The formal and programmatic daring demonstrated by Atxu Amann, Andrés Cánovas, and Nicolás Maruri is patent in their colorful dwellings that liven up the Madrid outskirts as well as in the lightweight Spanish Pavilion at the Expo in Dubai, but the tr

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The war warning of European elites has feet of clay. Robert Kagan coined in 2003 a metaphor that stuck: “On major international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” This was the opening line of his Of Paradise and P

To the beat of their hits, singers like Love Yi and bands like Locoplaya or Hinds perfectly capture the formal and programmatic daring demonstrated by Atxu Amann, Andrés Cánovas, and Nicolás Maruri. But beyond their colorful housing projects that liv

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

Amann Cánovas & Maruri - Temperaturas Extremas, AMM - Adelino Magalhaes   Luxembourg   A 2013 competition involving three residential buildings for the Société Nationale des Habitations à Bon Marché, in Luxembourg’s Kirchberg quarter, was won by the Madrid practice of Atxu Amann, Andrés Cánovas, and Nicolás Maruri – in collaboration wi

Amann Cánovas & Maruri - Temperaturas Extremas, AMM - Adelino Magalhaes   Luxembourg   - Two Madrid practices – the studio of Atxu Amann, Andrés Cánovas, and Nicolás Maruri on the one hand, and AMM-Adelino Magalhaes on the other – have in collaboration with João Nunes and Carlos Ribas of the Lisbon-based landscape architecture firm PRO

Amann Cánovas & Maruri - Temperaturas Extremas, AMM - Adelino Magalhaes   Luxembourg   Aiming to blend into the place like just another tree, this project is located in a forest of the city of Luxembourg, listed as a Natura 2000 site; that is, a conservation areas for the protection of biodiversity in the European Union. With the colla

Joaquín Medina Warmburg   On several occasions, the architect and researcher Frei Otto urged his colleagues in the profession to once and for all stop building in a way that was contrary to nature. Paradoxically, he also declared that he did not conceive of anything existing

Eduardo Prieto   If he had persevered in his longevity, Robert Venturi would have turned a hundred in 2025, and the centenary would perhaps have been observed with the unsettling kind of devotion that legends bent on continuing to live beyond their time stir up. But

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Ever alert as we are to what is said about us abroad, any article printed in the foreign press causes a stir in Spain. In the same way, books by Hispanists spark special curiosity. So it is surprising that the elegant volume by J.B. Trend, The Civili

Luis Fernández-Galiano   There has been much abuse of the oxymoron serio ludere in describing works where rigor comes with a smile, but what better way to describe the designs of Carme Pinós. Gathered in a Madrid space and simultaneously in a small book, the Barcelona archit

Alejandra Galache   What do a crustacean, the Joseon dynasty, and Lebanon’s capital have in common? Little more than being in one improbable question. For Lina Ghotmeh, the answer is in microwaves. This book is an eclectic array of visual essays, spiced up with brief no

Ginés Garrido   The one-family house has been a fertile field for experiments, revealing strategies applicable to more complex projects. This is the area Felipe Assadi has operated in, and the book presents eighteen houses built from 1997 to 2024, mostly in natural

Angela Pang   Architects who paint – from Le Corbusier to Zaha Hadid, among many – illustrate the interdependence of art and architecture, although most architects treat art as a representation and a conceptual tool. Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen, how

Ana Esteban Maluenda   “Mexican Modernist architecture came into its own during the twentieth century… [and] effectively prevailed thereafter. Indeed, the influence of Mexican Modernist architecture… is still alive and well today, shaping the production of current architec

Alberto Ballesteros   A laconic title. Behind the cover, an Atlantic scape. Next page, what looks like an attic, delimited by blocks of unfaced concrete. Then a terrace overhanging the garden one perceives to be part of a private house... And so with the next 300 pages: j

Enrique Morillo   Mere mention of another catalog of architecture photographs, the outcome of an exhibition, may make one yawn, especially if the cover promises a new comparison between two figures with little in common, and its flap asks about the role photography sh

Can we blame the Venetians for blowing up the Parthenon in 1687, when it was a Turkish arsenal? Or the popes for seeing the marbles of imperial forums as perfect quarries for building works of Baroque Rome? Like any other cultural concept, architectu

Arturo Franco   Spain   On the slope of Mount Pindo stands A casa das silvas, the oldest house in the Galician town of Panchés, the roof of which collapsed close to forty years ago. With the passage of time, a piece of mountain pierced through the walls, making it a home fo

Martino Picchedda   Italy   Of what in the 19th century was an agrarian landowner’s residence, all that remain are some pieces of masonry walls that have now been consolidated to form an open-air exhibition space. The decay of stonework faces was arrested by clearing them of ve

Arno Brandlhuber, Manfred Pernice   Poland   Instead of reconstructing the fallen roof, the project of converting an animal shed into a studio inserts a free-standing structure so as not to overburden the fragile existing walls. Unshackled of loads to bear, the brickwork and a gable-end kept up

Medprostor    Slovenia   The Slovenian architecture firm Medprostor – founded by Jerneja Fischer Knap, Rok Žnidaršič, and Samo Mlakar – carried out this intervention that included a movable, foldable roof to preserve the remains of the Romanesque church of the Carthusian mon

Bojaus   Spain   In its abstract and material essence, the X house arises from a tension between a stunning location and the desire to inhabit it. The conflict is addressed with a firm determination to create a new element that is not ‘in,’ but ‘of’ the landscape, in

Jakob + MacFarlane   France   One aspiration of the avant-gardes was to break the box, but the Nouvelle-Aquitaine regional center of contemporary art only had to open it: a simple two-level volume was inserted into the central void of a disused printing press to expand the exhibi

GN Architects   China   The elderly of Chaishan Island still fondly remember that its rugged coast – now only visited by the occasional ferry – was up to not long ago a thriving port, where arriving sailors were welcomed under the trees that stood at the entrance into the v

The Rise of Saudi Arabia

The Arabia Felix that supplied the ancient world with frankincense, myrrh, and cinnamon – in present-day Yemen – has moved to the northeast of the peninsula, towards what in the greater part of history was simply Arabia Deserta. In the 1930s, under t

The Japanese studio SANAA, led by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, has been awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The annual prize is recognition for people who have significantly influenced and transforme

Little-known today, Arnold William Brunner was a New York architect who was very active professionally, and especially institutionally, between the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. To honor him, in 1955 the American Academy of Arts and Letters cr

The Ecuadoran practice Al Borde, founded in Quito by David Barragán, Esteban Benavides, María Luisa Borja, and Pascual Gangotena, has won the 2024 BancaStato Swiss Architectural Award 2024. Promoted by Fondazione Teatro dell’architettura in collabora

Compared with musicians or painters, who can show their talent from a tender age, architects are altricial creatures that need time to mature before producing their first fruits. But, Manuel Bouzas is impressively precocious: barely in this thirties,

“Young Caipira dressed by Poiret.” These words of her second husband, the modernist poet Oswald de Andrade, sums up the contradictions that surround Tarsila do Amaral: a woman of the world, born into a wealthy family of landowners and brought up with

When a judge’s daughter, a painter in the making, saw Jackson Pollock in action at one of his ‘drippings’ in a New York gallery, she knew that her approach to the canvas would never be the same again. With that experience she gave up the easel, knelt

José Manuel Sánchez Ron   On 4 October 1914, barely two months after the outbreak of World War I, ninety-three German intellectuals issued a proclamation ‘To the Civilized World.’ “As representatives of German Science and Art… as heralds of truth we raise our voices… It is no