Luis Fernández-Galiano   The century bids farewell with the death of van Eyck, the inaugurations of the Reichstag and the Kursaal, and Eisenman’s project for Santiago de Compostela.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The beginnings of modernity crystallizing in the crucible of the Bauhaus form part of a mythical history that has created ‘the tradition of the new’.

Across the atlantic, the Modern Movement became the International Style. The artistic and social Utopia that a group of young European architects had conceived in the twenties gave rise, in post-Depression America, to what would be the 20th century’s

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The reconstruction of Barcelona’s Liceo is an indicator of the Catalonian cultural climate, and of the difficulty of reconciling the tradition with the new.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The project to extend Madrid’s Prado Museum faces the risk of interfering with a key neoclassical building and its historical urban setting.

Rafael Moneo   Spain   San sebastián has always been dominated by the extraordinary features of its geography, but in many ways owes its current physiognomy to the coast wall that led to the construction of the Zurriola quarter in 1919. An exceptional spot in this new are

Rafael Moneo   Spain   In a marginal area of Barcelona, where the Eixample (19th century urban extension) begins to fray, a large, imprecisely shaped plot of land reduced a possible dialogue with the place to a succinct soliloquy. The parcel was the result of the fusion of

Antonio González Cordón   Spain   To face the sport challenges of the new millennium, Seville’s Real Betis football club decided to carry out a radical renovation of its facilities in the folkloric quarter of Heliópolis. While maintaining the lines of the original ground plan, it was

Cruz y Ortiz Arquitectos   Spain   With the idea of reviving the huge urban impulse sparked by Expo 92, Seville attempted to use another event of international repercussions – the 2004 Olympics – as an engine to transform the city. In support of the candidacy, the Olympic Ring Society

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   The Montiliví campus, south of Gerona’s old quarter, imposes its rational grid on alandscape of gently rolling hills and extensive forests. The new school of law sciences is set up on one of the resulting parcels, with the intention of minimizing its

Carlos Jurado Fernández, Enrique Carbonell Meseguer, Salvador Moreno Pérez   Spain   The campus of Espinardo has an unfinished look, with the remaining features of a rural environment such as an unaltered topography, faraway views, and positionings unconditioned by neighboring constructions. On a parcel situated between the general c

Álvaro Siza   Spain   In Sanctiago de Compostela, the years of St. James (when the feast has fallen on a Sunday) can be tracked down through the architectural works that the city’s different administrations have carried out to celebrate the ephemeron, and the ‘Burgo de la

Juan Navarro Baldeweg   Spain   The weight the tourist industry carries in the Canaries often works to the detriment of other, less profitable but equally necessary activities. To draw attention to an educational life on the rise, the University of Las Palmas has invited teams of a

Sancho-Madridejos   Spain   In recent years Madrid has undergone notable growth along its entire eastern front. Perhaps affected by this, San Fernando de Henares is experiencing an unprecedented impulse in terms of municipal activity. As a symbol of such takeoff, the authoritie

Martín Lejarraga, Francisco Ruiz-Gijón   Spain   The huge military boost that Cartagena underwent in the 18th century remains evident in the great constructions that dominate the city’s encounter with the sea. The Royal Arsenal, the Antigones barracks and the Artillery Park are just three of the op

Lluís Clotet   Spain   Concieved as an alternative to the outcropping of private institutions, one able to compete with them from the public sector, Pompeu Fabra University was also born with a decidedly urban outlook. From its Rambla, Plaça de la Mercé and Francia Station

Jordi Garcés   Spain   Formed by successive additions carried out since the sixties, the Picasso Museum of Barcelona goes unnoticed in the intricate urban tissue of the quarter of Ciutat Vella. With their frameworks intact – marked by the fragmented contour of the party wa

Felipe Artengo, Fernando Menis, José María Rodríguez Pastrana   Spain   Physically bound to the city’s foundational moments, the presidential seat of the regional government constitutes a starting point for the the Canarian capital’s historic center renewal. Conceived as an emphatic interlocking of fractured basalt and c

María de los Ángeles Hernández, Vicens & Ramos   Spain   In the undifferenciated context of a recently urbanized zone, almost directly in front of the locality’s new railway station, this parish center is conscious of its role as an urban landmark. Unable to compete in mass with the six-story apartment blo

Javier Frechilla, José Manuel López-Peláez, Carmen Herrero   Spain   Operating more and more independently on Madrid’s periphery, Pozuelo de Alarcón has expanded in parallel to the growth of its services and infrastructures. In a residential zone to its south, a plot of land bordered by three roads and an apartment bl

Ábalos & Herreros, Ángel Jaramillo   Spain   Madrid has  a rugged topography and the southeast section of the municipal territory is one of its lowest points. This is perhaps why the area has traditionally been chosen as a dumping site for metropolitan wastes. Within the plan to rationaliz

Carlos Ferrater, Bet Figueras, Josep Lluís Canosa   Spain   Guarding Barcelona from its south tip, Montjuïc has served as the physical support for the city’s most far-reaching events of the past century. Site of the reproduction of traditional Spanish architecture for the Pueblo Español at the 1929 Universal

Enric Miralles   Spain   Part og Barcelona's industrial periphery, this sector of Mollet del Vallés will be another major access into the city once the planned changes in the traffic system are carried out. Set in a frontier territory whose urban conditions have yet to be de

César Portela   Spain   Topography and toponymy seem to marry in Finisterre to define a place predestined to be a scene of sorrow. On this cape of the ‘Costa de la Muerte’ (Coast of Death) – where the Romans thought the world to end – a plot of land exposed to the tempests

Gabriel Gallegos Borges, Juan Carlos Sanz   Spain   Against the general tendency in a region marked by the exodus of people from countryside to city, Villamuriel de Cerrato has seen its population multiplied by ten since the seventies, when an automobile factory was installed within its municipal lim

Miguel Ángel Campo, Roberto Ercilla   Spain   The road hotel inexorably falls under the emergency sort of architecture that all national highways provide on the way, halfway between local color and the Venturian experiment, but the new motel in Irún’s Integrated Transport Center resists this ste

Aranguren + Gallegos Arquitectos, Enrique Herrada, Marta Maíz   Spain   Resembling the growth rings of a tree, Madrid’s circular roads register the way the capital has expanded in the past decades, and with this, the evolution of residential architecture. If the M-30 highway was where the first municipal administrations

Rafael Otero   Spain   On the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, just a block away from the bay of Algeciras, a residual piece of land long used as a parking lot was chosen as the site of a new social housing development. Diagonally facing a school playground, the oper

José Morales, Juan González Mariscal   Spain   On the outskirts of Seville, forming part of a rural nucleus that has been absorbed by the expanding city, San Jerónimo is a shantytown where the urban fabric frays to meet the declining surrounding territory. As if to stress this boundary character

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The August 1999 issue of Dialogue asked: “Will we ever have a Bilbao in Taiwan?” The Taipei-based journal dedicated its cover to the fractured forms of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, and printed the question mark of its Forum over a photograph of

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The architecture of a Europe that is at present launching a new single currency vacillates between Dutch subversion and Swiss minimalist rigor.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The dwelling is the territory of formal experiments: in Holland and Japan, high demographic density is at times accompanied by high artistic density.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Moneo’s rigorous auditorium stands before Bofill’s jovial theater in an area of Barcelona that wishes to define itself through cultural buildings.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Europe offers prizes to its architects while an atrocious war is fought elsewhere on the continent: the maiden abducted by the bull is embraced by death.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Reconstructed by the British architect Norman Foster, the new Reichstag is the solemn, optimistic and amiable symbol of the Berlin Republic.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Instead of pursuing urban planning understood as little more than real-estate development, towns should care more for the civility of their public spaces.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Houses continue to be an architectural laboratory and an indicator of social mutations; several of the most influential are put on exhibit at the MoMA.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The centenary of the birth of Eduardo Torroja recalls the life and work of the most important figure of modern Spanish engineering.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   A Madrid exhibition explores forms of collaboration between architects and artists through five examples in European cities.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The elections in Catalonia choose not only individuals, but also ideas about regional planning, town development and urban design.

The last years of Franco’s rule devastated the Spanish landscape, and a quarter of a century after his death, democracy has not yet been able to stop the process.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Following the competition for its extension, Madrid’s Reina Sofía will be a museum in its present building and an art center in its planned addition.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The death of Dutch master Aldo van Eyck brings the end to a polyphonic biography that renewed modernity from an anthropological viewpoint.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The British architect Norman Foster will receive the Pritzker Prize in the city that welcomes his most recent work, the renovation of the Reichstag.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Rafael Moneo has finished the auditorium and convention center of San Sebastián, formed by two leaning glass cubes on the edge of the ocean.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   American architect Peter Eisenman is the winner of the international competition to design the Galician City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela.

Marta García Carbonero   Norman Foster On June 7, shortly after his remodeled Reichstag was inaugurated, Norman Foster received the Pritzker Prize in the same city of Berlin. For two consecutive years, therefore, the award granted by the owners of the Hyatt hotel chain has r

Marta García Carbonero   Fumihiko Maki Fumihiko Maki is finally a prophet in his own land. Having capped the Pritzker Prize and the UIA Gold Medal simultaneously in 1993, the most moderate of the Nipponese moderns has been decorated with the Praemium Imperiale by the Japan A

Marta García Carbonero   Barcelona The field’s oldest existing award, the gold medal that the Royal Institute of British Architects hands yearly to persons linked to architecture, has broken a tradition of over a century by distinguishing the merits of a city, Barcelona. Det

Marta García Carbonero   Ricardo Legorreta In the context of its last congress, held in Beijing, the International Union of Architects laureled the Mexican Ricardo Legorreta with its gold medal, a distinction that has since 1984 singled out 'service to man and society throug

Marta García Carbonero   Frank Gehry On February 6, Frank Gehry received the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects, joining personages like Jefferson, Wright and Kahn in a hall of fame heretofore inexplicably inaccesible to one of the most popular American archi

Marta García Carbonero   David Chipperfield The Brit David Chipperfield is the recipient of this year’s Heinrich Tessenow Medal, created by Hamburg’s Alfred Toepfer Foundation to acclaim figures of architecture, industrial design and the teaching of both. In itself a declara

Marta García Carbonero   Kunsthaus de Bregenz In March, from the Bauhaus in Weimar, the year’s continental capital of culture, a jury that included Dominique Perrault, Oriol Bohigas and Wilfried Wang announced the winner of the sixth annual Mies van der Rohe Award for Archit

Marta García Carbonero   Santiago Calatrava In the end of May, in what he has described as a ‘succession of miracles,’ Santiago Calatrava was almost simultaneously named doctor honoris causa by the University of Lund, Sweden and winner of the Prince of Asturias Prize for the

Marta García Carbonero   Faculty in La Coruña and Station in Córdoba  Two buildings – one in Galicia and the other in Andalusia – share the National Prize for Architecture, bestowed every two years by Spain’s Council of Architectural Institutes in conjunction with the M

Marta García Carbonero   Viviendas en Gerona y Alcoy The modest architecture of social housing is 1999’s resounding winner of the Fomento de las Artes Decorativas Awards. An apartment block by Arcadi Pla in Gerona and a residential development by Manuel de Solà-Morales in th

Marta García Carbonero   Luis Peña Ganchegui With a professional biography inexorably linked to the city of San Sebastián, Luis Peña Ganchegui received the Antonio Camuñas Award, granted since 1985 by the so-named Madrid foundation to acknowledge a Spanish architect’s overal

Marta García Carbonero   Biblioteca municipal de Tarrasa Organized jointly by the Ministry of Public Works, the Council of Architectural Institutes, the University of Alcalá and Menéndez Pelayo International University, the fifth Biennial of Spanish Architecture selected 21

Marta García Carbonero   (1920-1999) Death must have caught Colin Rowe by surprise while yearning for the Palazzo Massimo, Cornell University’s Rome headquarters where this Brit by birth and American by naturalization chose to take up residence since retiring in 1991. Traine

Marta García Carbonero   (1927-1999) On August 16, complications resulting from a minor operation put an end to the life of Ton Alberts, the Dutch architect whose biography lived up to the ‘courage to dream’ he asked of all. This motto is also present in his architecture, wh

(1918-1999) When Aldo van Eyck passed away without warning at the start of the year, he was a vital octogenarian. Yet we will always associate his name with infancy. The playgrounds he designed while employed at the public works office impregnated wi

Marta García Carbonero   (1943-1999) The sober pragmatism of Estanislao Pérez Pita, who succumbed to cancer in October, has helped characterize Madrid’s architectural scene of the past 25 years. Both a Madrid native and a 1969 graduate of its architecture school, with Jeróni

Marta García Carbonero   (1905-1999) With the passing away of Ignazio Gardella dies the generation of Italian architects whose careers were launched in the cradle of the Mussolini regime. Born in Milan in 1905, Gardella studied architecture in his hometown’s polytechnical un

Marta García Carbonero   (1903-1999) As a culmination to a life that has stretched in parallel with the 20th century, Charlotte Perriand has left to us her memoirs, a vivid testimony of the most significant events of the first moderns. Her first design, the ‘Sous le Toit’ ba