In his introductory essay to this survey of Alberto Campo Baeza's projects and finished buidings, Antonio Pizza begins by listing the influences on the Spanish architect's career since 1971, the year in which he graduated from the Escuela de Arquitectura de Madrid. Eliminating the superfluous and doing everything possible to communicate what remains by means of essentiality is both the primary aim and the message of Campo Baeza's architecture. The pure, dazzling whiteness to which his buidings and interiors aspire, and in many cases attain, is only the most obvious of the effects Campo Baeza is striving to achieve. What the architecture surveyed in this book conveys more than anything is a sense of timelessness and other-worldliness. Through his ability to reject the secondary features of what constitutes the essential fascination of the modern, Campo Baeza shows us that the present is essentially an inhospitable and uninhabitable place.