Brexit and Trump have marked a year in which liberal democracies have lost ground to populism and authoritarianism. The wars and failed states of the Middle East and the Maghreb combined with the vigorous demography of Sub-Saharan Africa to produce w
ike Vicente HUIDOBRO’S Altazor, Alejandro Aravena was born at 33. After his training in Santiago and Venice, at the turn of the century he went to Harvard to teach, founded Elemental, and started his Quinta Monroy project, an exemplary experience in
Architecture can build pluralism. In a world shattered by the tension between globalization and nationalism, the built environment can provide stages for this conflict to be choreographed, bridging the gap between the cosmopolitan and the local throu
Summer arrives with storms. A telegraphic chronicle of three days in June presents Europe’s fits and starts at a moment of tribulation that awakens old phantoms. In the first volume of his masterly history of the continent (To Hell and Back: Europe 1
A once young real estate developer and lover of ostentation has surprised the world by making it to the White House with a populist discourse.
Winner in a competition held in the year 2008, the project for the new auditorium of Lugo, a representative building south of the historic center of the city and very close to the River Miño, is set forth as an urban facade, a mirador onto Magoi aven
Located approximately 40 kilometers from Barcelona, the municipality of Llinars del Vallès rests on gently sloping land stretching between the Montseny massif and the coastal range. On a site in the northeast end of the town, the new theater-auditori
The new Palace of Justice goes up as a building open to citizens, functional, transparent, and accessible. If furthermore brings together all the law courts services of La Rioja, up to now scattered in different buildings, while at the same time cont
Located by the River Segre, Balaguer is the capital of La Noguera – the largest county in the province of Lleida, and one of the most heterogeneous due to its different types of landscape –, and also of one of the seven judicial districts of Lleida.
The building goes up on the site of the old market, with a trapezoidal plan, attached to a party wall and with three facades, the shortest one onto Plaza de Colón, the center of which is presided by the medieval Islamic tower, symbol and image of the
The new headquarters of Norvento, a group that specializes in renewable and efficient energy sources, aims to maximize power quality and respect for the environment.
At approximately 100 kilometers from the capital of Badajoz, in the northern part of the province, the city of Don Benito is, with Villanueva de la Serena, the economic center of the Vegas Altas region in Extremadura. The industrial complex of San Is
The site where the new Development Center goes up is located on the urban border of the small town of Calamonte – north of the province of Badajoz, 61 kilometers from the capital of the province and only 7 kilometers from Mérida, the capital of the r
Established in 2001, the Centro Superior de Música del País Vasco (Higher Music Center of the Basque Country) used to be housed in San Sebastián’s Miramar Palace. The new building, located in Plaza de Europa at the Ibaeta campus of the UPV-EHU (Unive
The project establishes a natural and continuous relationship between the building and the historic center through different scales of intervention. In the first place, the nearby urban space of Plaza de la Romanilla blends into the building’s foyer.
The project transforms the old fire station on Lleida Street, built for the 1929 International Exposition, including it in the cultural network known as ‘Montjuïc, Museum Mountain.’ The original building – the first raised for this purpose in Spain –
Two kilometers from the municipality of La Escala, in Girona, north of Costa Brava, Empúries was the gate of entry to Greek and Roman culture in the Peninsula. The sites found in the area (the first excavations were carried out in 1908), form one of
Inaugurated in 1921 by King Alfonso XII of Spain, El Caminito del Rey is a narrow footbridge that was built as a service path for workers, who had to move from the Conde de Guadalhorce dam up to the hydroelectric dam of El Chorro. Little by little it
The architectural site that has reached our days is part of a group of 11th-century buildings around a Benedictine monastery outside the city of Burgos, a crossing point in the Way of Saint James. The church, with three naves and several chapels,
The castle of Garcimuñoz is located in the municipality of the same name, southwest of the province of Cuenca – some 70 kilometers from the capital, at kilometer 156 of the A-3 highway. It goes up on the southern side of a hill, which is not too tall
In the historic center of Palma, Casal Balaguer is a large noble house from the 14th century, refurbished in the 16th and extended in the 18th. At the end of the past century, the City Council decided to convert it into a cultural center, making the
The project adds a new multipurpose space to Escola Gavina, in the Valencian municipality of Picanya. The main building of this learning institution was designed in 1980 by the architect Manuel Portaceli – author also of the extension undertaken som
The idea of constructing a large sports facility (a Basque ‘pelota’ court) in a town with a medium-low density urban tissue and in a rural environment was the project’s main challenge. With a volume that is broken along its northern front, and with a
Sitting at the foot of Collserola mountain, the Montbau-Albert Pérez Baró Library was set up by the neighbors in the 1980s as a public library, occupying two of the three buildings of an old school complex built at the end of the 1950s. The passage
On Granada's Costa Tropical, south of Sierra Nevada and very close to the sea, a slender tower heralds the presence of a new church, a simple concrete piece, close and accessible, rising amid the trees of an open garden. Faced with the challenge of b
The project was developed within the social housing program for the young promotedby the Community of Madrid. This type of rental housing establishes a strict range of 35 to 55 square meters of floor area per dwelling. Working within this range mean
Distribuyéndose en tres cuerpos posados sobre un zócalo de usos mixtos, las viviendas organizan una parte de su programa en torno a un núcleo y abren el resto a una terraza.
The block goes up in Camp Redó, in the urban expansion area of Palma, and is part of a residential complex built in 1954 by Obra Sindical del Hogar (a public housing agency of the time). Its construction was carried out speedily and with a reduced bu
The earthquake that struck the city of Lorca in the year 2011 affected a very high percentage of the buildings in the city, many of which had to be demolished, especially those located in La Viña neighborhood. The San Mateo Residential Development, o
Zaha Hadid Just a few months after her death, Zaha Hadid was awarded the Gold Medal that the Royal Institute of British Architects confers annually on a professional whose work has had a significant influence on the advancement and dissemination of a
Paulo Mendes da Rocha The Imperial House of Japan and the Japan Art Association give yearly since 1989 the Praemium Imperiale to five artists in the categories of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, and Cinema or Theater. In 2016 the awards – e
Alejandro Aravena The same year he directed the 13th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia under the title ‘Reporting from the Front,’ the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena was also presented with the Pritzker Prize, an awa
Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown The partners have won the AIA Gold Medal, becoming the first duo ever to receive an award heretofore reserved for individual architects. The prestigious medal is conferred annually by the Board of Directors of the
Six works Founded in 1977 and awarded by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, directed by the Spaniard Luis Monreal, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture has become the key prize for architecture in the Islamic world and for quality buildings carried out w
Newport Street Gallery Awarded yearly by the Royal Institute of British Architects to a work built by a British architect or studio within the European Union, in 2016 the Stirling Prize has gone to the Newport Street Gallery, designed by Adam Caruso
The Place for Memory With the idea of promoting gravitational balance in architectural production, tilted mainly towards Europe and Asia, the network of Latin American Architecture Biennials (Redbaal) instituted in 2016 the Oscar Niemeyer Prize. Ever
Antonio Almagro The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports presented the National Award for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Goods, with a prize of 30.000 euros, to Antonio Almagra Gorbea, a referent “for the innovative character of his wo
Rafael Moneo Born in Tudela in 1937, Rafael Moneo now holds Spain’s National Award for Architecture, a yearly honor bestowed by the country’s Public Works Ministry in admiration of professionals who have contributed in an extraordinary way to the enr
Eight works The 2016 FAD Award winner in the architecture category went to Arquipélago, a contemporary art center located in São Miguel Island in the Azores, where the firm Menos é Mais Arquitectos has built a severe but harmonious complex out of an
V. López Cotelo / G. Vázquez Consuegra Created in 1981, the Consejo Superior de los Colegios de Arquitectos de España (Spanish Association of Architecture Institutes) gives its Gold Medal to people or institutions that have contributed significantly
Spanish Pavilion The Spanish Pavilion – curated by Iñaqui Carnicero and Carlos Quintáns – won the Golden Lion for national exhibitions. With much economy of means, the curators not only managed to reinforce the general theme of Aravena’s Biennale (wi
1949-2016 The British historian and critic Peter Blundell Jones, champion of a modernity attentive to context, passed away on 19 August. Schooled at London’s Architectural Association in the late 1960s, when it was marked by Archigram’s utopian lyric
(1972-2016) After a short illness, one of the most distinctly personal voices of Portugal’s architectural scene passed away on 18 February. Born in Lisbon in 1972, Diogo Seixas Lopes attended the architecture school of the University of Lisbon and gr
Romaldo Giurgola (1920-2016) An influential and cosmopolitan member of the ‘Philadelphia School’ – to which also belonged architects as heteroclite as Louis Kahn or Robert Venturi – died at the age of 95. Born in 1920 in Galatina (Italy), Romaldo Giu
(1950-2016) Zaha Hadid, one of the most extraordinary figures of the architectural world, died at the age of 65 in Miami, Florida, succumbing to complications surrounding a case of bronchitis. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, she studied mathematics at the Ame
For Claude Parent, dead at 93, architecture was a way to get people to take part in creating a new way of organizing space, which he called ‘oblique function.’ Intellectually this program was forged very early on, when young Parent combined the study
(1929-2016) One of the finest Navarrese architects of the 20th century, author of emblems built in the course of almost six decades, died in Pamplona at 87 years of age. After graduating from the Madrid School of Architecture in 1957, Fernando Redón
1948-2016 A leading protector of Madrid’s architectural heritage, Vicente Patón Jiménez, died on 7 June. Born in the Spanish capital in 1948, Patón studied at its school of architecture under masters like Alejandro de la Sota, Javier Carvajal, Julio
1929-2016 An architect of clear social orientations, Luis Miquel Suárez-Inclán was born in Madrid in 1929. After finishing his studies in 1957, he went to Paris. Finding there an alternative to the “humbug and hillbillyish” modernity of Francoist Mad
1948-2016 Born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1948, Joaquín Casariego successfully combined professional activity with teaching and research. As an architect and urban planner, in partnership with his wife, Elsa Guerra, he carried out works of signific
1921-2016 Gil Parrondo, the only Spaniard in possession of two Oscar statuettes, used to say that a good set decorator has a “sense of color, of architecture, and especially of frame,” and this admirably shows in his work. Born in Luarca in 1921, Man
1926-2016 Born in Mexico City in 1926, Teodoro González de León was a leading modern architect in his country. After studying at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he worked with Carlos Obregón, Carlos Lazo, and Mario Pani from 1942 to 194
The digital viewer from Arquitectura Viva gives you a new experience browsing our publications in a simpler and agile way in all your devices
Try now
