José Luis Picardo

[6] Picardo executed his first professional mural painting at the age of 20 in 1939 in the Teatro Fígaro [es] (Figaro Theatre) in Madrid, commissioned by his architecture mentor Luis Moya Blanco.

[7][14] In the early 1960s Picardo built some houses in the vernacular and historical Andalucían style on the Costa del Sol and in Jerez and, in contrast, a number of modernist apartment blocks for the construction company Urbis in Madrid.

[7] As well as his work on modern buildings and on preservation and restoration projects through the 1950s, Picardo continued to receive commissions for decorative mural paintings, where he "demonstrated his mastery in the use of colour and techniques such as watercolour and oil".

[7] For nearly twenty years, from the early 1960s to his last work for the Paradores in the 1980s, Picardo carried out eleven major reconstructions of historical buildings and/or erected sympathetic and imitative new constructions abutting them or rising from their ruined foundations.

The basic structure was 20th-century concrete, steel, block and cement but he completely hid it from the public gaze with stone, brick, timber and iron in a way that suggested age and implied that the cladding materials formed the entire construction.

[29] In an article about the Jaén Parador for an architectural magazine in 1967, Picardo rhapsodised about the mood and aura he had created for the building: "Exterior, un conjunto de masas elementales rectangulares./Interior, techos con artesas, bóvedas y arcos, madera, barro y piedra.

At Jaen, and at Guadalupe, finished at much the same time, Picardo established a style of architecture and interior design which found favour with his clients and their guests and which he was to pursue in most of his further work for Paradores, refining it where required and elsewhere repeating it faithfully.

[22][note 1] In 1965 Picardo was commissioned by Paradores to restore and rehabilitate the old Casa de la Inquisición (House of the Inquisition) in the small, historic village of Pedraza, 37 kilometres northeast of Segovia in Castilla y León.

Inside, Picardo followed the rustic style of the region's inns, building a spacious lounge behind the entrance hall, with a large and low fireplace, and on the upper floors the bar and the 90-seat dining-room opening onto the balcony-gallery.

[30] He also made considerable use of his characteristic ceramic murals decorating the public parts of the building, including his history of the castle, all produced by his favoured ceramicist, Juan Manuel Arroyo, and signed by Picardo.

[30][45] Picardo began by demolishing most of the ramshackle service buildings, other than the square structure at Number 6 Calle Ancha which benefitted from substantial stone walls and four brick, groined vaults.

[44] Internally, Picardo repeated many of his pastiche medievalisms as seen in his previous Parador projects, with much use of heavy timber, such as a dark coffered ceiling in the dining room and classic Castilian designs for windows, doors, furniture, and light fittings.

Picardo's original entrance, bar and cafetería area now form a sumptuous suite,[45] though the medieval aura of his interior decoration and furnishings for that part of the building has been lost through modernisation.

[50] As the crack and the subsidence had been concealed by rubble to a depth of about half a metre, and Picardo and his engineers were unaware of the results of previous surveys, it was not until work began in 1969 preparing for the new building that the potential instability of the ground was revealed.

[59] In his reconstruction of the interior of the castle Picardo exercised the standard practice of the Paradores network, and of which he was deemed to be the master, of using steel, reinforced concrete, blockwork and cement to erect the basic structure but hiding those modern elements behind a faked historical veneer of walls, beams, arches, and cladding made of stone, brick, timber and iron.

A further much smaller, three-storied pastiche monastic courtyard with semi-circular arches was built at the southern end of the castle which had sustained the most damage in the Civil War bombardment,[54] with more guest rooms arranged around it.

He designed classic Castilian-style furniture, flooring, rugs, doors, windows, light fittings, mirrors, heraldic displays, seigneurial crests, banners, explanatory mosaics and so on, everything down to the smallest detail.

Among the most advanced plans Picardo drew up were in 1969 for the renovation and conversion into a Parador of the castle at Puebla de Alcocer, a small municipality 70 miles east of Mérida in the Province of Badajoz in Extremadura.

The hotel conversions and the demolition of large parts of monumental buildings without detailed investigation and record-keeping was frowned upon in the 1960s and 1970s, and over half a century later is seen by archeologists and historians as a matter of significant controversy and regret.

In writing of the new extensions which were designed to be identical to the monuments to which they were attached — Picardo's Parador at Jäen is a good example — she has described them as being "falso histórico" (false history) ... "a replica whose documentary value has been masked or even lost".

Demolition began in the mid-1970s, but pressure from admirers of the house and of Bosco's work, aided by architecture students who occupied what remained of the building, brought an official stop to its destruction in April 1977.

[77] The building's interior has since been further rehabilitated for the requirements of modern office technology and a set back mansard roof has been erected to enable the addition of a further floor, but these changes have not impinged on Picardo's restoration of the façades.

The ribbon windows, formed of near-black anodised aluminium frames and dark coloured glass, alternated with bands of white Carrara marble cladding[79] laid in a uniquely patterned bond.

[80][81] For the interior of the building Picardo designed several assembly halls, auditoria for concerts, theatre, cinema and conferences, along with numerous exhibition and gallery spaces, libraries, offices, Council rooms, conveniences and two floors of car parking below ground.

Picardo repeated the external colouring inside the hall, with the ochre of the loose sand on which the horses perform, and bright white walls and pitched ceiling reflecting daylight from the many windows.

Picardo was brought in by the Junta de Comunidades (Community Board) of Castilla La Mancha to design a "modern and functional" permanent home for the archives near the university campus in the city of Ciudad Real.

In 1982 the Ministry of Culture resolved to establish a purpose-built home for the archive, but it was not until ten years later, in 1992, that Picardo began work on a site on the Calle Las Mazas on the edge of the remains of the Convent de San Agustín in the old centre of Salamanca.

Directly above the entrance and beyond the cornice, Picardo has placed an unexpected single dormer window crowned with an oversized triangular classical pediment and adorned with the date in Roman numerals of the building's completion.

[102] In 2000 Picardo gifted the academy his oil painting Guardia civil en el puerto de Alazores, an image of five policemen mounted on five horses in a compact group.

The prize jury praised Picardo, the ninth winner, as an architect "knowledgeable about our culture ... who has quietly exercised his professional activity, reinterpreting and valuing the richness of our historical heritage.