Letter from the President of the Foundation:
WELCOME TO THE FUNDACIÓN JOSÉ ENTRECANALES IBARRA WEBSITE:
The Fundación José Entrecanales Ibarra was incorporated in 1999. The foundation’s initial capital came from the bequests that José Entrecanales Ibarra and his wife, María de Azcárate, made to the School of Civil Engineering beginning in 1957, the year in which José Entrecanales made the personal decision to stop teaching engineering.
These donations were made, as José Entrecanales said, “in gratitude for what I learned as a student, and for the satisfaction of having served there as a professor”.
The object and purpose of these donations was, according to José’s express wishes, to develop study and research in geotechnics and soil mechanics, a discipline he taught from the 1931-32 academic year onwards, and which was then called Stonework and Concrete Foundations and Bridges. This purpose was subsequently fulfilled through the funding of scholarships for doctoral candidates who decided to write their dissertations on these subjects, to which the granting of an annual prize for the best doctoral dissertation would be added later.
When the Fundación José Entrecanales Ibarra was incorporated with these bequests, its Board of Trustees decided to expand the Foundation’s initial objective by creating two prizes. The first of these is an International Civil Engineering Prize which, like the Pritzker architecture prize, is intended to recognize outstanding civil engineers, giving these professionals—who normally remain anonymous (and not only from the general public’s viewpoint)—a name and a face. The second is a Development Cooperation Prize, a cash award that finances the execution of public works in countries having deficient basic infrastructures.
Finally, it should be added that the Fundación also finances Civil Engineering School activities for which its budget is not sufficient, thus ensuring that José Entrecanales’s desire to maintain the excellence of the studies pursued there is fulfilled.
Don Juan Antonio Santamera Sánchez