ACFC. Engineer Fernández Casado Collection

Scope and Content

The collection draws together documents from Carlos Fernández Casado's project archive (originally from his own technical office) and from his personal archive. The bulk of the collection is made up of civil engineering works dossiers and projects. Together with plans, technical proposals, estimates, structural calculations, etc., these dossiers include many photographs taken before, during and after building work was carried out. The collection is completed by various other documents (correspondence, manuscripts, photographs) belonging to the engineer.

History and biography

Carlos Fernández Casado was born in Logroño on 4 March 1905 and died in Madrid on 3 May 1988. In 1924, aged nineteen, he obtained the qualification of Roads, Canals and Ports Engineer. He was also a qualified Radiotelegraphy Engineer ("Ecole Superieure d'Electricité" in Paris, 1926) and a Telecommunications Engineer (1927), as well as holding a degree in Philosophy and Letters, majoring in History (1944) and in Law (1973).

He began his professional career as an engineer in Granada, where he met and befriended Federico García Lorca and Fernando de los Ríos, who were members of the avant-garde Gallo group. It was during this period that the foundations for his engineering philosophy were laid.

On returning to Madrid in 1932, he started work at Huarte y Cía., the company where he carried out the bulk of his professional activity and where in 1950 he set up a laboratory for studying structures using scaled-down models. He did this alongside his work as a public sector engineer for the Ministry of Public Works and, in 1967, together with Javier Manterola Armisén and his son, Leonardo Fernández Troyano, he set up the "Carlos Fernández Casado" company, specialising in project development and structural works management.

In terms of his teaching activity, Fernández Casado held the School of Civil Engineering in Madrid from 1961. He also taught on the the master’s course on construction (known as CEMCO) at the Torroja Institute, which at the time was aimed at Latin American professionals, and at the Monument Restoration Institute in the Directorate General of Fine Arts.

He was a full member of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1976 and received many awards, including the medal given by the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering and medals from both the Spanish and the Fédération International de la Précontrainte medals.

His research, lectures and philosophy have survived in many written documents. The technical documents, on the theory and practice of structural design and the resistance of certain materials, are contained in monographs, conference papers and specialist journals and magazines published both in Spain and abroad. The most important texts include Cálculo de las estructuras reticulares (1934), Resistencia (1941) and La arquitectura del ingeniero (1975).

His studies on Spanish engineering heritage were pioneering in their day and are now required reading for public works history researchers; they include Historia del puente en España: puentes romanos and Acueductos romanos en España (1972). He also delved into other fields of knowledge, such as history, archaeology and philosophy.

His projects, carried out over an extensive period of time from the early 1930s through to the 1970s, involved a decisive commitment to modernity and to absorbing major technical innovations that were being developed internationally. From 1930 he carried out a systematic study of the types of beam bridges, resulting in his Strict Height Bridges Collection, approved by the Ministry of Public Works in 1939. Some three hundred bridges were built using models from the collection, including El Pardo and Puerta de Hierro bridges, both dating from the 1930s.

His internationally famous engineering works include the multi-level junctions on the Las Rozas-Villalba motorway, the Castejón bridge over the river Ebro, the Quentar dam, the Najerilla aqueduct, the Torres Blancas building structures and the grandstand roof in the San Mamés stadium.

Many of these works were tried and tested as scaled-down models in the laboratory at Huarte, which was later moved to his office. Such models included the movable scaffold system for the Mérida bridge, the roof of the Avilés Lamination Building, the micro-concrete model for the Galapagar bridge, various prestressed beams, box girders for continuous bridges, etc.

Acquisition information

The collection was received in the CEHOPU following signature of an agreement on 27 February 2008 between CEDEX and the descendents of Carlos Fernández Casado, together with the company Carlos Fernández Casado, S.L., with the commitment to facilitating research, public knowledge and conservation of his work and philosophy.

New items

No new items have been added to the collection since the agreement was signed.

Organisation

The documentation is organised into a main series comprising dossiers and civil works projects. Correspondence, manuscripts and graphic material (not directly related to works projects) are contained in three separate series. The archive inventory contains over two hundred works and nearly two thousand photographs.

Conditions of use

Content available via this web site may be used provided the following source is credited: Archivo Carlos Fernández Casado , CEHOPU-CEDEX. The same criterion applies to the use of photographs. Requests must be made in writing and addressed to the Archive. They must specify the use to be made of the material requested.

Conditions of access

Original documents may be consulted in the CEHOPU if requested in advance. Only digitalised copies can be consulted if the state of conservation of the original document precludes its availability.

Technical requirements

No special reading device is required to consult the documentation.

Processing

2007	Work is started on the description of projects and works dossiers to be used in the exhibition "Carlos Fernández Casado. Engineer".
2007-2010	Digitalisation of graphic material (photographs, plans, etc.). The task of compiling descriptions of dossiers and graphic material continues. In 2009 the conversion of descriptions to the EAD-XML standard was started.

Citation method

Archivo Carlos Fernández Casado, CEHOPU-CEDEX