Alejandro de la Sota y la gramática de las artes. Alejandro de la Sota and the grammar of the arts

The research has examined the work of the Spanish architect, Alejandro de la Sota, attempting to study and to retrace the ideas behind his personal creative process. Since the early years, as seen from his biography, the architect began form an interest in music and drawing, setting aside the study of mathematics. Caricature, drawing, mathematics, geometry, music, (and perhaps much more) come together in de la Sota’s work to define this process, creating a grammar with which to compose his operas. This text investigates Alejandro’s method of research in the drawing of caricature, comparing it with the work of his masters Honoré Daumier and Daniel Manuel Rodríguez Castelao. Taking their teachings as a starting point, de la Sota uses the technique of caricature to depict the world and himself, to interrogate reality, a different way to express Mies van der Rohe’s concept of “Less is more”. The caricature is an exercise of transfiguration which is useful in constructing a method and a series of laws and techniques, necessary for the identification of a new order. The harmony which governs everything around us - the “ultimate beauty” -, is the ultimate objective to which to aspire that, according to de la Sota, can be reached by forming relationships between the world of the plastic arts and the applied sciences. This research passes through an attitude to the rigor of the irony that finds expression in his works from experiences investigated in the exercise of caricature, music and mathematics. These disciplines allow him to achieve form through the search for proportion, the domain of rules and the construction of a rhythm.