Luis Lacasa
(Ribadesella, 1899 - Moscú, 1966)

Luís Lacasa graduated at the School of Architecture in Madrid in 1921. He went to Germany to study the technique of reinforced concrete, but ended up majoring in urban planning in the Office of Urban Planning in Dresden, where he worked until 1923.

He also visited the Bauhaus in Weimar. After returning to Spain in 1923, he lectured on German city planning, published articles in the Arquitectura periodical, and participated in numerous competitions in architecture and city planning, winning several of them, such as the competition to build the Hospital Provincial de Toledo (1926-1931), and the Instituto Nacional de Física y Química, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (1927-1932), both with Manuel Sánchez Arcas, and Solana; the Hospital Provincial in Logroño (1929); the project to built villages on the irrigated banks of the Guadalquivir  river (1934), in collaboration with Martí, Esteban de la Mora, and Torroja;  and the competition for the Plan de Extensión of Logroño (1935).

In 1925, he became member of the organizing committee of the
11th National Congress of Architecture, and the First Urban Planning National Congress, both held the following year. He was one of the founding members of the College of Architects of Madrid, in 1930.
He worked in the Technical Office of the University of Madrid from 1927, and in the Construction Office of Madrid City Hall from 1931.
He was a friend of Alberto Sánchez, Federico García Lorca- who dedicated to him a poem of the cicle «Earth and Moon» in Poeta en Nueva York- Luis Buñuel, and other students at the Residencia de Estudiantes, with whom he founded the Order of Knights of Toledo. He was also a founding member of the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture, and built with Josep Lluís Sert the Pavilion of Spain, at the Paris Exhibition of 1937.

In 1938, he returned to Spain, but a year later he was forced into exile, and moved to Moscow, where he worked as an architect at the Academy of Architecture of the Soviet Union until 1954, except for 1941-1943, when he was evacuated to the Urals. Between 1954 and 1960, he went to China with his family to head the Spanish section of the Foreign Languages Publishing House. After a short trip to Spain in 1960, he returned to Moscow, where he worked in the Art History Institute of the Academy of Sciences until his death.