Puttingthe  reason of strength before the strength of reason, the only superpower of the 21st century uses the trauma of 9-11 to impose a new imperial order on the planet. Despite the reluctance of allies, the US went into Iraq with the purpose

Suddenly the cuty is navigable. We are guided not by sight, but by hearing, with the docile voice of the car’s GPS replacing the landmarks that in the past helped us find our bearings in the urban tapestry. Without the polar ice caps having to melt,

We would like to think that size does not matter. But what is more important than dimension? Architects prefer to speak of scale, a more ductile term that insensibly slides toward proportion and the amiable realm of relative harmony. Teachers reprodu

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   Spain   With a dense program that includes an auditorium for music, theater, opera and an exhibition hall, the new congress center of Mérida has, above all, a strong symbolic load. Located on the banks of the Guadiana river, between the bridges of Ferrocarri

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos   Spain   The seafront location of the site by the Castle of Peñíscola determined both the design and the purpose of this cultural building. The premise was the desire to link all the interior spaces to the park and the sea, so the building displays a continuo

Francisco Mangado   Spain   In Pamplona, the residential growth has evolved in an orderly way, without encroaching upon the city center and leaving the task of organizing the urban fabric to the open spaces (landscaped parks, walled precincts, squares, gardens, river promenades

Santiago Calatrava   Spain   Located on a promontory close to the port, the new auditorium rounds off the program for the revitalization of an ocean front area west of the city, taken up until recently by industrial sheds and a refinery, and which is now the site of the marine p

Carlos Ferrater, José María Valero   Spain   Between the  neighborhoods of Almozara and Delicias, historically separated by the railroad tracks, and next to the old station of Caminreal – a work by Gutiérrez Soto that today houses the Railroad Museum – stands the new intermodal terminal of Zara

Justo García Rubio   Spain   Ten kilometers  north of the city of Cáceres, the municipality of Casar was to house a subregional bus station, and the plot chosen was a corner one located between the kindergarten and the school, in a street that, close to the park, leads to t

NO.MAD   Spain   The urban and environmental renovation of the Vizcaya’s capital, promoted by the consortium Bilbao Ría 2000, extends to the areas cleared on both banks, promoting new programs where once there were only factories and cranes. Halfway between city and

Ábalos & Herreros, Ángel Jaramillo   Spain   The municipal complex of La Chopera, completed in 1960 on the southwest side of the Retiro park, is one of the oldest sports centers of Madrid. The multiple installations with which it is equipped (football fields, outdoor tracks, basketball and tenn

Rafael Moneo, José María de la Mata   Spain   Part of the Gregorio Marañón hospital complex, the new maternity ward takes up one of the blocks developed within the 19th century Plan Castro, east of Retiro Park. The building is inserted in a larger urban operation that links three blocks parallel

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos   Spain   Founded as cultural institution in 1933, the Archaeological Museum has changed site and name on several occasions in the course of the past century. Its final location in what used to be the Colegio Menor Santa María del Mar was followed by several e

Solid Arquitectura   Spain   Associated to  an outdoor culture and blessed with a good weather, the Mediterranean tradition regards its public plazas as the ideal place for the development of commercial activity. Protected by light canopies which are easily set up and taken apar

Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra   Spain   The olive grove estates, successors of the old Muslim and Roman farms, are the most interesting rural structures of the Low Guadalquivir basin. This type combines two differentiated areas in a single introverted enclosure: the manor house, with a lar

Eduardo de Miguel    Spain   Next to the estuary of the Turia river, and barely four kilometers away from the historic center of Valencia, El Cabanyal is one of the maritime towns parallel to the coast. Its origins date back to 1249, and it was organized with barracas (tradition

Carlos Puente   Spain   The Archbishop Alfonso de Fonseca ordered the construction in 1525 of a hall of residence to accommodate the noble Irishmen that went to Salamanca to study. The building, at scarcely four hundred meters from the main square, was extended in 1558 with

José Ignacio Linazasoro   Spain   On december of 2001, Madrid’s Lavapiés quarter celebrated the inauguration of Agustín Lara square, remodelled after the winning project of a competition convened by the Gerencia Municipal de Urbanismo. The program buried a four-level parking lot and

b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos, David Chipperfield Architects   Spain   Frontier first  between Muslim and Christian Spain, Teruel was afterwards a strategic scenario of the Civil War. In the winter of 1937-1938 the city staged one of the bloodiest wars of the conflict, in which a large part of the historic center was de

Ensamble Studio   Spain   Auditorium of Galicia, lies the country estate Vista Alegre, a park which has been transformed into a university campus. Separated from the city by a stone wall, it concentrates buildings devoted to academic and research activities. Among them rises

Martínez Lapeña & Elías Torres   Spain   Inthe north of the city of Tarragona, the campus of Sant Pere de Sescelades extends its facilities and so consolidates the presence of the University Rovira i Virgili in the capital, where it already has eight academic centers – aside from another tw

martínezysoler   Spain   Aiming to promote the specialization of health services from the fields of education, research and technology, the Fundación Campus de la Salud was founded in 1997 in Granada, with the participation of both private and public entities. Among its obje

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   Spain   The university of Vigo offers its students the possibility of studying in three Galician cities: Pontevedra, Orense and Vigo. In this last city, the different schools take up a green, undulated terrain close to mount Marcosende, which serves to name

Aranguren + Gallegos Arquitectos   Spain   In the southern extension of Carabanchel, an area close to the M-40 beltway where the streets, not yet consolidated, are still identified with numbers, this housing block evokes the movement of a train – as well as its condition of being simple in it

Manuel Ruisánchez   Spain   Within the  program for the renovation of Trinitat Nova neighborhood, a decaying area northeast of Barcelona, the Catalan institute for land development decided to increase the number of residential units with a total of 249 state-subsidized houses,

Javier Terrados   Spain   In the coast of Cádiz, the urban center of Conil preserves a pattern of close-knit streets and small courtyards where the frontier between public and private realms fades. Some of these streets become galleries when the night falls: the neighbors clo

Carvajal+Casariego Arquitectos   Spain   in the south of Madrid, began in 1959 and, ever since, several buildings (in most cases blocks of over ten floors) have seen how time has caused a severe deterioration in their structure. The problems, initially ascribed to the quality of the terrain

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Wars destroy individual lives and collective symbols in equal parts. In the conflict that is closing in on the Near East, the terrible threat of urban bombings is cynically softened with the promise to respect the despot’s monuments, but the victims

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Museum of Royal Collections and the Library of the Community of Madrid, by Mansilla & Tuñón, illustrate the inertia of the urban landscape.  

Luis Fernández-Galiano   They look similar, and in truth are worlds apart. Erect and streamlined, the Swiss Re and Agbar towers seem to soften the mineral frigidness of their glass skins with their roundness, letting the wind or the gaze of the pedestrian slide along their s

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Monopoly is a  a construction game, but a real estate game. The winner is whoever man- ages to put houses and hotels in the city’s best areas, bankrupting the other players with his greedy tolls. The colorful wooden prisms, cylinders, pyramids and ar

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Don't say it was a dream. The bird’s eye view of the City of Culture of Galicia is a near-tactile testimony of ongoing construction, and yet the landscape molded by the moving of soil gives an oneiric impression. Set between the highway and the histo

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Peter sloterdijk begins his trilogy Spheres by quoting Gaston Bachelard: “The difficulty we had to overcome... consisted of staying clear of any geometric evidence. In other words, we had to take off from a kind of intimacy of roundness.” And the Ger

Luis Fernández-Galiano   If there are 360 degrees, why use only one?” Zaha Hadid chose this vague declaration of disdain for the right angle to promote her exhibition in Vienna’s MAK, which opened on May 14, two weeks before Barcelona saw her receiving the Mies van der Rohe

Luis Fernández-Galiano   A certain Tamayo has caused an earthquake in Madrid’s regional parliament. Projecting impassiveness, the deputy who has broken the socialist party discipline poses meekly in the office of his lawyer on the Plaza de Castilla, behind him a pallid lands

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Economic bubbles produce architectural bubbles. The accelerated white-hot prosperity of the sixties gave us the colorist collages of Archigram, complete with walking cities on telescopic legs, lysergic kaleidoscopes of yellow submarines, and circuses

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Tireless inventor, Miguel Fisac cherishes his patents as much as his buildings. From the hollow brick that he registered in 1952 to the prefab-rication system registered last year, on to the bone-beams, the flexible formworks or the supports for lamp

Luis Fernández-Galiano   If Borges made the library and the labyrinth in-separable and Octavio Paz coined the image of a Mexico self-withdrawn in a labyrinth of solitude, it seems inevitable that the new Library of Mexico should choose its author through a labyrinthian compe

If architecture is frozen music, concert halls must be doubly so. Tenerife’s opened in September with a minor work of the Polish composer Krysztof Penderecki entitled Royal Fanfare, and there is indeed something of the music’s racket of metal in the

The baluarte of Pamplona is more a city than a building. Not only because its formidable scale can take in the multitudinary conglomeration of that virtual urb that participants of conventions, spectators of concerts, and visitors to exhibitions cons

Luis Fernández-Galiano   And New York in the distance. The results of the Ground Zero competition were announced on 27 February, and the next day The New York Times graciously divided its front page between a picture of an ecstatic Daniel Libeskind beside the model of his pr

Luis Fernández-Galiano   To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the Pritzk-er Prize goes to a great Dane who a quarter-century ago had already made history. In 1978 Jørn Utzon received the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects – a prestigious centenarian award

Two years ago , the architect Mohamed Atta changed the world. At the head of 19 suicidal youths, he hit the heart of the empire with such trag-ic and sublime precision that his terrorist act must be used as an esthetic bar for judging the recon-

On the occasion of the presentation of the La Caixa exhibition center in Madrid, Jacques Herzog reflects on art, architecture and museums today. 

Jørn Utzon Coinciding with its 25th anniversary, the Pritzker Prize has decided to amend a historic injustice: Jørn Utzon (Copenhagen, 1918) has been honored with the award over twenty years after retiring in Majorca. After a short and intense career

Rem Koolhaas For fifteen years, the Japan Art Association, founded by the Japanese royal family, annually honors the artists who contribute significantly to the development of culture in five categories: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and t

Rafael Moneo “Being an architect is one of the most attractive ways to be in the world”. The one speaking in such terms is Rafael Moneo, honored by the RIBA with its Royal Medal. At 67, Moneo preserves his passion for architecture and teaching – jobs

Santiago Calatrava The gold medal of the French Academy of Architecture was presented to the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava at the Museum of Popular Traditions and Arts, in Paris. Set up in 1965 and with no established periodicity, this award t

León Krier On 22 March, the inaugural Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture was presented to Léon Krier in a ceremony held at the Art Institute of Chicago. Founded by the businessman Richard H. Driehaus with the University of Notre Dame, and furn

Mikko Heikkinen & Markku Komonen After the Portuguese Eduardo Souto de Moura and the Swiss Peter Märkli, the Finns Heikkinen and Komonen are the last awardees of the Tessenow Medal, with which the Foundation of the same name and the Alfred Toepfer of

Miguel Fisac Though on the list of those who have earned this distinction he will appear as the 2002 laureate, it has been in 2003 when the jury of the National Architecture Award of the Ministry of Public Works has decided to honor Miguel Fisac. In

Intermodal Terminal in Strasbourg The aerial photograph shows an asphalt surface covered with white lines, diagonally traversed by a gray triangular piece. Like a geological fold, the concrete canopy of the Strasbourg terminal rises over the ground s

Laban Dance Centre in London The award created in memory of the British master has gone for the first time to a work carried out by a foreign office, the Laban Dance Center in London, by Herzog & de Meuron. Authors of the Tate Modern in the city of t

Concert Hall in León Spain’s Council of Architectural Institutes presents every two years the Prize for Spanish Architecture to distinguish the best work carried out in our country. In its edition of 2003 the work chosen has been the Concert Hall of

Garriga-Poch House in Lles de Cerdanya For the way in which it revitalizes a local building type, combining solidity with lightness and avoiding local mimesis, the FAD architecture award of 2003 went to the Garriga-Poch house, a holiday home built by

Housing in Santiago, Terminal in Yokohama  Presided by Antonio Ortiz and formed, among others, by Rafael Moneo, Carlos Ferrater, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Francisco Mangado and Javier Revillo, the jury of the VII Biennial of Spanish Architecture evalua

(1923-2003) The table clocks and indicator screens ‘Cifra 3”, the characteristic calendar-page movement of which presides the atmosphere of stations and airports, talk about Gino Valle, the Italian designer and architect born in Udine, whose career a

(1919-2003) After suffering a long illness that had left him paralyzed since 1998, the architect from Sri Lanka died when he was in the heart of the labyrinth of his house on Bagatelle Road in Colombo, probably the work that best sums up his legacy.

(1923-2003) As he left his studio on 3 March, Peter Smithson suffered a collapse that put an end to a career inseparable from that of his wife Alison, who passed away in 1993. The couple’s scarce oeuvre – from Hunstanton School (1949-1954), to the he

(1934-2003) Wished to put architecture “at the service of the delights and uncertainties of life”, and imagined it as changeable as the society it aims to serve. Cedric Price is, along with Reyner Banham and Colin Rowe, a pillar of the British archit

(1925-2003) Professor emeritus of the University of Kassel, where he taught sociology of urban systems, Lucius Burckhardt died on 26 August, at 78. He was born in the Swiss town of Davos, and after studying sociology and obtaining a doctorate in Phil

(1924-2003) The day before his death of a heart attack, on 9 April, Abraham Zabludovsky presented the project for the Museo del Niño in Villahermosa, so fulfilling his wish of keeping himself at work until the very end. Born in Poland, Zabludovsky ha

(1943-2003) Dolphins were the real passion of Doug Michels, an architect, designer and artist graduate of Yale and Harvard who devoted his life to the protection of marine life. His death, as the result of an accidental fall from an observation point

(1930-2003) Motivated by ethics rather than by aesthetics, the outspoken, caustic art reviews of Pierre Restany were directed during the sixties against the cultural policy of France, against the conservatism of the conservatives, against the superfi

(1951-2003) Tony Fitzpatrick helped to design and build several emblematic buildings of the past twenty years. A prominent member of the mythical engineering firm founded by Ove Arup, he was born in London in 1951 and died in a cycling accident in Ca

(1908-2003) (1908-2003) Pneumonia ended the life of the polemic artist who showed so many architects the value of the void. Born in Orio (Guipúzcoa), he spent the first years of his career in Latin America. He returned in 1948, imbued with the spirit

(1910-2003) Father of two architect sons, Manuel and Ignasi de Solà-Morales i Rubiò – the latter prematurely deceased in 2001 –, the architect Manuel de Solà-Morales de Rosellò was born in Olot, Gerona, in 1910, and died on 18 December in Barcelona,

(1935-2003) With the death of José María Banet, architecture has lost one of the few persons who understood the profession as a commitment. Born in Galicia – though he always studied, lived and worked in Madrid –, Banet died of cancer at 67. After a