Collected here are some critical reactions to Alexandrine Years, the two volumes that gather a good part of the articles I wrote for El País between 1993 and 2006. The work was presented by Norman Foster and Rafael Moneo on 19 February at Ivorypress, and their remarks were published in Arquitectura Viva 212. Ferrán Bono took stock of the event in El País on 21 February, and that same day Luis Alemany marked the launch with a long interview in El Mundo. The first critique was the very lyrical one by Antonio Fernández Alba, who read the eight-page ‘Exorcisms of architecture, for a world without governance’ during the session of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando that was held on the 25th of that month; the most illustrated, the very detailed one by Pablo Delgado in ABC, released digitally on 19 June; and the most widely disseminated, the very perceptive one by Estrella de Diego, who made the book the subject of her 27 July column in El País, titled ‘The Architect as Biographer.’

In the following pages we reproduce two critiques, two reviews, and two letters that together chart the key arguments of the book. The critiques are by Richard Ingersoll, who wrote his expressly for this magazine in April, and by Miguel Aguiló, whose piece came on 17 June in the Revista de Libros of Álvaro Delgado-Gal, and is printed here considerably abridged; the reviews appeared in the July-August issue of Casabella, directed by Francesco Dal Co, and on 27 August in the newspaper Le Monde, written by Isabelle Regnier; and the letters are from François Chaslin, dated 11 March, and from Kenneth Frampton, written on 17 July. With all of them I have incurred a significant debt of gratitude.