Upon completing forty years of existence, AV Monographs publishes the second issue of its international Portfolio, which features the most prominent buildings finished abroad, complementing the already classic Spain Yearbook. This time the twelve wor

By a Pythagorean chance, the AV/Arquitectura Viva project – which was born in 1985 and groups the magazines AV Monografías, Arquitectura Viva and AV Proyectos – completes its fortieth year having published 666 issues: 270 each of the first two titles

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Trade unites, and its paths weave a web that holds the world together. Faced with shrinking globalization, with many countries preferring geographical or ideological proximity in their exchanges, to defend the links created by commercial traffic is t

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In the cold Berlin morning, the tractors on the avenue leading to Brandenburg Gate line up with the discipline of an invading army. Norman Mailer wrote The Armies of the Night moved by the 1967 March on the Pentagon, and today’s armies of dawn that h

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Madrid in March has staged the malaise of memory. The city’s Teatro Real has presented The Passenger, an opera whose characters travel on a ship that carries the remembrance of the horror of the Holocaust; the Royal Academy has inaugurated an exhibit

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The 1914 sleepwalking elites are warmongers in 2024: Europe rearms in haste guided by leaders with no biographical experience of conflict. Those born after 1945 have lived on a continent that judged war on its grounds inconceivable, even if the disma

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The tragedy in Gaza is summed up in one image. The Palestinian photographer Mohammed Salem captured with his camera the mourning of the world through two figures intertwined by pain: the 36-year-old woman Inas Abu Maamar embraces the body of her five

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Our continent has gone to the polls at a critical time, and architecture cannot be indifferent to the great dilemmas of the moment, for its own future is essentially tied to climate change, to the protagonism of existing constructions, and to demogra

Luis Fernández-Galiano   With the attempt to assassinate him, Trump steps up from history to myth. More than thirty years ago we gave him space in these pages, in line with the publication of The Art of the Deal, part memoir and part property developer’s manual, and his arri

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Marco Bellocchio released China Is Near in 1967, a satire of bourgeois decadence which mixed Catholic morals, electoral opportunism, and Maoist revolutionary dreams. The ironic proximity of China referred to its ideological influence on the young rad

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, a novel that would become paradigmatic of the Lost Generation. In it, a group of characters travel from Paris to Madrid with an obligatory stopover at the Sanfermines in Pamplona, described in de

Luis Fernández-Galiano   We need more dwellings, and we need better cities. Housing is the field where the main contemporary challenges converge, from youth precarity or mass tourism to uncontrolled immigration or climate change, problems all of them that – beyond requiring

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The DANA of Valencia has violently struck the territory and the consciences. On one hand, it reminds us of our failure in the moderation of climate change, which is making meteorological catastrophes more frequent and intense; on the other, it faces

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Blinded by the war flashes in Ukraine and the Middle East, we fail to see the agony of Sudan. The outcome of the conflict in Ukraine is very important for Europeans, and uncertain due to cracks in the support of the country in the East of the contine

Christian Kerez   Bahrain   Compensating for the lack of parking spots in the former capital is a network of open, flexible constuctions which serve at the same time to give the urban fabric a new character altogether.

NP2F   France   Located at the entrance to the Brazza area of Bordeaux, this sports center has built area exceeding 15,700 square meters and rises 20 meters. The exterior spaces are superimposed like urban squares and streets protected against wind. The building’s m

Gustav Düsing, Max Hacke   Germany   The organizational principle behind this project was based on the idea of a superstructure allowing for constant reconfiguration of the floor plan. The two-level, glass-clad building raised for the Technical University of Braunschweig, in the German

Junya Ishigami + associates   China   This kilometer-long museum in Rizhao, a city in China’s Shandong province, rises on an artificial lake with openings to let water in, flooding the floor. The 20,000-square-meter construction presents a dynamic of varying widths and heights. The obje

La Cabina de la Curiosidad   Ecuador   The tourist center of the indigenous community of Shalalá is located close to the volcanic crater in the Quilotia Lagoon. Promoting sustainable tourism, the complex recently incorporated a circular construction for stalls showing handicraft products,

Colectivo C733    Mexico   San Blas is one of the historical towns of the Riviera Nayarita, which stretches along the coast of the Mexican state of Nayarit. The Secretariat of Agrarian, Land, and Urban Development (SEDATU) sponsored the project to adapt the San Blas Pier to se

A Threshold   India   On land where fruit-bearing plants are grown, arches of different sizes and walls of brick peep through dense vegetation, looking like ruins of an abandoned construction. Outside Kaggalipura, a village some 40 kilometers south of Bangalore, the capit

UAD Zhejiang   China   The Architectural Design & Research Institute of Zhejiang University (UAD) has built a series of public spaces for Wanghu Village, in the mountainous zone of Zhejiang Province in China. In the context of rural revitalization, the objective was to pre

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   The new University Children’s Hospital in Zürich-Lengg, Switzerland’s largest medical center for children and adolescents, comprises two buildings: a low-rise acute-care facility on the south plot, and a cylindrical construction for research and teac

Kengo Kuma, OODA architecture   Portugal   The Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian has reopened after almost four years of renovation works. It is located on the campus of the Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian. The main feature of the intervention carried out by Kengo Kuma – in collaboration with t

KWK Promes   Czech Republic   In Ostrava, capital of the Czech region of Moravia-Silesia, the Polish firm founded by Robert Konieczny, KWK Promes, was entrusted to transform a slaughterhouse that was in a state of ruin into an art gallery. In the superposition of layers showing t

Snøhetta   China   The new center is a quiet oasis of culture in the district where the Chinese capital’s local administration has been concentrating, a ‘sub-center’ that seeks to slow down the crowding of the heart of the metropolis. Protected by a flat roof with larg