Sister magazines AV and Arquitectura Viva (born respectively in 1985 and 1988) were advertised for many years with an oil on panel painted around 1594 by an anonymous author belonging to the Second School of Fontainebleau, depicting Gabrielle d’Estrées and her sister the Duchess of Villars in the bath. The work is preserved at the Louvre Museum, and the gesture of pinching the nipple is attributed to Gabrielle’s upcoming maternity, pregnant with a natural child of King Henry IV. When in 2004 the sister magazines reached a fertile age, they were fortunate enough to leave offspring in the form of a third masthead, AV Proyectos, which then appeared as a vulnerable infant in a period of political convulsions, economic dynamism, and cultural effervescence, the latter expressed in the field of Spanish architecture by the flowering of singular works that would be exhibited under the title ‘On-Site: New Architecture in Spain’ at New York’s MoMA in 2006.

After two decades, this magazine —focused on projects and on students — has traversed the landscape of crisis opened in 2008 by the crash of Lehman Brothers, by the political disaffection that led to the 15-M movement, and by the planetary uncertainty associated with the acceleration of climate change, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine to reach in 2024 a young maturity, which now wants to express itself with an improved editorial design and with a renewed aesthetic and intellectual approach that brings it critically closer to the professional sphere.

The first year of a new phase is always programmatic, and for this purpose we have prepared a series of cover themes that combine the technological with the social, and the formal with the reflective, so that the great challenges of architecture are placed in dialogue with the concerns that mark the daily life of the studios. Analytical texts and in-depth interviews will join the projects that have formed the magazine’s DNA – often through the publication of competitions – and prominent works, some of which will continue to appear with extensive reports of their construction process. The cultural dimension of architecture and its link with other expressive forms will continue to have a privileged place, and we will try to ensure that all of this is reflected on the page with the highest graphic and literary quality. The daughter of the two sisters is now an adult, and although she records with curiosity the vicissitudes of her transit through a time that was not always kind, she congratulates herself for having come this far and is ready to face with humility and ambition a future as uncertain for her as for all of us.