(b Valencia, 22 Dec 1875; d Valencia, 3 Nov 1921). Spanish architect. He began his studies in Barcelona, where from 1893 to 1896 he studied science and mathematics as well as architecture. The dominant architectural style in Catalonia at this time was Modernisme, a local variant of Art Nouveau, which became Ribes’s first major influence. He finished his studies in Madrid, where until 1917 he worked as an architect in the Northern Railway Company, planning such buildings as the offices of the Estación Príncipe Pío (1906) in Madrid and the Estación del Norte (1906–17) in Valencia. From 1907 to 1913 Ribes was on the editorial board of the magazine Pequeñas Monografías del Arte, which opposed official Madrid architecture and published essays and articles describing aspects of European Modernism and promoting the ideas of the Vienna Secession. The same tendencies are evident in Ribes’s designs of this period, for example for Gran Vía del Marqés del Turia 1 (1909) or the Equitativa Building (1911) in Calle Pérez Pujol, both in Valencia, which show the influence of Otto Wagner’s architecture in their decorative motifs and in the retention of an academic monumental composition. From 1915 Ribes favoured a rationalist architectural idiom deriving from new construction materials and dictated by the use of the building. He propounded the separation of structural skeleton and ornamental trappings, a theory related to his use of new construction techniques in reinforced concrete. These ideas were reflected in the Almacén Ernesto Ferrer (1918; destr.) in Valencia.