C Magazine, edited by Cosentino and Arquitectura Viva, celebrates its first ten years with an event that will take place on Wednesday, 20 November, at 7 pm at COAM (Hortaleza, 63).

After a dialogue in which Santiago Alfonso, VP Strategic Communication of Cosentino, and Luis Fernández-Galiano, director of AV/Arquitectura Viva, will discuss the origin and evolution of the magazines, the architects Fuensanta Nieto and Carme Pinós will talk about their work experience abroad through specific projects of their studios outside Spain, at a time when the exterior projection of our architecture resonates with the international presence of Cosentino.

Fuensanta Nieto will discuss buildings as prominent as the Arvo Pärt Center in Laulasmaa (Estonia), the Archive of the Avant-Garde in Dresde (Germany), and Dallas Museum of Art (USA); and Carme Pinós will focus on singular works like the WU Building – University of Economics in Vienna (Austria), the MPavilion 2018 in Melbourne (Australia), and the Cube Towers in Guadalajara (Mexico).

After the presentations, attendants are invited to a glass of Spanish wine and will be handed the latest issue of C Magazine 2024.

Please RSVP at av@arquitecturaviva.com. 

Celebrating an Anniversary

Luis Fernández-Galiano 

Adapting the exact verse of Gardel to our anniversary, we go back to the starting line of this fertile route traversed with Cosentino through “architecture & everything else,” as we marked programmatically on the masthead of C magazine. The journey, as Santiago Alfonso comments, began at the Venice Biennale in June 2014, with a presentation of the maiden issue with Daniel Libeskind – who also contributes a text to this publication – and Pachi Mangado, driver of the project from its beginnings. This city would be followed by many others, because the opening of Cosentino City spaces would provide an opportunity to produce architectural guides and promote the magazine in the corresponding geographical area, but I want to mention two of them at least: Milan, in whose Expo of 2015 Spain participated with a pavilion in which Cosentino had intervened, and where we presented the third edition of Spain Builds (the first was launched at the MoMA in New York in 2006, and the second at Expo Shanghai in 2010), also sponsored by the company; and Dubai in 2018, where we tackled the history of the kitchen, a space tightly linked to Cosentino, as much in the domestic sphere as in the restaurants of great chefs.

The first twelve city guides published in C magazine were included in a book of 2017, where under the title Cities and after an introductory text on travel as an itinerary of knowledge, the aforementioned Milan was accompanied by European cities like London, Madrid, and Berlin; beyond the also listed above Dubai it reached the Far East and the Pacific with Singapore and with Sydney; and the American continent was generously represented with five metropolises: São Paulo, Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, and Montreal. In the following years, many other cities would appear in C, in the wake of Cosentino’s international expansion. In addition to the nearest cities of Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao or Lisbon (and Porto in this latest release), Europe would be present with Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and even Istanbul; Asia would extend from the Middle East of Tel Aviv to the most distant Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur; and America would be well illustrated with Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Buenos Aires. I expand on this urban list because it is an abbreviated way of underscoring the cosmopolitan profile of the magazine and of the company, and after all the standard that has oriented the selection of contents over these ten years.

Along with the breadth of geographical and thematic vision, the other compass that has guided the editorial work at C is the pursuit of excellence, an effort that has a technical dimension in the graphic and literary quality – distinguished with international awards to the best corporate magazine –, and an intellectual dimension in the selection of the voices that participate in it. The dialogues between prominent architects and critics exemplify this spirit well, and in fact in 2018 it published a selection under the title Conversations, where Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Álvaro Siza, Rafael Moneo, Eduardo Souto de Moura, or Jacques Herzog – all of them Pritzker laureates – talk with historians like Kenneth Frampton or William Curtis and with writers like the disappeared Vicente Verdú or Richard Ingersoll. A quest for excellence that has continued with architects such as Francis Kéré, Carme Pinós, Anna Heringer, Peter Eisenman or Benedetta Tagliabue, artists like Cristina Iglesias or Juan Bordes, and critics like Francesco Dal Co or Estrella de Diego. Our journey has lasted a decade, but ten years is nothing, and hopefully we can continue much longer together in this itinerary of discovery and emotion. 

C Magazine is the contribution from Cosentino to the world of architecture