Gustavo Gili

Campo Baeza's poetics is the outcome of a complex and wide-ranging dialogue with architectural history that has provided him no so much with a set of formal models as with a repertoire of compositional strategies, raising questions of method which he has answered by inverting Mies van der Rohe's celebrated dictum "less is more" to give "mas con menos", more with less. The fact that achieving "more with less" is Campo Baeza's ultimate aim, and that variation rather than variety is one of the fundamental and most characteristic techniques he employs in his architecture, only goes to show how superficial the efforts of critics have been in attempting to reduce the tectonic austerity and luminarist poetry of his buildings to just another form of minimalism. Campo Baeza's simplified assemblies of primary geometric forms carry the rejection of decoration to disconcerting, almost hermetic extremes.