After thirty volumes of the Spanish Yearbook, which covers of the best architecture built each year in the country, in 2023 to this special edition we add an international Portfolio featuring the most noteworthy buildings completed outside our border

Luis Fernández-Galiano   At the close of 2023, AV magazine enters its fortieth year, with the Spain Yearbook launched in 1994 having completed thirty volumes, and AV Proyectos turning the corner of twenty years. This triple anniversary encourages to refresh the editorial pro

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In a new epiphany of unease, a crowd chose a symbolic building as a frame for its protest. On 6 January 2021, Trump supporters stormed into the United States Capitol to try to overturn the election of Biden; and on 8 January 2023, Bolsonaro followers

Luis Fernández-Galiano   This country-continent is already the world’s most populated. While humanity hit the 8 billion mark, India surpassed China, showing a demographic strength that contrasts with the decline of the Middle Kingdom, which for the first time in 60 years has

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Dystopia exists, and can be found in El Salvador. In this small Central American country of abrupt geography, tropical climate, and the highest population density on the continent, President Nayib Bukele has launched an unprecedented social experimen

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The landscape is a product of human action. We do not know what the future of the environment shaped by climate emergency will be like, but we do know that those landscapes will be defined by deliberate choices. Haiti’s deforestation contrasts with t

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Two British architects who have foundations in Spain were feted in the month of May: Norman Foster inaugurated the largest retrospective ever done on his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and David Chipperfield was awarded the Pritzker Prize at t

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The desert kingdom builds on the sand. Like other petrostates, Saudi Arabia diversifies its economy to prepare a future without oil; like most of them, it tackles this transformation from the dirigisme of an autocratic regime; and unlike practically

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architecture longs for the exact pleasure of the garden. Photographer José Manuel Ballester – who was already on the cover of ‘Utopías útiles’ with his stripped-down version of The Garden of Earthly Delights – is showing De arboris perennis at the Bo

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Fortress-Europe lodges migrants at sea. The Bibby Stockholm, a residential barge built in 1976 to be used as alternative accommodation, has become a symbol of the migratory crisis upon docking at a British port, coinciding with the approval by the go

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Republic of Turkey celebrates its centenary on 29 October 2023. Founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and led for the past two decades by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country in February suffered earthquakes that left

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Like Samson in his captivity, Israel is eyeless in Gaza. Captured and blinded, the Israeli hero regained his phenomenal strength to tear down the columns that held up the temple and make his enemies perish with him. The Biblical story inspired a poem

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Generative artificial intelligence prefigures digital life. If the great geopolitical event of 2023 is the war in Gaza, perhaps the most important gathering has been the one held at Bletchley Park, where 28 countries warned about the existential dang

Luis Fernández-Galiano   At the end of the past century, a world without walls seemed feasible; in the first decades of this one, walls spread without control. Many are physical, fragmenting the territory with inaccessible precincts; others are judicial, segmenting the popul

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Turkey   At the edge of the medieval Galata district, facing the Bosphorus, a building with industrial airs has replaced the obsolete facilities of what was the country’s first museum of contemporary art.

Herzog & de Meuron   Israel   The design for the National Library of Israel juxtaposes the desire to react to the architectural traditions of the place with the ambition to make a building that is appropriate for our contemporary time – a library that is welcoming, accessible to

MVRDV   Albania   Built in 1988 as a museum dedicated to the communist dictator Enver Hoxha, the Pyramid of Tirana has been converted by the Rotterdam firm MVRDV into a cultural center. Located in the heart of the Albanian capital, it has reopened with the original co

Neri & Hu Design and Research Office   China   Amid the tourist boom that the region is undergoing, a young art center has endeavored to relieve its tight installations with an urban landmark that will give it more visibility.

Studio Gang   United States   The 154-year-old American Museum of Natural History across the upper west side of Central Park has a new wing that establishes a fluid connection among the institution’s various buildings. The new educational programs of the AMNH are organized around

Zaha Hadid Architects   China   A dreamlike construction seeks to pay homage to the popular literary genre that has thrived in a city of millenarian tradition now turned into a dynamic hub of scientific innovation and research.

Lina Ghotmeh   France   This facility in Louviers, Normandy, accommodates 260 crafters of artisanal bags, small leather goods, and equestrian items like saddles and harnesses for the luxury brand Hermès. The project of the Lebanese-French architect Lina Ghotmeh is based on

Níall McLaughlin Architects   Ireland   Located on O'Connell Street, in the heart of the southern Irish city of Limerick, the International Rugby Experience building is respectfully inserted amid historical constructions. Reaching a maximum height close to 34 meters and a total area of 2,1

Behet Bondzio Lin Architects    Taiwan   The cemetery in Hsinchu, known as ‘the wind city’, is located high up on Xiangshan Hill, overlooking the sea and exposed to gusts crossing the Taiwan Strait. Protected by an introspective concrete skin, the main volume harboring the columbarium is fo

Diana Kellogg Architects   India   Within the GYAAN Center, designed by the New York architect Diana Kellogg, stands this school built with local sandstone that welcomes more than 400 girls from families living below the poverty line, in a region where female literacy barely reaches 3

JEJU.studio   Tanzania   The Polish firm Jeju Studio, led by Iwo Borkowicz and Adam Siemaskiewicz, was commissioned by the Wayair Foundation to build a preschool and primary school in the refugee settlement of Ulyankulu, in western Tanzania. The inhabitants of Ulyankulu fled

Productora   Mexico   Laguna was a textile and yarn factory built in the 1920s in Mexico City’s Doctores neighborhood. Carried out by the local firm Productora (Carlos Bedoya, Víctor Jaime, Wonne Ickx, Abel Perles), the project returns the manufacturing facility to its or