of urbanism on a planetary scale. In these books he advocated
Sustainable architecture, at a time when that ecological term did not exist. At the time, Lamela defined it as "naturalism". ==Most relevant projects==