Museo Shuijingfang, Chengdu

Pritzker Prize 2025. Our magazines had barely published flashes of the exquisite and silent work of Liu Jiakun, an architect who at the outset was keener on persevering in his career as a novelist than on mastering the art of building. But in the heat of his recent distinction with the Pritzker Prize, Arquitectura Viva offers a run-through of his trajectory through six projects of civic scope that melt into intense spatial and narrative experiences where memory and the everyday overlap poetically.

For its part, the issue’s dossier presents three educational projects, each located in a different African country, that have focused on bringing innovative pedagogical approaches to developing communities through collective-design endeavors: the Waldorf School in Nairobi (Kenya) by Urko Sánchez; the Collège Amadou Hampaté Bâ in Niamey (Niger) by Article 25; and the Simba Vision Montessori School in Ngabobo (Tanzania) by Architectural Pioneering Consultants in collaboration with Wolfgang Rossbauer.

The Art and Culture section reproduces an excerpt from the discourse that Estrella de Diego delivered at her induction into Spain’s Royal Academy of Doctors, with the response given by Beatriz Colomina: a pair of texts that returns us to the past for us to reflect on the role museums play in patriarchal, capitalist societies. The usual News and Books pages are complemented with an article in which Juan Miró Sardá sees nature as a common denominator in the urban experiences of the American continent.

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