Luis Fernández-Galiano   The blue planet  is black. Though astronauts describe our world as a misty blue sphere, the delicate crust of technical civilization feeds on the black sap of fossil hydrocarbons, and its deposits and flows are what determine political structures, us

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Celebrations do not remember history; they fabricate it. Beneath the gleam of the New York exhibitions on Mies van der Rohe, the year 2001 tiptoed through the Louis Kahn centenary and mutely marked those of figures like José Luis Sert or Jean Prouvé,

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Caudilatry is in tune with Miesticism. Worship of Gaudí, which on his 150th year is reaching Wagnerian proportions, and devotion to Mies, converted into the familiar divinity of current anorexic minimalism, are parallel phenomena. In theory, no two a

Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza   Spain   The idea that governs the museum is based on an interrelated sequence of different spaces presided by a central double-height one. This proportion and natural illumination of this space recalls the tunnel-workshop that the artist used in Aránzazu whe

Ábalos & Herreros, Ángel Jaramillo   Spain   From the diagonal promenade that crosses the park of Olof Palme and amongst the tree tops, rises the new library of Usera. The project (winner in a restricted competition held in 1995) took on the image of a tower, the classical form identified with

Mariano Bayón   Spain   As a part of the series of developments promoted on occasion of Salamanca’s designation as European City of Culture in 2002, the Performing Arts Center has been built following the program of the project chosen in an open international competition. C

Ángel Verdasco, Rojo Fernández-Shaw   Spain   Half-way between the historic center and the periphery, in a blurred residential environment where repetition replaces hierarchy, it was difficult to find an external reference for the project. And the new auditorium does not look for one; it materia

Rafael Moneo   Spain   In one of  the highest areas of Pamplona’s plateau, Sancho el Sabio ordered the construction in the 12th century of the Palace of the Kings of Navarra, which stands out against the profile of a city whose border is defined by the wall and defens

Mansilla + Tuñón   Spain   Very close to Atocha station, the old El Águila brewery is a reflection of the recent past of Arganzuela, today a residential district in the south of Madrid that was once characterized by its industrial fabric. The construction of its main buildings

Eduardo de Miguel    Spain   The palau de la Música of Valencia is one of the most perfect acoustic works of the ill-fated José María García de Paredes, great expert in musical projects and also the designer of the auditoriums of Granada and Madrid. Opened only fifteen years ago

Junquera arquitectos   Spain   The decision  to extend the Estudio school goes back to 1993, when the new management plan drew up a program to improve the existing spaces and incorporate classrooms, laboratories, staff rooms and a covered gymnasium. Taking up the parcel right

Carlos Ferrater   Spain   Built in the year 2000 on the mountain of Montjuic, by the Olympic Ring and with impressive views of Barcelona, the Botanical Garden is a triangular mesh of concrete paths and cor-ten steel walls, concave and convex, that cover the north hillside. Th

AMP Arquitectos, José Luis Camarasa   Spain   The end of L’Aigüera park, where an old river-bed meets the city of the fifties, was taken up until recently by an unfinished square. The Town Council decided to build its new headquarters on this site, maintaining the two-story public parking on the

Javier Manterola   Spain   The route of the Madrid-Barcelona high-speed railway line has required a previous adaptation of both the terrain through which the tracks will pass and of the urban centers that shall house the different stations. While in Zaragoza the construction w

Lorenzo Fernández-Ordóñez, Francisco Millanes   Spain   Bilbao ría 2000 ha cumplido su décimo aniversario. Creada con participación de las administraciones estatal, autónoma y local para recuperar con otros usos los enclaves de la capital vizcaína y Baracaldo obsoletos tras la reconversión industrial, est

Juan Miguel Otxotorena   Spain   The town of  Cizur Menor, that is linked to the neighborhoods of the south of Pamplona by the Camino de Santiago, enjoys impressive views of both the Navarrese capital and of the surrounding mountain tops thanks to its raised position. In the last ye

Javier Terrados, Fernando Suárez Corchete   Spain   The new highschool takes up a plot with a strong slope there where the urban edge of the small Sevillian town of Villanueva del Río y Minas begins to blur. It is reached through an ascending narrow street formed by the houses units located to the nor

Miguel Ángel Cámara, Alejandro Virseda, Iñaqui Carnicero   Spain   The campus of Montepríncipe is the most recent of the three that the private university San Pablo CEU has built in Madrid. Located in the town of Boadilla del Monte, to the west of the capital, it specializes in science studies. The polytechnic unive

Carrascal-Fernandez de la Puente arquitectos   Spain   The several buildings of the University of Huelva go up around the new layout of the campus of El Carmen, between the avenues of Andalucía and the Fuerzas Armadas, this last one used to lead to the old pavilions of the Cuartel del Carmen, currently r

Alfredo Payá Benedito / Noname 29   Spain   Inmerso ya en el área metropolitana de Valencia, Quart de Poblet ha conseguido mantener intacto su carácter de pequeña población, así que cuando las autoridades se dispusieron a levantar la casa de la juventud —sobre un solar del centro integrado en

Jesús Aparicio   Spain   Atriangle opposite the river Tormes contains the plot chosen to house a home for the elderly and the social services department of the City of Santa Marta, both in one single building and following the bases of the competition, which was celebrated i

Ramón González de la Peña   Spain   To the east Jerez’s urban center, the area for which the Sports Pavilion was designed in 1997 already had several sports installations, as well as others in progress, following a defined layout. During the construction period, they underwent a period

Basilio Tobías Pintre   Spain   Founded over a decade ago, the University Jaume I has established its position in the province of Castellón, where it counts four campus already, and in the national education panorama. Located to the west of the urban center, the campus of Río Seco

Víctor López Cotelo   Spain   A few minutes from the Plaza del Obradoiro, Santiago de Compostela breaks into an array of scattered constructions which show the agricultural and stockbreeding activities that still go on in its close surroundings. On this borderline, where country

Pico & López   Spain   The settlement of Doña Blanca was one of the projects that the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (Land Settlement Institute) developed in the seventies with the objective of consolidating the agricultural exploitation of the marshlands of the river

Rueda & Pizarro   Spain   The 1985 town plan proposed in this part of the city to continue the layout of the extension foreseen by the Castro Plan, but it also proposed for the plot – a triangle whose area is one eighth of the traditional block – to be aligned with the diagon

Joan Pascual   Spain   In the district of Nou Barris, in the north of Barcelona, the City Council is promoting a series of measures – public parks, equipments, social housing – aimed at correcting its lack of collective facilities, something common to all the residential a

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Pedestrians beware. During the summer, the state traffic authority carried out a campaign to remind pedestrians of their fragility. Independently of the rights that street regulations give them, pedestrians are the most vulnerable elements of tr

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architects are mistrustful of ballots. Most of the masterworks they admire are products of despotism or theocracy, and they tend to think that the esthetic judgments of common people are predictable and abominable. Trapped between the romantic narcis

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Mr.Murcutt... “Call me Glenn!” At first con-tact the architect demands colloquial cordiality, dropping formalities with the unmistakable clarity of one who likes to go straight to the point. The works of Glenn Murcutt, mostly houses, come across with

Luis Fernández-Galiano   A pink facade, a yellow lattice, a violet wall: the work of Luis Barragán abounds in rugged textures and fiery colors, a surprising mix of tactile roughness and visual violence accompanied by a parallel devotion to Franciscan austerity and oriental s

Luis Fernández-Galiano   France is no different. After the lay papacy of François Mitterrand, who profiled his place in history through a series of grands projets for Paris, the bicephalous France of Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin offers voters a plain track record and a b

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Europe a lust for landscape. On one hand, the continental territory suffers an ordeal of scorn and aggressions that distorts its profile, damages its integrity, and altogether jeopardizes its existence. On the other, landscaping as an instrument for

Luis Fernández-Galiano   New York is undaunted. In Ground Zero, tears have given way to cameras and calculators. The scene of the tragedy is now a tourist site, and soon it will be a construction site. Designed by the conceptual architects Diller & Scofidio in collaboration

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Benidorm is  a hamburger: the McDonald’s of tourism, an admirable combination of quality and price that ignorant snobbery contemplates scornfully, but whose persistent success ought to in-spire more emulation than suspicion. Benidorm is also the Span

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Before new labour's cool Britannia, the visionary Albion claims his rights: English imagination is sentimental. Sentimental is the recently completed Town Hall of London, a glassy head that faces the Thames through a zigzag mask; and sentimental too

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Berlin is Europe's autumn and spring. In the clamor of the September 11 commemorations, we forgot that although the 21st century effectively began with the destruction of the WTC towers, the 20th had already ended on November 9, 1989 with the fall of

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The catalog is entitled Natural History, but the work of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron presents itself in Montreal like nature without history. Unlike the accelerated time of general history, the slow time of the natural world composes a still

Luis Fernández-Galiano   All soul's day calls for a memory exercise, because the dead live on only for as long as we keep talking to them. This year, the first after the catastrophe of 9-11, has reaped its usual harvest of completed and truncated biographies, brought a sheaf

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The museum  of the sea is the coast. In this thin and shifting line that separates two worlds and threads two ecosystems together, the sea manifests itself in its splendor and threat. No display is more emotive, and no exhibition more didactic, than

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The new art museums of Koolhaas in Las Vegas eloquently express the commercialization and trivialization of high culture in the contemporary world.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The jury of the Pritzker Prize got the message. After 11 September, a new spirit of austerity and rigor extends over an architecture that has lately flirted with excess and whim. In tune with this climate of revision, the unexpected selection of the

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The emblem of the World Cup is a wharf. The holding of the World Soccer Championship in Japan and Korea has occasioned the construction of 17 new stadiums in both host countries, but the most innovative work is perhaps a transport building, Yokohama’

You must come to see it.” Under the high frescoes of Rome’s Palazzo Colonna, Frank Gehry demurely resists commenting on the progress of his Disney Hall, the auditorium he is building just three blocks from the cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the

Glenn Murcutt All the last Pritzker awardees were part of architecture’s star system until the Australian Glenn Murcutt came around, an unclassifiable figure foreign to the mediatic circles, that not only credits the award as much as his illustrious

Norman Foster The Japan Art Society celebrated its centenary by founding in 1989 the Praemium Imperiale, which recognizes every year the contributions of artists of all nationalities and creative fields to the cultural progress of humanity. In a cere

Archigram Almost half a century ago they set out to change the world, and the new millennium has brought them the recognition of their peers. The group Archigram received on 3 December, the Gold Medal awarded annually by the Royal Institute of Britis

Renzo Piano Awarded by the International Union of Architects within the context of their triennial congresses, this year’s medal has gone to the Italian architect Renzo Piano, who holds, among other prizes, the Auguste Perret (1978), the RIBA’s Gold

Tadao Ando The American Institute of Architects has granted Tadao Ando its 59th Gold Medal, the greatest honor that this veteran institution bestows each year to professionals with built work in the United States. Awarded with the Pritzker in 1995 an

Peter Märkli The Swiss Peter Märkli (Zurich,1953) received the Heinrich Tessenow medal, granted jointly by the Society by the same name and the Alfred Toepfer Foundation of Hamburg. The award, established in 1963, is given to figures of architecture,

Toyo Ito Known for being the international exhibition that presents the current state of architecture, the Venice Biennial, in its eighth edition, has awarded the Japanese Toyo Ito with the Gold Lion for his career and his contribution to contemporar

Wilkinson Eyre The firm Wilkinson Eyre has won this year’s Stirling Prize for its Millennium Bridge in Gateshead, making of this a double historic victory for the studio, that in 2001 received the same award for the Magna Centre, the renovation of an

Hotel Explora, San Pedro de Atacama (Chile)  Hotel Explora, San Pedro de Atacama (Chile) The Hotel Explora, designed by the Chilean architect Germán del Sol, has won the prize for the best work at the third edition of the Iber-American Architecture &

Antonio Fernández Alba The Spanish Council of Architectural Associations has awarded Antonio Fernández Alba, at the age of 75, with its gold medal, recognizing the “excellence of his built work, his constant commitment with the intellectual avant-gar

Javier Carvajal Ferrer The Camuñas Foundation established in 1985 the Antonio Camuñas Award that takes stock, every two years, of the career of a Spanish architect; and in 1990 it created the exhibition of Young Spanish Architects, to acknowledge a s

M&M Houses, Cerdanyola del Vallés The M&M Houses in Cerdanyola del Vallés, Barcelona, designed as two pavilions on pillars by the young architects José Miguel Roldán and Mercé Berengué, have received the award in the category of architecture from the

(1927-2002) Leaving as legacy an oeuvre that is inexorably linked to the Spanish architecture the last half of the 20th century, Pedro Casariego died on 8 September in Madrid, the city where he graduated in 1953 and where in 1955 he founded his studi

(1934-2002) Thanks to J. Carter Brown museums ceased to be ivory towers fit only for elites and were transformed into popular establishments open to everyone. Director of Washington’s National Gallery of Art for 23 years, Carter Brown passed away on

(1910-2002) With the death of Eric de Maré, architectural photography has lost one of its leading figures. Born into a Swedish family in London, De Maré discovered his passion for photography while studying at the Architectural Association, and event

(1924-2002) Eduardo Chillida wanted to be an architect, a vocation that he abandoned to become a painter first, and then a sculptor. But matter and form in Chillida’s sculptures revealed a spatial conception that was very close to his earliest vocati

(1910-2002) Founder of the International Union of Architects (UIA), Pierre Vago died on 27 January at the age of 92 in his house on the outskirts of Paris. The French architect of Hungarian descent was also a successful writer, editor, and critic. So

(1955-2002) Yorgos Simeoforidis died prematurely of a heart attack last February in Lugano. Born in Athens in 1955, Simeoforidis studied architecture in Florence, Philadelphia and the Architectural Association in London, where he taught history and t

(1918-2002) The architect and designer Achille Castiglioni, one of the leading figures of modern Italian design during the second half of the 20th century, passed away on 2 December at the age of 84. Born in 1918 in Milan, he studied there at the Pol

(1942-2002) On 2 February, the French architect Jacques Hondelatte suffered a heart attack from which he would not recover. Awarded in 1998 with the Grand Prix of Architecture, he was a tireless researcher and an enthusiastic designer, whose work was

(1919-2002) Sergio Bernardes, the youngest figure of the modern Brazilian school, spearheaded by the architects Lucio Costa and Óscar Niemeyer, passed away on 15 June at the age of 83. He graduated in 1948, and forged his reputation on the many singl

(1923-2002) Known mainly for his contributions to graphic design, AG Fronzoni was above all a versatile creator whose activity covered the most diverse areas of design. Born on 5 March 1923 in Pistoia, his self-taught formation did not keep him from

(1921-2002) The conservation and cataloguing of the built heritage were for José Luis García Fernández an obsession that he developed simultaneously with his career as an architect and civil servant. An extraordinary draftsman, a tireless worker and

(1941-2002) María Pérez Sheriff belonged to the same generation of Spanish architects that Ricardo Aroca or Manuel de las Casas. Upon return from her urbanism studies in the United States, that she carried out thanks to a Fullbright scholarship, she