Luis Fernández-Galiano   The great Recession has generated in the West an economy of fear and a culture of repentance. Impelled or imposed by the crisis, a new austerity pervades public budgets and private concerns. Both political discourse and intellectual debate are govern

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The classics advise not to wish for roses in winter. Our world, however, is built with desires out of season, and those undue appetites govern markets and lives. The temperature of consumption controls financial fluxes and the libidinal economy, in a

Luis Fernández-Galiano   A specter is  haunting Europe: the specter of identity. Under the demographic  and cultural impact of the torrential flows of immigrants, and in the geopolitical context of successive enlargements of the European Union, the old nation-state

Peter Eisenman   Spain   AFTER YEARS of vicissitudes, the City of Culture of Galicia emerges like a fossil vieira  on the hillside of Mount Gaiás, in Santiago de Compostela. In the wake of the cultural projects of the 1990s, this work aimed at placing the city in the select

Oscar Niemeyer   Spain   Equidistant from Gijón and Oviedo, Avilés is the third largest city of Asturias population wise, and its name has been associated, since the late 19th century, but above all since the second half of the 20th, with the industrial sector. This field wa

Álvaro Siza   Spain   Located in the center of Ceuta, block belonged to the Ministry of Defense,  this urban and used to house military barracks. It takes its name from the Paseo de Revellín, a promenade that borders it on the north, and that makes reference to a fortress

Juan Navarro Baldeweg   Spain   Located on the riverbanks of the Arlanzón  as it flows through Burgos, the new complex has a material and fluvial relationship with the Atapuerca site. The paleontological and archaeological findings of Atapuerca were so considerable that it was nece

Francisco Mangado   Spain   Teulada-Moraira is an atypical urban center. Though it is divided into two separate  physical units, it is however a single administrative one. Located in Alicante, in a valley that descends from the mountain to the sea, the town gives up neither its

Spain   The project addresses the peculiarities of both site and program. Regarding the site, it  goes up on the edge of the established city and the future expansion areas. The transition from one type of fabric to another is articulated by a strip of natur

Andrés Cánovas, Atxu Amann, Amann Cánovas & Maruri - Temperaturas Extremas, Nicolás Maruri   Spain   The new museum constitutes the first phase  of a project to improve the accesses to the Castle of Monteagudo – an impressive military fortress built by the Almohads in the 12th century in this small municipality of Murcia –, and its refurbishment in

Barceló Balanzó Arquitectes   Spain   CALA RATJADA – located in the northeast end of Mallorca, some 80 kilometers from  Palma – is a small seaside town with its own port, the most important one of Capdepera and also the one closest to Menorca. It is a small urban center located in a rect

Foster + Partners, Norman Foster   Spain   WITHIN THE growth strategies of Spanish companies, and in particular of Spanish wineries, it is becoming more and more important to invest in intangible assets. Over the past years there has been an increase in the number of signature wineries built

Barozzi Veiga   Spain   Perched over a hill by the Duero River, the town of Roa has a strategic position over the Burgos plateau, which turned it into a fortress during the expansion of the Christian kingdoms towards the south in medieval times. This vantage position howeve

Suárez & Santas Arquitectos   Spain   Located in a business park with access to good transportation infrastructures – between the Pino Montano and San Jerónimo areas, very close to the beltway and the new entry to the city through the north –, the PEASS is an initiative of the Seville Ci

Arroyo Pemjean Arquitectos   Spain   Located close to the convent of San Esteban, the new building houses the  headquarters of the Colegio de Arquitectos (Institute of Architects) of León and its cultural foundation. The building offers views of the cathedral, with its imposing dome and

Mansilla + Tuñón   Spain   The proposal for the Lalín Town Hall moves between precision and probability, building an antimonumental structure in which, as with clouds, each one can recognize the changing forms starting from personal references, so that collective identificatio

MGM Morales De Giles Arquitectos   Spain   An increasing demand urged to equip the Pablo de Olavide University with new  classrooms and student halls. The competition called to fulfill this project had to include the urban plan for the university’s campus on Seville’s outskirts. The new lectu

aldayjover arquitectura y paisaje   Spain   The type of program this building harbors is more commonly found in large houses with garden, and not in a dense urban center as in this case. The regulations determined that the building should go up three levels, so the new volume had to be in

Jordi Badia   Spain   LOCATED IN Barcelona’s industrial belt, the city of Badalona has experienced several  fast-paced transformation processes in the last decades. The first one of them occurred during the developmentalism period due to the massive arrival of immigrants

Ecosistema urbano   Spain   IN THE TOWN OF Rivas Vaciamadrid, located 15 kilometers to the southeast of the capital,  the Plaza Ecópolis project comprises three parts: public space, elementary school and toy library, and regenerates a plot – right by an industrial complex and s

Rueda & Pizarro   Spain   Inspired in the duality between the world of adults and the world of children described in  the work of Lewis Carroll, the project proposes transferring Alice’s universe to the primary school; a world full of sensations, experiences, games, scal

Alejandro Muñoz Miranda   Spain   THIS NEW primary school goes up under the harsh sun of Albolote, a town in the Vega de  Granada county. Its white and abstract volumes stand out in the neighborhood of El Chaparral, a resettlement housing town built in the 1950s under Franco’s regime

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos   Spain   THE SIX large mulberry trees that rise in the Ausiàs March Park determined the design of this building of innovative program. The UPI (Universidad Popular Infantil, or children’s university), in Gandía, takes up a trapezoidal plot located on the sout

Zigzag Arquitectura   Spain   Located in Mieres, a municipality of Asturias with an industrial past – it was an important mining town since the 19th century and center of the iron and steel industry until 1970 –, the building stems from the competition ‘Hacemos ciudad’ (we genera

Coll-Leclerc   Spain   This building of 44 rental social housing units is located in Pardinyes, a neighborhood  in the old part of Lérida, an area whose rural character began to disappear midway through the past century, becoming markedly residential in the 1990s. The plot

Alberola, Díaz-Mauriño & Martorell   Spain   The project called for the construction of 22 social housing units to be rented by youngsters, in the center of El Rastro – an open air flea market held in Madrid’s La Latina quarter on Sundays, and that began in 1740. The area was filled with ‘corra

OAB, Nuria Ayala   Spain   THE SUMMER camp cabin is part of a series of commissions of the same type carried out by the studio in different areas of Catalonia, promoted by the Fundació Catalana de L’Esplai, a non-profit educational association. The project takes three essentia

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The real estate crisis that led to the financial collapse of the emirate of Dubai marks the end of an urban model; another of the Gulf emirates, Abu Dhabi, proposes an alternative model with Masdar, a new city with no emissions and no waste.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Shanghai Expo proposes extending Car-suffering from the effects of the financial crisis, and the whole of it faces the impact of climate change and the mutations of the economic, energy and territorial model that circumstances impose, China once

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Solar time is not the time of the solar house: it is the time of the slow city. Indeed, solar houses as those gathered in Madrid for the first Solar Decathlon in Europe are useful platforms for innovation, and fertile grounds for technological compet

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Ai weiwei has carpeted the Tate Modern in London with 100 million sunflower seeds.  Made of porcelain and painted individually by an army of 1,600 craftsmen, the delicate ceramic seeds cover the floor of the huge Turbine Hall with a thick layer that

Ieoh Ming Pei The China-born North American architect Ieoh Ming Pei has received the 2010 RIBA Gold Medal. Born in Canton in 1917, at 18 he moved to the United States, where he studied architecture at the MIT and then joined Harvard’s GSD, shortly be

Toyo Ito The Imperial House of Japan and the Japan Art Association award the Praemium Imperiale yearly since 1989. Endowed with 15 million Yen (132,000 euros), the prize is presented to five artists in the categories of painting, sculpture, architect

SANAA Kazuyo Sejima (Ibaraki, 1956) and Ryue Nishizawa (Tokyo, 1966) are the Pritzker 2010 laureates. It is the fourth time that the prize goes to Japanese architects – Kenzo Tange received it in 1987, Fumihiko Maki in 1993 and Tadao Ando in 1995 – a

Peter Bohlin Peter Bohlin “Again and again, his work demonstrates that great cities, towns, and buildings are created by designers looking to further the story of their place in a collaborative and contextual way, not by singular architecture that c

Diébédo Francis Kéré The second edition of the BSI Swiss Architectural Award, presented every two years to architects under 50 who have “made an important contribution to contemporary architecture and who have shown particular sensitivity to the land

Rem Koolhaas The jury of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, formed by Beatriz Colomina, Francesco Dal Co, Joseph Grima, Arata Isozaki, Moritz Küng and Trinh T. Minh-ha, conferred the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achiev

MAXXI of Rome  El Museo MAXXI de Roma fue declarado ganador del premio Stirling 2010. Es la cuarta vez que Zaha Hadid optaba a este reconocimiento, el más importante en el campo de la arquitectura en el Reino Unido y uno de los más prestigiosos

Rafael Manzano Rafael Manzano (Cádiz, 1936) has received the Richard H. Driehaus Prize 2010, endowed with $200,000, and awarded by the American University of Notre Dame. Presented yearly, the prize honors excellence in the field of classical arc

Madinat al-Zahra Museum  “The museum is a symbol of the ‘convivencia’ evoked by the name Andalusia, and bears testimony that, indeed, Córdoba is the future, not only the past”. With these words the jury of the Aga Khan Awards referred to the Mad

Instituto de Secundaria en Rafal, Alicante In the 52nd edition of the FAD Awards, four winning works were chosen among the 541 presented to the different categories. The High School in Rafal, Alicante, by Grupo Aranea – directed by Francisco Leyva –

Lluís Clotet The National Architecture Award has gone for the third time in a row to a Catalan architect, in this edition to Lluís Clotet (Barcelona, 1941), who follows Carlos Ferrater and Oriol Bohigas. The jury declared that Clotet deserves the p

Manuel Gallego Created to acknowledge “people and institutions that commend and ennoble architectural activity”, the Gold Medal of the Council of Spanish Architectural Associations has gone in its 2010 edition to Manuel Gallego Jorreto (O Carballiño,

1933-2010 The Austrian architect Raimund Abraham, who would later take on the American nationality, died in Los Angeles at the age of 76. Author of a small number of built projects, among which the most noteworthy is the Austrian Cultural Forum in Ne

1921-2010 Son a modest employee of the Swiss railway company, Ernst Beyeler was one of the most important art dealers and collectors of the second half of the 20th century, aside from directing the foundation that bears his name and being the cofound

1944-2010 Architect and urban theorist, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor William J. Mitchell was born and raised in Australia, where he obtained his Bachelor of Architecture. He later pursued post-graduate studies at Yale and Cambr

1924-2010 A deceptively simple problem, determining the length of Britain’s coast, marked the origin of one of the most influential mathematical discoveries of the past century: fractal geometry. Benoît Mandelbrot, known as the father of fractal geom

1922-2010  The German architect Günter Behnisch, one of the authors of the Olympic Stadium of Munich, passed away at the age of 88. Behnisch, born near Dresden in 1922, was captured at the end of World War II, and remained prisoner of war in England

1925-2010 Bruce J. Graham, author of famous skyscrapers like the John Hancock Center (1970) and the Sears Tower (1974), was born in Colombia in 1925. Son of a Canadian-born international banker, Graham moved to the United States when he was 15 years

1933-2010 The architect, painter and sculptor Joaquín Vaquero Turcios, author of works like the monument in Madrid’s Plaza de Colón (1977), or that devoted to Francesc Macià in Barcelona’s Plaza de Cataluña (1983), died in Santander at the age of 77.

1959-2010 Graduate of the Madrid School of Architecture, Sigfrido Martín Begué was a painter, professor and scenographer, aside from a key figure of the Movida Madrileña of the 1980s. His beginnings as painter in the late 1970s are, however, linked t

1966-2010 Partner of the studio DL+A studio, which he directed with José María de Lapuerta and Paloma Campo, Carlos Asensio was associate professor at the Madrid School of Architecture, where he earned his PhD with a thesis entitled ‘Architecture ope

1957-2010 Expert in urban landscaping and professor of Landscape Architecture at the Barcelona School of Architecture since 1983, Bet Figueras was a member of the Landscape Institute and of the Spanish Association of Landscape Designers. She studied

1919-2010 Born in Jerez, where he would build one of his last and most important works – the covered exercise ring of the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art, a building of traditional Andalusian style built in 1980 –, José Luis Picardo graduat

1921-2010 The Spanish Pavilion for the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958, designed with his partner Ramón Vázquez Molezún – deceased in 1993 – is, probably, the most well-known and praised work by José Antonio Corrales, one of the pioneers of architectur