Juan de Villanueva

He entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando as a pupil when he was eleven years old.

A year later, he travelled through Córdoba and Granada, where he, together with José de Hermosilla, went to draw the "Arab antiquities."

He was going to construct several pavilions for the royal disposal: in 1771, he built the Casa de Infantes at the Royal Palace of Aranjuez; in 1772, the Casita del Príncipe, at El Pardo; in 1773, the Casita del Infante (with a Palladian scheme and a notable plasticity in the treatment for the main portal) and the Casita del Príncipe, both in El Escorial, where he also constructed the Casas de Oficios, a group of houses, according to the sober Herrerian style of the Monastery.

With his interventions in the Plaza Mayor, both after the fire of 1790 and in the Major House among others, he collaborated in the renovation of the image of the city.

[1] With his personal style and with his strong local influences, he was the architect who best brought the theorical basis of European Neoclassicism to Spain.