Luis Fernández-Galiano   Any recapitulation of the year will inevitably hinge around the tragedy of 11 September. The number 2001 evoked the metaphysical futurism of Kubrick, but from now on it will be undivorceable from the image of two passenger planes crashing into Manhat

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Skyscrapers grow with stockmarkets, their height marks reproducing the profile of stock prices. According to The Economist, financial soothsayers predict the future by counting cranes and every prolonged period of stock exchange euphoria leaves a bui

Alberto Campo Baeza   Spain   On the south periphery of Granada, the new headquarters of the Savings Bank will finally gather the offices of this financial institution that were scattered all over the city. As against the variety of shapes that make up the museum of science and t

Bonell & Gil   Spain   As so many other coastal towns, Vigo found it necessary to transform its harbor in orderto adapt to the new demands of sea traffic and, as a result of this process, a series of docks now fallen into disuse will make it possible to recover the connect

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos   Spain   The new Congress Center rounds off the cultural program of the Auditorium of Murcia, whose bold triangular form did not admit extensions. However, the mild climate as well as the character of the site, a green area on the city outskirts, let both bui

Mansilla + Tuñón   Spain   The complex formed by the Parador of San Marcos and the sixteenth century bridge by the same name constitutes the main reference of the parcel where the new auditorium of León has been raised, a plot of difficult borders whose construction will allow

Aranguren + Gallegos Arquitectos   Spain   In the heart of the northern Sierra of Madrid, the town of Colmenar Viejo enjoyed in the 18th century a period of splendor to which the built remains scattered throughout the historic center bear witness. To preserve this heritage, in itself very har

ODImásP   Spain   The vast Castilian landscape is necessarily linked to the stone fortresses that dot its horizon like silent sentinels. In view of the difficulties that the maintenance of this heritage entails, there are numerous initiatives which follow the purpose

Luis María Uriarte   Spain   Located in the proximities of the Guggenheim Museum and the Euskalduna Palace – thoughon the background with respect to the estuary –the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao takes up one end of Casilda Iturritza park, the main green space of the northwest o

Aldo Rossi, César Portela   Spain   From the coast of the most southern of the Rías Bajas, the city of Vigo renders tribute to the ocean with the Sea Museum. Over the Punta de Muiño – which marks the point where the harbor area ends and the beaches begin –, the museum mediates between

AH Alonso & Hernández, Sancho-Madridejos   Spain   Farming fields, palm tree plantations, cypresses and other typical specimens of the Mediterranean vegetation compose a landscape that, on the city outskirts, surrounds the hospital of La Arrixaca. On an plot next to it, a building for the Faculty of

Ábalos & Herreros, Ángel Jaramillo   Spain   The city of Mérida – the actual seat of the government of Extremadura– goes up on the ruins of Emerita Augusta, the Roman city that always emerges from the subsoil as the new city tries to continue growing.  Without forgetting the heritage of its ric

Martín Lejarraga, Francisco Ruiz-Gijón   Spain   A dry and marked topography are the main distinctive features of the campus of Espinardo, located on the outskirts of Murcia. Upon this plateau cracked by riverbeds and run off lines, the faculties rest their modular geometry with difficulty, sketchi

Vicens & Ramos   Spain   Raised on a  plot in the historic center of the locality, the Jesús Ruiz School consisted of two freestanding pavilions with no link to the surrounding urban fabric. The need to renew its facilities has allowed to reformulate the relationship of this

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   Immerse in one of the exceptional natural spots common to the province of Gerona, the town of Olot is particularly careful when it comes to its expansion on the surrounding areas in order to avoid destroying on its growth that which constitutes one

Alfonso Penela   Spain   The winter sports station of Manzaneda (practically the only one in the northwest of the Peninsula) was installed thirty years ago within a natural context of great beauty which has to a great extent been damaged by the influx of visitors who go ther

Fité & Mejón   Spain   On the limit of the built fabric, overlooking the city that is yet to come, the health center for a new neighborhood in Lérida must assert its identity as public equipment. On a plot that forms part of a closed block and with two large brick walls on

ByE arquitectos   Spain   Buñuel is a  small town located on the southeast of Tudela, where Navarra meets the province of Zaragoza. It is one of the many examples of towns whose historic center has gradually grown with scattered single houses that are beginning to blur t

Rubiño García Márquez Arquitectos   Spain   The orderly landscape of olive trees that reaches the very boundaries as Jaén is endangered by an urban center that spreads at a paced yet continuous rhythm. On this periphery of hills dotted by trees organized in a grid, the plot proposed to site th

Matos Castillo   Spain   The opening of the day center and park in the Casino de la Reina, starts a new episode in the eventful history of these grounds of the Madrid quarter of Lavapiés. The historic center – formed initially by a small palace, a vegetable garden and a pond

NO.MAD   Spain   The profile of chimneys and blast furnaces, refineries, steel plants and shipyards that flanked the estuary of Bilbao has gradually given way to a clean landscape scattered with architectural landmarks that bear witness to the modernization of the re

Jordi Badia, Josep Val   Spain   Located next to a residential quarter formed by open blocks of recent construction, the plot chosen to raise the municipal morgue of León did not seem at first to be the most appropriate one to house such function. Therefore, to create an environment

aceboXalonso Studio   Spain   As so many other locations in the Basque country, Urretxu, Guipúzcoa, is constituted by a high-density sequence of industrial sheds and housing blocks which are gathered along the valley, leaving intact the green tops of the encircling mountains. Cli

AMP Arquitectos   Spain   Forming part of the more dense and uniform fabric of the city – a few meters from the Rambla de Pulido and Plaza Weyler– a corner plot belonging to one of the typical rectangular blocks has now been taken up by a building of apartments and shops. Fac

Miguel Ángel Campo, Roberto Ercilla, Francisco Mangado   Spain   Aktur Lakua– a macrosector on the periphery of Vitoria which was conceived at the end of the seventies – is the yet undefined area chosen to build 168 social houses. Its streets are barely supplied with the basic urban installations and the facilitie

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   Spain   Far from the dense fabric of the historic center – where the winding streets and hidden courtyards still fascinate both natives and foreigners – Seville is fragmented in a mosaic of neighborhoods with scarce facilities that, despite the improved infr

Luis Fernández-Galiano   11-S coincided with the opening of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, linking two historical tragedies that show the fragility of human domestication.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Short of stature but tall in reach, José Luis Sert was great in Spain and even greater in the United States. But in the past three decades his reputation has suffered an unmerited erosion in both his native and adopted countries. In the militant seve

Luis Fernández-Galiano   A museum costs the same as a soccer player, and a similar return is expected: ticket sales and titles. The city of Castellón opened its Fine Arts Museum on January 24, a week after Martín Palermo was incorporated into theVillareal club, and a week be

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Thurday the 8th. In Nantes with the jury of the Mies van der Rohe Award, after a journey made eventful by airlines’labour conflicts. The visit to Nouvel’s Palace of Justice is disappointing. We recently put it on the cover of Arquitectura Viva and it

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The law builds the landscape, but the land-scape does not build the law. Forgetting that nature is an artifice, some who indulge in the hermeneutics of natural law try to look for the ori-gin of law and normative order in the terrain. In Der Nomos de

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Justice is no longer blindfolded. Both France and the United States are erecting effusively visual constructions to patch up a cracked system, and Spain – attentive at once to the judiciary experiments of its northern neighbor and to the litigation s

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Veni, vid, vici.The concise report of Caesar to the Senate serves well to describe the last visit to Spain of Rem Koolhaas: the rushed Rotterdam architect stopped in Córdoba just the necessary time to persuade a jury of the advantages of his project

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Genius and  Austria do not go together, says Thomas Bernhard, and the complex of muse-ums that has been raised in the interior grounds of Fischer von Erlach’s imperial stables confirms the pessimistic opinion of the author of Old Masters. Along

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In Spain, the fall term began with Eva Sannum and without Juan Muñoz. The appearance of the Norwegian fashion model in Oslo’s royal wedding and the sudden demise of the Madrid artist in Ibiza wrapped up an August clouded by the tragic tides of Africa

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The brutal destruction of the World Trade Center has made us all New Yorkers. Four decades ago, the raising of the Berlin wall provoked a similar wave of fraternal empathy in the face of the threat of urban asphyxia, and the West felt with Berlin: “

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Teruel exists, but only at times. It existed with Mudejar splendor in the 13th century, a briefand shining medieval moment that began with a town chapter in 1176 and culminated with the magnificent towers, of the first quarter of the 14th century, wh

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The silamic continent is an archipelago. If architecture is to provide an example, the image reflected in the dark mirror of Muslim construction is a landscape fractured into abnormal splinters, a warm sea of poverty and violence dotted with islands

Luis Fernández-Galiano   They wish to be spirits, but could instead be-come specters. The towers of light that artists and architects have conceived to rise skyward from the rubble of Ground Zero are well-intentioned and laudable in their aim of filling the painful void of t

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974) transformed the architecture of the 20th century with masterworks that interpret in contemporary language the timeless forms of past.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are to receive their Pritzker in Monticello, a happy coincidence befitting their status as founding fathers of the architecture of the new century. Jefferson’s Virginia mansion, a landmark of neoclassical architect

Luis Fernández-Galiano   New York was the venue of two important exhibitions on Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), the modern master who worked in Berlin and Chicago.

The fact is that we architects never really liked Yamasaki. His professional success, which had him building the world’s tallest skyscrapers, was systematically accompanied by negative criticism. The Twin Towers themselves, the tragic destruction of

Herzog & de Meuron They met in primary school, studied architecture together, and have since 1978 shared a studio in their native city, Basel, from which they have carried out some of the most influential works of the past decades, such as the signal

Jean Nouvel On October 25, in a ceremony graced by the Emperors Japan, the Japan Art Society gave the Praemium Imperiale awards for painting, sculpture, music, theater, and architecture. The awardees were the Korean painter Lee Ufan, the French sculp

Jean Nouvel On 21 June in London, Jean Nouvel accepted the Royal Institute of British Architects’ gold medal, becoming, at 56, one of the youngest recipients ever of an award annually granted to honor the career of a historian, critic, or architect s

Centro Magna, Rotherham Seven buildings vied for the Stirling Prize, created in 1996 in memory of the British master, and with the support of The Architect’s Journal, to acknowledge the most significant work erected each year in the United Kingdom. T

Michael Graves One of the profession’s longest-established awards – the medal that the American Institute of Architects has bestowed since 1907 – has fallen upon a veteran architect. Michael Graves participated with Meier, Eisenman, Hejduk, and Gwath

Kursaal, San Sebastián In its seventh edition, the Mies van der Rohe Award went to the Kursaal of San Sebastian, thereby completing with a Europe-wide honor the recognition obtained by Rafael Moneo’s building in the Biennial of Spanish Architecture.

Kursaal y Palacio Euskalduna Like a thermometer of design and building quality in the country, the Biennial of Spanish Architecture – jointly organized by the Council of Architectural Institutes, Menéndez Pelayo International University, the Universi

José Luis Picardo Alternating with prizes for specific works by young architects, every two years the Antonio Camuñas Foundation takes stock of the oeuvre of a consolidated professional. The honoree of this year’s ninth trophy was José Luis Picardo,

Museum of Fine Arts, Castellón Under the categories of architecture, interiors, exterior spaces, and ephemeral spaces, the Fomento de las Artes Decorativas awards are given yearly to recognize the most outstanding products of architecture and design

Viviendas en Amsterdam y Museo en Valencia Dos edificios compartieron este año el premio Grupo Dragados de Arquitectura, que concede desde 1987 y con carácter anual la Confederación Española de Organizaciones Empresariales: las vi-viendas en el muell

Line 8 of Madrid’s Metro Organized every two years since 1985 by the San Benito de Alcántara Foundation, the prize bears the name of the Roman bridge that graces this town in Extremadura, and is bestowed on public works carried out in Spanish- and Po

Congress Center of Catalonia A jury composed mostly of representatives of professional and institutional organisms – in particular Spain’s Council of Architectural Institutes and a couple of ministries – granted the Prize for Spanish Architecture to

(1932-2001) Known especially for his contribution to critique on the image of the city, a theme that dominated the French architectural debate for years, the architect Bernard Huet passed away at the age of 69. Born in Quinhon (Vietnam), he studied i

(1940-2001) While biking in Vermont, Steve Izenour suffered a heart attack he would not recover from. A partner of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown since 1969, he took part in the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, one of the most influenti

(1902-2001) His intellectual sharpness and prodigious memory intact at 92, the architectural historian Ernst Gombrich passed away in London, his adopted city. Born in 1909 in Vienna, he finished university there and emigrated in 1936 to the British c

(1922-2001) Music, mathematics, and architecture coincide in the biography of Iannis Xenakis, the composer and engineer of Greek origin who collaborated with Le Corbusier – whom he met in 1948 on his arrival in Paris as a political refugee – in works

(1953-2001) Prematurely and at one of the finest moments of his prolific career, Juan Muñoz passed away, on account of an aneurysm, in his summer house in Ibiza. Just months before he had inaugurated Double Bind, an ‘architectural’ installation whose

(1942-2001) On 12 March in Amsterdam, a heart attack cut short the life of Ignasi de Solà-Morales. The Catalan architect and historian was in the Dutch capital to participate in the announcement of the 2001 winner of the Mies van der Rohe Award: the

(1927-2001) Royston Landau died in London on 11 October. British by birth and American by adoption, his professional biography swung for decades between both shores of the Atlantic. At the end of the Second World War, Landau began his studies in the

(1902-2001) Some scenes of Goldfinger, one of the most famous James Bond pictures, were filmed in Miami Beach’s Hotel Fontainebleau, described by its architect, Morris Lapidus, as the world’s most pretentious hotel. After all, its rooms of red velvet

(1944-2001) Hale County, in the state of Alabama, shall always remember Samuel Mockbee, Sambo, an architect who dedicated his teaching vocation to an idea of architecture as a social service. At Auburn University, where he taught, Mockbee in 1991 cre

(1910-2001) In London, where Charing Cross intersects with Oxford Street, rises Centre Point, a 40-story structure that once was the tallest building of the city. Not until retirement did Richard Seifert receive the credit due for this tower, as well

(1916-2001) Marco Zanuso was one of the protagonists of the architectural debate in postwar Italy. Born in Milan in 1916, he studied architecture there, and the same day he graduated, he embarked on a warship as a marine. The international conflict m

(1914-2001) With Denys Lasdun’s dying of pneumonia at the age of 86, British modernity has lost a principal reference. A graduate of the Architectural Association, where he would also teach, Lasdun in 1938 became a disciple and collaborator of Bertho

Luis Fernández-Galiano   With the rubble still fresh, Manhattan’s future is being debated. Should the World Trade Center be rebuilt? Real estate pragmatism demands the replacement of the office space that was extirpated from the economic heart of the planet. Assertive patrio