Luis Fernández-Galiano   Asia used to be the future. Today it is the present. The mutation of the economic cycle has brought about a financial sorpasso that heralds political and military leadership for the continent. At the start of 2007, three of the world’s five largest

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Climate is the problem, the city is the solution. This is how the spirit of the most ambitious urban program for energy efficiency launched in the United States could be summed up. Promoted by the city of Cambridge – home to universities like Harvard

Herzog & de Meuron   Spain   Conceived as a new magnet attracting art-lovers, within the triangle formed by the Prado, Reina Sofía and Thyssen-Bornemisza museums, the new CaixaForum is located on a privileged site of Madrid’s Paseo del Prado, and takes up an old power station –

Carlos Ferrater, Eduardo Jiménez, Yolanda Brasa   Spain   The project for the extension of the Science Park of Granada, a commission assigned after a call for ideas held in the year 2003, conceives the intervention from the outset as an opportunity to address urban distribution issues that go beyond the pre

Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra   Spain   The Alfonso XII quay, physical edge ofthe city of Cartagena, was built in 1872 on land reclaimed from the sea, and devoted to port uses until just a few years ago, when authorities decided to recover it as a space for civic activities, along the same

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   Spain   The romantic image of the ruins, so often rejected as nostalgic and anachronistic, is capable of transmitting, however, not only the evocative power of the constructions of the past but also the destructive force of time and nature. In this duality -

Jordi Badia   Spain   The brief described the objective of raising a volume to preside and give shape to a new square that, surrounded by public buildings and connected with the historic district through a boulevard, wishes to become a new symbolic city center, one that c

Ensamble Studio   Spain   The new Headquarters of the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (General Society of Authors and Editors of Spain) is located in the privileged environment of the VistaAlegre park of the Galician capital, next to a series of academic and cultural b

Francisco Mangado   Spain   Located on a large plot by the technological park of the municipality of Sarriguren, 9 kilometers from Pamplona, the new building had to include, on a total area of 10,500 square meters of office space plus 8,745 of parking, a comprehensive and relat

FOA | Foreign Office Architects   Spain   The Complex is sited on the outskirts of Logroño, on an esplanade by the RivermIregua, in a beautiful spot that the Government of La Rioja currently uses as a tree farm and as a natural reserve of local species in danger of extinction. This area will

Alberto Nicolau   Spain   Drawing inspiration from the changing reflections produced by the sunrays when crossing the layer of moving water, the project – a heated municipal swimming pool in the town of Valdemoro, some 27 kilometers south of Madrid – is located in a depressio

Manuel Ocaña   Spain   With a program that can accommodate seventy resident patients and twenty users of the day center, the project takes as point of departure the idea that the centers for the elderly must be optimistic places, and proposes creating a special atmosphere

Carlos A. Wandosell, Javier de Mateo   Spain   With an artificial landscape inspired byimages like the morning fog or ice chips on tree branches, a center for the severely handicapped faces a heterogeneous landscape, establishing a connection both with the square and with the structures surroundi

estudio_entresitio   Spain   The new Centro de Especialidades de Diagnóstico y Tratamiento (CEDT, or center for diagnosis and treatment specialties) combines in one same building primary care and emergency rooms with specialty care including radiology and surgery, thus helping t

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   These new cellars for private wine production and consumption are located in an outstanding setting, at the head of a valley beneath a mountain in a protected area. Along apath that connects different types of buildings – including a chapel –, unfold

Clotet & Paricio   Spain   Developed by the Generalitat and Caixa Manresa and with Ferrán Adriá as advisor, the objective of the Fundación Alimentación y Ciencia (Alicia), is to organize and promote, with no profit motive in mind, research and technological development activit

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   Spain   Located in Barcelona’s Maresme region, the library was drawn up in life of Enric Miralles and its construction began a decade ago; since then the project has gradually evolved until is recent completion. The proposal started out as a single large roo

Manuel Ruisánchez   Spain   After a decade of neglect, the Barcelona City Council convened a competition in the year 2000 for the recovery of a shopping center that had never come into use, located on a corner of the Ensanche, and transform it into a complex of public facilitie

Picado - De Blas Arquitectos   Spain   The project prompts to reflect upon the life of babies, taking as point of departure a circular form, the one intuitively chosen in the past to build fortresses, huts and igloos. The circle is able to generate a maximum volume with the least material

Hans Finner, Santiago Carroquino   Spain   The school is one of the projects included in the ‘Plan de Barrios’ (a local urban plan)promoted by the City Council, also featuring the schools of Oliver, La Paz and Actur, designed by this same studio, and that make up the core of the new municipal

Dospunts Arquitectura   Spain   The new elementary education center Artur Martorell, with a 2,370 square meter surface, fulfills the demands of the old school of the same name – founded in 1969 and a public school of the Generalitat since 1987 –, whose facilities had become obsolet

Irisarri + Piñera   Spain   With an aera of 150,000 square meters,the A Xunqueira campus of the University of Vigo in Pontevedra is located on a slightly isolated site, flanked by the river and the highway. This peculiar feature served as starting point for the redevelopment pl

López & Rivera   Spain   Located three kilometers from Tudela, next to the Bardenas Reales natural park, in a spectacular landscape characterized by the exposure to the strong northeast wind, the hotel is conceived as a sequence of cozy, sheltered interior spaces to contempl

Burgos & Garrido   Spain   The project stems from the idea that the best neighborhood needn’t be made up of unique pieces, but rather that specific elements such as systematicity, homogeneity and expressive moderation are essential in residential buildings. In this way, the bl

Rueda & Pizarro   Spain   The town council of Parla, a municipality located some 20 kilometers south of Madrid, called a competition in 2005, in collaboration with the Madrid Institute of Architects, to build826 housing units, distributed over a total of six plots, to be rent

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, Wiel Arets   Spain   Close to Pradolongo Park, in the Usera neighborhood, south of Madrid and north of the M-40 perimeter highway ring, the Empresa Municipal de la Vivienda (municipal housing agency) promoted five years ago the creation of a residential area of more than

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In an agnostic world, art is the ultimate religion. Beyond the fractures between confessions, art presents itself as a universal creed. Its priests are heard with reverence, its liturgies are followed with devotion, and its temples colonize the plane

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Whenever in Valencia, there are two rites I never miss: a visit to the Lonja, a 15th cen¬tury Gothic guildhall which is the finest in the Mediterranean, raised by the great masterbuilder Pere Compte with eight salomonic columns that soar up to the 57

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Politicians are from Mars, architects are from Venus. To paraphrase the neo-conservative Robert Kagan, whose Of Paradise and Power explained the differences between Americans and Europeans in those terms, the current conflicts between politicians and

Luis Fernández-Galiano   New York remains the capital of the planet. The decline of the dollar and the exodus of corporate headquarters in the wake of 9-11 have somehow debilitated its hold as financial center, threatened moreover as it is by Asia’s rise and the agility of L

Richard Rogers A bit over ten years after his previous partners Norman Foster and Renzo Piano – the latter a Pritkzer juror in this edition–, the British Richard Rogers, who already possesses the Praemium Imperiale and the RIBA Gold Medal, has been d

Herzog & de Meuron Los arquitectos Herzog y de Meuron han sido premiados por el Royal Institute of British Architects con su máximo galardón, sumándose así a la lista de prestigiosos profesionales —desde Le Corbusier a Rem Koolhaas, pasando por Jean

Herzog y de Meuron The architects Herzog & de Meuron have received from the Royal Institute of British Architects its most important distinction, thus joining the list of prestigious professionals – from Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas, and also Jean No

Edward Larrabee Barnes With its Gold Medal, the American Institute of Architects has posthumously honored the career of Edward Larrabee Barnes, deceased in 2004 at the age of 89. Graduated from Harvard University in 1942, the teachings of Walter Grop

Kristian Gullichsen For a boy growing up at Villa Mairea, an essential work by Alvar Aalto, developing an interest in architecture may seem only natural. Kristian Gullichsen, now recipient of the Gold Medal from the French Academy of Architecture, ha

Nine Works After thirty-three years of existence, the Aga Khan Awards celebrate their tenth edition commending works that have two basic common denominators: they must be built in the Islamic world, and they must use design as a tool for social and e

MUSAC The Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León, also known as MUSAC, by the architectsLuis Moreno Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón, won the seventh edition of the Mies van der Rohe Award. Among the 272 proposals from 32 countries, the jury of inter

Antequera Courts of Justice Ignacio Laguillo and Harald Schönegger are the authors of the Antequera Courts of Justice, winning work in the Architecture category at the 49th edition of the FAD Awards. The building proposed by this Seville-based studio

Museum of Modern Literature A building of classicist inspiration and precise insertion in the site has been awarded with the Stirling Prize, the most important of those given by the Royal Institute of British Architects to an individual work. Its aut

Oriol Bohigas Polemical thinker, influential urbanist and prolific architect, Oriol Bohigas has gone beyond the boundaries of his profession to become an essential referent of Spanish and Catalan culture. Head of the Barcelona School of Architecture

Cube Tower Structural clarity, environmental concern, constructive quality and the desire to offer a powerful and attractive urban image are some of the reasons put forward by the jury of the IX Biennial of Spanish Architecture to grant its highest d

Valle-Inclán Theater A plot previously occupied by the Sala Olimpia, in the Madrid square of Lavapiés, is the site for the new Valle-Inclán Theater, a work of the architects Ángela García de Paredes and Ignacio García Pedrosa that has earned the Priz

(1923-2007) André Gorz ended his life, at age 84, together with his terminally ill wife. Gorz was born in Vienna during the interwar years, the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. During the 1930s he moved to Lausanne, fleeing from the Nazi

(1933-2007) The Swiss architect passed away in Basel after a long illness that kept him in hospital for several months. Born in 1933 in Locarno, in the southern canton of Ticino, in 1953 he began his architecture studies at the Swiss Federal Institut

(1922-2007) The name Colin St John Wilson is directly linked with the British Library in London, the work to which he devoted thirty years of his professional career. Designed with Leslie Martin, the project site was moved and during Margaret Thatche

(1926-2007) Born in Germany during the interwar period, Oswald Mathias Ungers was an enthusiast of the right angle, the square and the cube. Trained at the University of Karlsruhe and influenced by Prussian masters such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel, by

(1917-2007) Social responsibility, research on cost-effective building systems and the interest in India’s vernacular construction methods define the work of Laurie Baker, who passed away at the age of 90 in Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala, India.

(1934-2007) Architect, philosopher, writer and in recent times also politician – he ran, without success, for governor of Tokyo and for the Japanese Senate –, Kisho Kurokawa died a few months after finishing his last great work, the National Art Cent

(1929-2007) With the death of Rogelio Salmona, Colombia has bid farewell to its most renown architect. Born in Paris to a family of Sephardic origin, Salmona returned to the French capital to study at the École des Hautes Études with Pierre Francaste

(1947-2007) Taking the baton from Paul Goldberger, Herbert Muschamp was The New York Times architecture critic from 1992 to 2004. During the twelve years he occupied this distinguished position he practiced a sharp and forceful criticism with an effu

(1917-2007) After studying architecture in Turin, the Austrianborn architect and industrial designer Ettore Sottsass established his studio in Milan, in a postwar Italy that moved little by little towards reconstruction. The year 1958 marked the begi

(1923-2007) Art and architecture historian, and art professor at Yale University from 1963 to 1998, George Hersey died at home in New Haven in October. He was an authority in Italian Renaissance architecture and sculpture, and 19th-century art a

(1931-2007) Born in New York two years after the financial crash of 1929, the philosopher Richard Rortygrew up in an anti-Communist family involved in left-wing social activism. In 1948 he started his philosophy studies at the University of Chicago,

(1916-2007) Geometry, matter and form are the most characteristic features of the work of the Spanish painter Pablo Palazuelo, who passed away in Galapagar, Madrid. The outbreak of the Civil War interrupted his architecture studies at Oxford Universi