Arenas & Asociados was born in November 1999 when its President, Juan J. Arenas, Professor of the University of Cantabria, left the engineering company Apia XXI, which he had co-founded in 1989 and presided until his leaving. The team composing the new company, mostly young engineers who had collaborated in Apia XXI with the principal of the new firm, collects all the experience of design and construction gained during along their whole professional life. Including, of course, the decade of hard work developed in Apia XXI in the fields of bridges and special buildings.

Experience that, looking at bridges, includes typologies as varied as cantilever bridges, trusses, frames with inclined legs, carefully treated urban bridges, precast bridges, bridges with decks of composite cross-section, classical arch bridges, arch bridges with the deck placed at an intermediate level, bowstring bridges, and cable stayed bridges. Even some examples of suspension and movable bridges are included. These are cases where concrete as well as structural steel is employed, and where all kind of construction procedures are found, including flotation, rotation about a vertical axis and, also, rotation of the legs of a frame bridge about a transverse horizontal axis.

There are special buildings like stadiums, a very particular underground wine cellar consisting of concrete vaults and the new Fishmarket of the Santander Harbor which includes a roof composed of double curvature concrete shells.

The new team can thus base its work on an intense and wide professional experience, which has always had the careful treatment of the visual, landscape and aesthetic values of their new constructions as a leitmotiv. Face to people arguing that public works should be merely functional, we use to say that we agree on the functionality but not in the adverb “merely”.

Because we think that the beauty itself, the improvement of the environment and the cultural values transmitted by really good public works are values, or “functions”, that must be performed by our engineering works. And that, furthermore, these values, arising from the same structural quality and born from the very pureness of the conceived construction, should have no additional cost for the taxpayer.

Our dedication to the direction of conceiving and designing beautiful structures is thus clear and definite. Firstly, because these are ideas for which we have stood up since many years with words and, more important, with facts. Secondly, because over the last years these ideas have gained an increasing public support among citizens, and, of course, among engineers.