It is attractive and elegant, the formwork can be manufactured from unbent wood, and its realization requires only a thin layer of concrete, which saves material and thus costs. The hyperbolic paraboloid, or hypar roof, held a particular fascination for him. At the end of the 1940s, Candela began to replicate the structures, and to experiment with them. For almost a decade, he mostly designed residential buildings and hotels, but his interest in thin-shelled structures never left him. He married, took on Mexican citizenship in 1941, and began to work as an architect. In June of the same year, Candela emigrated to Mexico, where he had to build a new life. The 26-year-old sided with the republic and fought against Franco, wound up in the French prisoner-of-war camp at Perignon, and had to leave Spain after the war ended in 1939. The outbreak of war in 1936 initially prevented Candela’s planned research trip to Germany, where he had intended to learn about the influence of the still young reinforced steel construction method on architectural design. The realization of Torroja’s spectacular draft for the »Hipódromo de la Zarzuela« racetrack was delayed, however, by the Spanish Civil War, which would lead to a remarkable turning point in Candela’s life. He studied the work of Eduardo Torroja, who became one of the first Spanish architects to experiment in the late 1930s with the hyperbolic paraboloid shell: a roof with regular curves in two directions, the shape of which is also referred to as a saddle roof. After his graduation from the Universidad Politénica de Madrid, he deepened his knowledge at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He also repeated all the calculations step-by-step, and thus acquired a basic, self-taught understanding of the thin-shell construction method. Because thin-shell designs were not covered during his studies, Candela copied out articles from German and French technical journals by hand, and translated them into Spanish at home, word by word.
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