The reader of this magazine knows – as any reader of periodical publications does – that anniversaries are important in the selection of news items. The attentive and faithful subscriber, moreover, will have observed that the contents of Arquitectura Viva and its sisters are always subjected to the dictates of the number, presented with patterns based on harmonious repetition and coincidence. As the director, Luis Fernández-Galiano, explains in the latest AV monograph: “We multiply arbitrary rules to find the freedom that comes with discipline, and this demanding landscape supplies at once musical rhythm and analgesic sedation.”

The need for anniversaries to observe and the search for geometries to play with are allied for even stronger motives in this issue of Arquitectura Viva, the 200th, which coincides with the 200th of AV Monographs and the completion of 500 publications, including AV Proyectos and other printed products that our house has released since 1985. It also happens that Arquitectura Viva will be 30 years old in 2018, more cause for celebration considering the current difficulties of publishing in general and architectural publishing in particular. With this in mind, Arquitectura Viva makes its issue 200 a tribute to all media of architectural dissemination, selecting for the purpose a total of two hundred books, magazines, exhibitions, and films and photographers of importance in the latest fifty years. A tribute to be seen as an incentive to keep working and last another thirty years.