Frank Auerbach (1931-2024)
22/11/2024

Frank Auerbach (1931-2024)

The Guardian   Michael McNay   Frank Auerbach’s paintings, each one wrested from chaos over weeks and months of struggle, place the artist firmly in the English tradition stemming from Constable, who had the same feeling for the material world...

Full vision for Habitat 67 housing
18/11/2024

Full vision for Habitat 67 housing

The software developer Epic Games and the visualization firm Neoscape have created an interactive model showing how architect Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 housing development in Montreal would have appeared had it been fully realized...

Housing. Fifty Works in Spain

Housing. Fifty Works in Spain

Arquitectura Viva gathers in one volume of 320 pages, with a special price of 60 euros, hardbound and in fully bilingual Spanish-English edition, 50 housing projects built in Spain since the year 2000. Always at the center of the architectural debate...

‘José María García de Paredes: Meeting Spaces’

‘José María García de Paredes: Meeting Spaces’

On 2 October Museo ICO officially opens ‘José María García de Paredes: Meeting Spaces,’ an exhibition curated by the architect Ángela García de Paredes for the birth centenary of one of Spain’s leading architects in the second half of the 20th century...

Highlights

14/11/2024

‘Ai Weiwei: Don Quixote’ at MUSAC

Taking up 1,700 square meters, this exhibition of 44 works by the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei (Beihing, 1957) opened on 9 November at MUSAC in León, to run until 18 May 2025. ‘Ai Weiwei: Don Quixote’ shows creations of the past twenty years...

13/11/2024

Winners of the 13th BIAU

Winners of the 13th BIAU Ten projects have been announced the winners of the 12th Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (BIAU), themed ‘Climates: Actions for Good Living’ and to be held in Lima from 2 to 6 December...

12/11/2024

2023 National Award for Architecture

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda has distinguished Ángela García de Paredes and Ignacio García Pedrosa with the 2023 National Award for Architecture. This accolade comes with a prize of 60,000 euros...

07/11/2024

Trump Beats Harris

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Republican Donald Trump returns to the White House – which he occupied from 2017 to 2021 – after defeating the Democrat aspirant Kamala Harris in extremely neck-and-neck presidential elections...

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT

Founded in 1994, the Barcelona-based studio Miralles Tagliabue EMBT – directed by Benedetta Tagliabue since the premature death of Enric Miralles in 2000 – stands out for a creative process that is characterized by its poetic approach and the attention to the context, history, and culture of each place, and which produces an architecture strongly attached to the genius loci and formally inspired by nature. To mark the firm’s thirtieth anniversary, the magazine AV Monographs gathers a selection of eighteen works spanning from the beginnings in Barcelona and its metropolitan area...

Lacol

The association culture of Barcelona’s Sants neighborhood nourishes the practice of Lavol, a collective grounded on participatory and horizontal structures, in the awareness that only in a community spirit can current problems be addressed and market logics dealt with. Arquitectura Viva presents its work in four movements that are simply variations on the same residential theme, placed in context in a short article by Josep Maria Montaner and Zaida Muxí. For its part, this issue’s dossierfeatures four buildings designed by Vietnamese firms: the Urban Farming Office in Ho Chi Minh City, by VTN Architects...

Social Heritage

AV Proyectos 125 dedicates its cover to social heritage, a concept that includes the conversion of industrial buildings into civic spaces. As Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats point out in the article that accompanies the section, such interventions aim to give new life to the traces – material or immaterial –, that are identified after a careful observation of the existing. And in its further analysis of this theme, the magazine conducts an interview with BURR, the young Madrilenian studio that focusses its practice on the reactivation of unused industrial facilities. The issue also features several proposals of G124, the university working group...

In Construction 2

Arquitectura Viva presents —in Spanish-English and digital format only— the second compilation of buildings published in the ‘In Detail’ section of AV Proyectos. The volume, of over 200 pages, features twelve works covered with comprehensive sets of technical plans, details, and photographs documenting the different stages in the construction process of some of the most prominent buildings completed in recent years around the world. The new selection includes cultural infrastructures like the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg by Herzog & de Meuron or the Contemporary Creation Center of Córdoba by Nieto Sobejano...

Other publications

23/10/2024

Searching for Legends

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Distanced from any kind of essentialism, both the Greek scholar David Hernández de la Fuente and the journalist Pedro García Cuartango explore Spain’s mythical roots from the lenses of history and the territory...

23/10/2024

Ortiz-Echagüe & Echaide

Justo Isasi   My first design course at the Madrid School must have been Rafael Echaide’s last year as department deputy head. In the lack of architecture books, I had only managed to get hold of...

23/10/2024

Siza & Malagamba

Eduardo Prieto   From hand to eye, from eye to hand, and either way to architecture. This is the route proposed by Duccio Malagamba in a highly personal but also celebratory book that passes not only through...

Future

16/10/2024

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has achieved something extraordinary

The Economist    The launch was remarkable: a booster rocket with twice the power of the Apollo programme’s Saturn V lancing into the early-morning sky on a tight, bright column of blue-tinged flame. But that wonder has been seen four times before...

02/10/2024

First map of every neuron in an adult fly brain complete

University of Cambridge   This landmark achievement has been conducted by the FlyWire Consortium, a large international collaboration including researchers from the University of Cambridge, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology...

11/07/2024

Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket powers into space

ESA   Ariane 6 is the latest in Europe's Ariane rocket series, taking over from Ariane 5, and featuring a modular and versatile design that can launch missions from low-Earth orbit and farther out into deep space...

Castelar House, Madrid
20/10/2024

Castelar House, Madrid

Solar   Spain   Flaunting its name, the Madrid Moderno development was in 1906 dubbed in the newspaper ABC as “the most European of Madrid neighborhoods”: an ensemble of garden-city schemes of which barely twelve small houses...

The Cabanon in Rotterdam
03/09/2024

The Cabanon in Rotterdam

Netherlands   The Cabonon is a fully equipped apartment with a floor area of just 6.89 square meters, including an infrared sauna and a whirlpool bath. Its inside dimension are: height 3 meters, width 1.97, length 3.6. A large window overlooks the city...

Renovation of the MNAC in Lisbon
13/11/2024

Renovation of the MNAC in Lisbon

Portugal   The team formed by the Spanish firm Baile Menduiña and two Portuguese practices – del medio atelier and Luis Manuel Pereira – has won the competition to refurbish and extend the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), in Lisbon’s Chaido district....

On the Valencia fire

Ten people have perished in a conflagration which in a matter of minutes wrapped the facades of the fourteen-story building in the eastern Spanish city of Valencia...

The Undersigned

Luis Alemany   The Greek writer Vassilis Vassilikos, author of the political novel Z (on which the Costa-Gavras film of the same title was based), tells of how a few days after...

Pérgola series of Grupo Ayuso

Grupo Ayuso presents its Pérgola series for terraces and gardens. With mixed aluminum and canvas coverings, it is designed to provide spaces where one can enjoy the open air while being sheltered against adverse weather...

New black PVD finish by Comenza

The Galician company Comenza, which specializes in developing industrialized railing and handrail systems, presents the PVD Black Finish for its GlassFit CC-800 and GlassFit CC-775 glass railings, offering it as an...

25/10/2024

Alberto Ponis (1933-2024)

The Italian architect Alberto Ponis has died at the age of 91. Born in Genoa in 1933, he completed his architecture studies in Florence in 1960. Shortly afterwards he moved to London, where he worked with Ernö Goldfinger...

22/10/2024

Joseph Rykwert (1926-2024)

The critic and historian Joseph Rykwert has died at 98 years of age. Born in Warsaw in 1926, Rykwert studied architecture at Bartlett and later at the Architectural Association. He first worked with architects like Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Richard Sheppard...

15/07/2024

Bill Viola (1951-2024)

The Guardian   Charles Darwent   Video artist who melded the material and the spiritual and applied modern technology to Renaissance subjects. In 1957, on a family holiday, Bill Viola fell in a lake. He was six years old. Sixty years later, Viola, who has died aged 73...

01/09/2024

Rosa Regàs (1933-2024)

Just like Beatriz de Moura and Esther Tusquets, Rosa Regàs belonged to a generation of rich kids – cultivated and naughty at the same time – that made Barcelona a haven of freedom and creativity in the death throes of the dictatorship...