He studied the work of Eduardo Torroja, who became one of the first Spanish architects to experiment in the late 1930s with the hyperbolic paraboloid shell: a roof with regular curves in two directions, the shape of which is also referred to as a saddle roof. After his graduation from the Universidad Politénica de Madrid, he deepened his knowledge at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. He also repeated all the calculations step-by-step, and thus acquired a basic, self-taught understanding of the thin-shell construction method. Because thin-shell designs were not covered during his studies, Candela copied out articles from German and French technical journals by hand, and translated them into Spanish at home, word by word.
