The architect Felix Candela is one of the most outstanding figures of the Shell Modern Architecture. An architecture which, as happens with Gothic Cathedrals, the habitable space is defined by the building's resistant form. For this reason and regardless of their university degrees, some modern engineers and architects recovered from the oblivion the primitive feeling of the Art of Construction, keeping an inseparable relationship between architecture and its structure. This way they became capable of building their own ideas alone. It's a fact that after the industrial revolution, the technological evolution and the appearance of the new materials, the art of construction was divided into two separate jobs; the engineer and the architect. For this reason, since the 18th century, universities were generating a bigger and bigger separation between the constructive competences of these two new jobs. Architecture was already the job of the architect, but as the structure became more complex, as it happens nowadays, the architecture needs the harmonious collaboration between architects and engineers. Although, throughout Architecture History there has been many important and relevant figures in architecture and engineering who have never been limited by their university degrees when it came to designing and building some of the most innovative constructions ever built. It has come to a point, that many people don't really know which was the official degree of many, such as Eduardo Torroja, Pier Luigi Nervi, Heinz Hossdorf, or Felix Candela. Felix Candela Outerino (1919-1997) was born in Madrid, Spain, on the 27th of January 1910. In 1927 he joined the Escuela Tecnica Superior of Architecture of the Politecnica University in Madrid, finishing the degree in 1935. From the beginning, Felix Candela, who really admired Eduardo Torroja, demonstrated a special interest on the laminar structure of reinforced concrete. In 1936, they gave him a scholarship as a price for his outstanding doctoral thesis tittle "La influencia de las nuevas tendencias en las tecnicas del hormigon armado sobre las Formas Arquitectonicas". This scholarship was given to him by the Real Academia Espanola, tu extend his studies on laminar structures in Germany with the pioneer engineers Dischinger y Frinster-walder. The beginning of the Spanish civil war unabled him to travel, but this fact did not prevent to Felix Candela in order to learn about structural concrete shells. In 1950 Felix Candela founded the company "cubiertas Ala" in Mexico, with which he constructed a total of more than 800 architectonic shell roof which were built from then until 1969. In this communication, which is expected to take place in the centenary of his birth (2010), will analyse the relationship between Felix Candela and the architectural structure, which is made clear in the analysis of his obra, as well as in his publications. It is very interesting know his thinking about structural which he reflected in his book "Filosifia de las Estructuras" (1953).
