With this issue the magazine AV enters its fortieth year, and this circumstance prompts to look back. Initiated as ‘Monografías de Arquitectura y Vivienda,’ residential works and projects were very important during its first period, but lost ground as the public development of housing contracted, and the current concern about the difficulties of access to affordable dwellings suggests paying this issue renewed attention. The Yearbooks, of which thirty volumes have been published to date, have always had a section devoted to housing, but in comparison they have paid little attention to what happens outside Spain, something that from now on we will try to remedy in two ways: with a yearly Portfolio containing a selection of the twelve best international buildings and with twelve articles covering month-to-month the world’s major issues; and with a chapter in the Yearbook gathering the works of Spanish offices outside the country. The first Portfolio was the issue before this one, and the first section of international Spanish works opens the six that make up this monograph, which has managed to increase the space devoted to the twenty-four usual projects by reducing to a minimum the thematic introduction and the architectural annex now published in extenso in the independent Portfolio. 

On another note, we will keep on editing monographs of historical and contemporary architects, we will continue to prepare the Houses issue released in the last few years, and we will endeavor to occasionally publish other unique ones such as ‘Masters’ Memoirs’ or ‘Four Cities,’ with a documentary intent that will continue to leave current affairs to Arquitectura Viva. With this magazine, as with AV Proyectos, there will be some overlaps – this is the case of the Royal Collections Gallery, to which an issue of Arquitectura Viva was devoted, but that could not be excluded from this annual summary –, but we will strive to ensure that they are only the unavoidable ones. The complementariness between magazines is helpful however in some cases, because important works that could not be documented in real time are featured in a summary issue: a good example is the National Library of Israel, whose competition I organized at the time, but which was completed when the Gaza war broke out, and thus could not be included in the issue that commented on the conflict, but it was in the subsequent Portfolio of AV. In our fortieth year we will undoubtedly come across difficulties again, and we hope that the generosity of our readers will forgive our inadequacies.