Luis Fernández-Galiano   From virus to vaccine, 2020 has been a year on pause. From the detection of the first cases of covid-19 in Wuhan to the announcement of the efficacy of vaccines, we have lived a period of virtual life, locked up in domesticity and our contact with ot

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The virus threat cancels frontiers. The vulnerability of our hyperconnected planet becomes exposed with computer and biological viruses alike. In both cases, the physical or political boundaries of territories and societies seem incapable of containi

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Confinement is easier to endure than uncertainty. Practicing il mestiere di vivere, private space takes on a different meaning, because the intimate shelter becomes a prison cell, and ‘private’ is translated as ‘deprived’ of contact with others. In H

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architects design space, but also time. Imagining the city after the pandemic, they strive to reconcile the need for social distance with the convenience of proximity: on one hand, space is fragmented to avoid contact; on the other, uses are gathered

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The creative destruction defended by Schumpeter deserves another name: corrosive destruction. The oxymoron popularized by the Austrian economist describes the gales of transformation powered by capitalism as forces of creativity that allow a hatching

Harquitectes   Spain   In the historic center of Gratallops, a municipality of Tarragona province, amid narrow streets and houses between party walls, a winery with a built area of 1,289 square meters adapts to its L-shaped plot. With walls as thick as 1.75 meters at most,

Rafael Moneo, Canals Moneo Arquitectos   Spain   With over three centuries of history, Bodegues Ribas is the oldest winery on the island of Mallorca. Since its foundation in 1711, its wines have been produced in Ca’n Ribas – an 18th-century manor house kept intact to date – and the lands around it,

Carme Pinós   Spain   Located at the foot of the Serra de Tramuntana, close to the town of Pollença, in the southernmost tip of Mallorca, Son Brull is a five-star hotel located in an old Jesuit monastery from the 18th century, and which was carefully restored in 2003 by i

Salgado e Liñares   Spain   The client asked for a unique hotel project in Albeida, on a beautiful location at the source of the Muros i Noia estuary, in the parish of San Cosme de Outeiro, which is part of Outes, a municipality of A Coruña province. The project adds nine woode

Ensamble Studio   Spain   Ensamble fabrica is the new prototyping facility and fabrication laboratory of Ensamble Studio in Madrid. Besides serving its purpose as a work place, it is a proof of concept that tests the hybrid steel-concrete construction technology the firm has

Josean Ruiz Esquíroz   Spain   Ever since the first cargo ship carrying intermodal containers docked in Bremen in 1966, their growth and development in international trade has been spectacular. Shipping containers are icons of our globalized society. Almost everything we buy trave

Twobo arquitectura, Luis Twose   Spain   The town of Vilajuïga is in a privileged location, between Serra de Verdera and Cap de Creus natural park, and is well connected to the rest of the region. With a population slightly over 1,000 inhabitants, Vilajuïga has a long food and wine traditio

Antonio Montes Gil   Spain   In the town of Molins de Rei, in Barcelona, the new El Molí Library – previous Biblioteca Pau Vila – is located in the old industrial warehouse of Ferrer y Mora, a textile factory built in 1858, also known as ‘fábrica del molí’ because of its locatio

Magén Arquitectos   Spain   Illueca is a town located in the western part of Zaragoza, and is the administrative center of Aranda, one of the least populated areas of Aragón. To prevent depopulation and provide leisure activities, the town council called a competition to build

BAAS Arquitectura   Spain   The project undertakes the recovery and conversion of an industrial building from 1920 into a museum, highlighting its special configuration in three sheds and its interior textures, and adding layers that adapt it to a new use. The warehouse was goi

GPY Arquitectos   Spain   Jameos del Agua is a natural space and a cutural center conceived by the artist and architect César Manrique, and is part of the network of Art, Culture and Tourism Centers (CATC) of Lanzarote. The intervention, developed in phases over more than twe

Amann Cánovas & Maruri - Temperaturas Extremas   Spain   Located in Molinete Archaeological Park, in the historic center of Cartagena, the museum occupies the ground level and basement of the health center. The project was drafted – with the building of the Roman Curia already excavated –, with the intenti

Barceló Balanzó Arquitectes, Gustau Gili Galfetti , AIA Activitats Arquitectòniques   Spain   Given the huge volume of the functional program – three sports tracks – in regards to the reduced dimension of the plot and the high urban density in the area, an important part of the sports complex is partially buried. By working on the section of

Abraham Castro Neira, Carlos Alberto Pita Abad   Spain   The football stadium of A Gandareira sits at the edge of the urban center of Villa de Bandeira, in the municipality of Silleda, facing the rural landscape. Serving a local sports club and its school, the facility is designed to take in usual traffic,

Pablo Millán   Spain   The Andalusian architect Pablo Millán’s project for the new center of the Parish of Our Lady of the Assumption – located at Plaza de la Constitución 12 in Porcuna, a municipality in the province of Jaén – is being carried out in three phases, the fir

José María Sánchez García   Spain   The proposal is based on the understanding of the hospital building as an urban space, through the recovery and revaluation of its historic qualities, and the appropriate incorporation of the building in the city. The intervention allows the hospital

Gradolí & Sanz arquitectes   Spain   The building lies on the edge of the Valterna residential area, on a stretch of land located between the dwellings and the En Dolça ravine, which separates Valterna from the expansion area of La Pinada, of the same property as the school. The first d

Abalo Alonso Arquitectos   Spain   The main campus of Vigo University is 10 km from the urban center, and with the purpose of expanding its activity, the institution decided to refurbish three buildings in the city. A wood volume rests on the stone supports, which are the only existin

Javier de las Heras Solé   Spain   The project approaches the Zeleieta Zentroa building as an autonomous element. With this idea as starting point, the following objectives are set: in the first place, to turn its party wall into an extra facade to complete and wrap up the entire peri

Carles Enrich   Spain   The old church of Santa Eulàlia in Gironella was built in the mid-14th century and since then it has been repurposed several times. In 1907 the building acquired a civil use and suffered a series of alterations derived from its different activities –

estudioHerreros, MIM-A Arquitectes   Spain   The program – which combines subsidized and free-market housing – practically requires filling the available volume. This limitation, along with the demands of efficiency and simplicity, represents a challenge for the development of a project with so

Romera y Ruiz Arquitectos   Spain   Stacking was one of the primitive activities of men, according to Semper’s classification. This project for 25 sustainable dwellings uses stacking as a means to build concrete tubes with an almost squared section (3,65 x 3,20 meters) that, as bases o

straddle3, Yaiza Terré, Eulia Arkitektura   Spain   The aprop program for provisional housing launched by the City of Barcelona is designed to offer a swift, efficient, and pragmatic response to emergency situations caused by shortage of housing, keeping neighbors from having to leave gentrified distr

Lacol   Spain   The la Borda process was launched in 2012, within the context of a program to recover Can Batlló, where a group of neighbors set up a group to collectively address the issue of access to housing through a cooperative system. The architects’ cooperat

The Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the highest distinction that can be given to a professional in the field in the United Kingdom, went to David Adjaye, one of the leading African architects in the international scene. Born

The fourteenth Alvar Aalto Medal has been handed to Bijoy Lain, director of the Indian architectural office Studio Mumbai. The accolade is a lifetime achievement award which has been handed out since 1967 – currently every three years – by the Alvar

In 2020, for the first time in the history of the award, the Hyatt Foundation gave the Pritzker Prize to a tandem of women: the Irish firm Grafton Architects. The work of Yvonne Farrell (1951) and Shelley McNamara (1952) – in joint practice since 197

Since its creation in 2007, the Swiss Architectural Award conferred by the Accademia di architettura in Mendrisio has made a place for itself among the major international accolades by recognizing emerging figures who have at least three major built

Presided in its 2020 edition by Anna Ramos, the FAD Award for Architecture went to an apartment block in Sant Boi de Llobregat, by the Madrid firm Estudio Herreros in collaboration with the local Estudi d’arquitectura MIMA-A. The jury deemed it “a me

A master of contemporary architecture, Alberto Campo Baeza received Spain’s National Architecture Award, given by the Ministry of Public Works with a prize of 60,000 euros. With this the jury composed of Álvaro Siza, Manuel Gallego, Estrella de Diego

1948-2020 In New York, complications caused by covid-19 claimed the 71-year-old life of Michael Sorkin, an architect and educator whose polemic voice laid bare the contradictions of contemporary urbanism. After graduating from the University of Chica

1940-2020 The year of the plague also claimed the life of a highly influential and original art critic: Germano Celant. Born in Genoa with the war in full swing and trained under Eugenio Battisti, a leading art historian of the 20th century in Italy,

1944-2020  Like Edmund Burke and Kenneth Clarke, Roger Scruton was a typical product of that liberal British tradition that knew to combine conservatism with a lack of preconceptions, and made clarity something more than a mere courtesy to readers. B

1941-2020 A father of ‘radical architecture’ and coauthor of one of the most influential architectural visions of the second half of the 20th century, the Continuous Monument, Adolfo Natalini died on 23 January 2020 at 78 years of age. A graduate of

1937-2020 The designer, bibliophile, and art collector Franco Maria Ricci expired on 10 September in La Magione, the house-archive near his native Parma where, encouraged by Jorge Luis Borges, he built a mythical labyrinth. He was born in 1937 into a

1935-2020 He whom critics called the “wrapper artist,” whose full name was Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, was born on 13 June 1935, the same day as the woman who would be his wife and inseparable companion in artistic endeavors: Jeanne-Claude Denat de

1927-2020 Having contracted the coronavirus, the 92-year-old Vittorio Gregotti succumbed to it on 15 March. He was one of Italy’s most recognized architects and a theorist of importance much followed and admired in Spain during the years of postmoder

1926-2020 A Bostonian born in 1926, Henry N. Cobb spent half of his seventy-year career as partner of a larger figure, Ieoh Ming Pei, and together they ran what for five decades was one of the most versatile and successful practices in American archi

1935-2020 On 27 March, a coronavirus-induced case of pneumonia took the life of Michael McKinnell. He was 84. Born in Manchester, McKinnell attended his city’s university, then left to complete his studies at Columbia University. In the USA, he had h

1926-2020 The “father of modern Iraqi architecture” breathed his last on 11 April at 93 years of age. He was born in Baghdad into an affluent and well connected family; his father, in fact, was president of the National Democratic Party, and this pro

1923-2020 The Hungarian-born French architect and urban planner Yona Friedman – perhaps the last of the great utopian masters of the 20th century – passed away in Paris on 21 February 2020 at the age of 96. After World War II, when being Jewish almos

1932-2020 In the same Ticino canton of his birth to which he was ever bound, Luigi Snozzi fell prey to Covid-19 on 29 December. A master of contemporary Swiss architecture, Snozzi was born in Mendrisio in 1932 and attended ETH Zurich, after which he

1942-2020 In all probability, without Eusebio Leal, Old Havana would have suffered the fate of other historic quarters: degradation, if not outright demolition. Born in the Cuban capital in 1942, Leal was an autodidact who after Castro’s revolution w

1925-2020 Born into a Galician family of intellectuals, Antonio Bonet Correa studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Santiago de Compostela and then at the Sorbonne. He returned to Spain in 1958 and later held chairs in

1948-2020 On the first of May, in the Barcelona of his birth in 1948, the architect, historian, critic, and publisher Carlos Martí Aris died of the coronavirus. He was a cultural reference for the entire profession and a member of the brilliant gener

1929-2020 He who some critics called the “silent artist” – due to both his personal discretion and his objectivist idea of art – passed away at 91 years of age in the Córdoba of his birth. Having studied architecture, in his native city he co-founded

1925-2020 The Navarrese architect and professor Carlos Sobrini Marín passed on at age 95 on 9 December. His prolific professional and teaching career got going after he finished up at the Madrid School of Architecture – where he won the 1952 National

1924-2020 At the patriarchal age of 96, a leader of the postwar generation of Catalan architects died in the Barcelona where he was born into a bourgeois family that originally came from Comillas and Jerez. Federico Correa was educated under professo