Luis Fernández-Galiano   The tabula rasa of modernity was historical, but also topographical. In its effort to raise generic buildings, canonical functionalism decided to erase the traces of the architectural languages of the past, which could be felt as a heavy burden of hi

Stan Allen   Either merging with the landscape or in themselves becoming landscapes, topographical buildings suggest altogether new ways of shaping the flows of cities and territories.

Álvaro Fernandes Andrade   Portugal   At once white and earthy, geometric and formless, tectonic and telluric, the building suggests the same material and chromatic contrasts that characterize the surrounding landscape.

Heneghan Peng Architects   Northern Ireland   In order not to upset the delicate visual balance of the landscape, the building folds and sinks into the land, only revealing to the exterior a lattice of large buttresses of local basalt stone.

Steven Holl   France   Convex outward and concave inward, this museum devoted to surf undulates topographically to open up to views of the ocean while generating spatially rich exhibition halls.

Petr Hájek Architekti   Czech Republic   Although when seen from the outside the building appears like a bold volume clad with plants, the inside is a luminous space opening on to views of the surroundings.

Emre Arolat   Turkey   This mosque located outside Istanbul sinks into the terrain to become a cavern for prayer with an atmosphere defined by the tenuous light emanating from the Qibla.

Zaha Hadid Architects   Azerbaijan   The calligraphy of ramps climbing up the terraces of the park continues in the sinuous folds of a neat envelope, executed with panels of concrete and polyester.

Justo Isasi   With works in original format, the exhibition throws light on the role that photography played in the dissemination, in Spain, of modern architecture.

Ángel Martínez García-Posada   A 20th century giant, Richard Hamilton explored all genres, from the montage to landscape, from the collage to photography, from pop to painting history.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Half a century after his death, the bibliography on Le Corbusier is truly overwhelming, and in this section we have tried to cover the most significant examples. But the book by Jean-Louis Cohen, which served as catalog for the MoMA exhibition that h

José Jurado   To build is to choose. Architectural design is a crucible of objectives, data, and criteria, all merging in a single proposal. The step toward materialization, always implicit, is just one more turn of the screw in the routine of rejection and select

Yoshihiro Amano   Japan   Situated on a commercial street of Tokyo, the building breaks with the area’s characterless image by means of a facade of faceted and seemingly random shapes that serve as a visual announcement. The envelope is formed by two layers separated by a cha

Zaha Hadid Architects   South Korea   A huge cultural complex in Seoul, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, is the first public building in Korea ever to be designed with the help of BIM (Building Information Modeling, see Arquitectura Viva 158). Through this system, the project’s highly comple

Abbink X de Hass Architects   Netherlands   This apartment building rises in the heart of Amsterdam and is part of a general redevelopment project that took off twenty years ago. Boxed in between alleys and hidden in the dense mass of historical constructions, the block addresses the unique su

Carme Pinós   Spain   Winner of the competition held in 2008, the project for the cultural center of La Caixa Foundation in Zaragoza stems from a double challenge: in the first place, to create a building that generates city through its uniqueness and because of the publi

Kengo Kuma   France   Located in the city where a good part of Cézanne’s career unfolded, this music conservatory of faceted forms takes inspiration, like the painter’s works, from the surrounding mountains. The other metaphorical reference – the music one – is expressed

3XN   Denmark   Visitors arriving at Copenhagen airport will soon be able to discern a sea-facing volume of unmistakable organic forms. It is the so-called Blue Planet, the city’s new aquarium. With capacity to hold seven million liters of water, the building contai

The World Congress that the International Union of Architects (UIA) recently held in the city of Durban centered on the role of architecture in the African continent, but was marked by this year’s recipient of the institution’s Gold Medal, the almost

Coming with an endowment of 15 million yen (almost 109,000 euros), the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale has since 1989 been given yearly to five artists in five fields: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, and Film/Theater. The 2014 la

Together with the automobile, the airplane, and the zeppelin, the ship was a mechanical dream of the modern architects, who envisioned in its forms the expression of a refined and graceful functionality, and also of the generation following them, whi

The Clark Institute harbors one of the most important private art collections in the United States, but few people know that it has prosaic origins, as so many fortunes in fact do. When, after wandering in the Far West, Robert Sterling Clark moved to

After showing at the Museum of Modern Art of New York and at CaixaForum Barcelona, ‘Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes’ arrives at the CaixaForum Madrid, and can be visited until 12 October. Although we featured this exhibition when it first

The road toward the disintegration of art perhaps began in the the year 1917, when Marcel Duchamp signed his Fountain urinal with the pseudonym R. Mutt. It continued, although without a good part of the talent and intellectual sophistication of Ducha

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Europe today is a landscape without figures, a garden marked out by empty pedestals. The heroes have abandoned their podiums and wander about in the summer, oblivious to the buzz of the crowd. A century ago, Europe’s leaders acted out a grand guignol