Luis Fernández-Galiano   City air makes us free; city air kills us; and city air saves us. Urban humanity lived a drama in three acts: the bourgeois revolution ended feudal or class servitude, because as the medieval German saying goes, Stadtluft macht frei; the industrial r

Since they won the 2015 Mies van der Rohe Award for the Mieczysław Karłowicz Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, Barozzi Veiga – set up in Barcelona in 2004 by Fabrizio Barozzi (Rovereto, Italy, 1976) and Alberto Veiga (Santiago de Compostela, 1973) – ha

Barozzi Veiga   Switzerland   The new art district of Lausanne is an urban regeneration plan that includes the construction of venues for the city’s most important museum institutions and the regeneration of a run-down area by the train station. The new cultural facilities are or

Barozzi Veiga   Switzerland   Located along the river Limmat, on the spot occupied by old building, destroyed by fire in 2012, the Tanzhaus Zürich stands as an important cultural institution, a school of dance that has become the symbolic center of the neighborhood. The project a

Barozzi Veiga   Italy   The historic center of bruneck, a small town in the Bolzano province of the Italian Alps is a unique urban agglomeration composed of a series of aristocratic villas featuring a large garden enclosed by walls. One of these former aristocratic villas

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Se recogen aquí algunas reacciones críticas a Años alejandrinos, los dos volúmenes que reunían una buena parte de mis artículos en El País entre 1993 y 2006. La obra fue presentada por Norman Foster y Rafael Moneo el 19 de febrero en Ivorypress, y el

Richard Ingersoll   When does news become history? Considering the current threat of climate change, I often wonder if a historical vision will survive the 21st century; but if it does, those concerned with what happened in architecture during the last decade of the 20t

Miguel Aguiló   The subtitle ‘A Chronicle of Architecture’ raises the question of why the author calls this compilation of writings a ‘chronicle’ instead of a ‘critique,’ given that his opinion is held in esteem within the profession worldwide. His academic trajecto

Isabelle Regnier   Pendant quatorze ans, de 1993 à 2006, Luis Fernández-Galiano a dirigé la rubrique architecture du quotidien espagnol El País. Architecte de formation, professeur à l’Université Polytechnique de Madrid et dans de nombreuses grandes écoles à travers le

Casabella   Prima gli anni dell’ottimismo giustificato dalla crescita economica e dai successi ottenuti dalla Spagna dopo il 1992; poi quelli della crisi dopo la distruzione delle torri gemelle a New York (e sullo sfondo il 2008 e il fallimento della banca Lehma

François Chaslin   Je suis enfin, depuis deux heures, en possession de ces kilos de réflexion que j’ai été chercher en autobus dans un dépôt UPS au fin fonds de ma triste banlieue (on y vend aussi des DVP, essentiellement pornographiques tant est grande, ici, la misère

Kenneth Frampton   Please excuse my very delayed response to your Alexandrine Years. I have been preoccupied of late in trying to finish, at long last, the ‘impossible’ expansion of Modern Architecture: A Critical History so as to shift the focus away from Europe and t

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Modern architecture was based on montage and the metropolis. This is the main point of the splendid work of the Swiss historian Martino Stierli, chief curator of architecture at the MoMA. With elegant prose and excellent illustrations, Stierli reconc

Eduardo Prieto   Architecture is in crisis. So is criticism. Fragmented into narratives and poetics, the former can’t quite find its place in late-stage capitalism. The latter, ignored by the public, media, and architects themselves, has lost the regulatory role it o

Reto Geiser   Many years ago, when Carola Giedion-Welcker and Sigfried Giedion’s son Andres welcomed me to the family’s home in Zurich, he shared a vivid picture of the days when his parents held a weekly jour-fixe in this neoclassical villa packed with books and

It is difficult to name a country where the modern program of social reform and hygienization through housing has been as strong as in France. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier declared architecture to be a crucial instrument in addressing societal ills Arc

Sou Fujimoto Architects, OXO Architects   France   Inspired by the Mediterranean tradition of outdoor living, the design of this iconic tower is the result of the collaboration of Sou Fujimoto Architects with two young French studios, Laisné Roussel and Manal Rachdi. The 17-story building, located in

Aires Mateus, AAVP architecture   France   With a composition of series, encounters, and indentations that make the facade a dazzling urban altarpiece, the building rises fifty meters over the horizon of Paris.

MAD Architects   France   The cantilevers of MAD’s first residential building in Europe, constructed with white concrete, wrap around the facade to give splendid views of the Eiffel Tower.

Jean Nouvel   France   A delicate bioclimate filter creates a perimetral communal space and gives a distinct character to a mixed-use tower located in Confluence, a new neighborhood in Lyon.

ArchStudio    China   The project involved renovating a siheyuan – a historical Chinese type of residence – located in Beijing’s Dongcheng District. Originally there was a group of unconnected volumes under a flat roof, a rare feature in constructions of this kind, charac

Junya Ishigami + associates   China   Located in the Lujiazui financial district of the economic capital of China, the retail store of the eyewear brand JINS is conceived as a large central space free of structural obstructions, making for optimal circulation of customers and flexible pr

Zaha Hadid's Beijing Airport

The first gates of cities were the triumphal arches through which enlightened governments sought to imitate ancient Rome; later, the grand foyers of train stations, true monuments of the industrial city. Today we have the airports, symbols of global

Like all clichés, the one that associates architecture of the Islamic world with either the simple replication of traditional styles or the ostentation of glass skyscrapers, results in a caricature. In fact there is no scarcity of admirable works, fr

The Thai architect Booserm Premthada, born in a Bangkok slum, made a name for himself with his early projects, so respectful towards context and local building traditions (see Arquitectura Viva 151 and 200). This is certainly evident in one of his la

Two issues ago, in time with the opening of Lausanne’s Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts, we highlighted the splendid international trajectory of Barozzi Veiga, dotted as it is with building works as iconic as the Mieczyslaw Karlowicz Philharmonic Hall in

As regards Spanish architects succeeding internationally, the firm of Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano boasts an already long list of projects located in Germany, Austria, and Estonia (see Arquitectura Viva 209), the most recent addition to which

With their proven grasp of the contexts of places, the husband-and-wife architecture team of Ignacio Pedrosa and Ángela García de Paredes has won the ideas competition for the refurbishment of Praza do Mar in Sanxenxo (Pontevedra) and its immediate s

The search for powerful identifying images has made it increasingly usual for professionals of very different fields to join hands, hence the alliance between chef René Redzepi – owner of Noma, one of the world’s top restaurants – and the architect B

Eating is a natural thing to do but it is also a cultural activity, and this would to a large extent explain the exquisite attention and care that the leading chefs are in the practice of putting into the construction and design of their kitchens a

We have our star chefs – and of course our sports stars – but would be at a loss to think of other such clear cases of stardom within the ‘Brand Spain.’ And as far as Spanish chefs go, it is hard to find a success story coming close to that of José A

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The generic title Alexandrine Years has caused some bewilderment, and I find myself compelled to explain it. On the one hand, it refers to the Alexandrine verse form of fourteen syllables divided into two hemistiches of seven, numbers that matched th