Luis Fernández-Galiano   The change of climate we are engaged in is both material and mental. On the one hand, the impact of climate change on the planet is of such scale that it alters geopolitical balances and forces us to remodel the technical and economic structures of o

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The impact of the economic crisis that broke out in 2008 was especially hard on construction, a sector which had contributed to Spain’s prosperity and its citizens’ well-being through improvements in housing and cities; but a sector, too, that became

Richard Ingersoll   While his name in English evokes an air-conditioned villa (cool house), in Dutch it suggests one of the major anthropogenic causes of climate change: coal. This came to mind because twenty years ago, in the extremely climatized setting of Houston, Te

Llátzer Moix   The partners Jean-Philippe Vassal and Anne Lacaton like to call themselves strategists of the essential. This means that their architectural work aims to address the basic needs of users. And it does so with lightness, delicacy, and friendliness. Als

Antonio Lucas   Louisa Hutton (Norwich, 1957) takes the city as a concept and as a starting point. It was almost thirty years ago that the firm Sauerbruch Hutton was set up in London, to later move its main office to Berlin. She studied at the Architectural Associat

Peter Buchanan   Born in 1952, Dietmar Eberle is the principal of Baumschlager Eberle, founded in 1985. For legal and commercial convenience the practice retains this name, even though Carlo Baumschlager moved on in 2010. As well as running what is now a group of ten

Vicente Verdú   No one really knows whether to call him an emerging or an already established architect, and the ambiguity continues to work in his favor. What’s sure is that Bjarke Ingels, born in 1974 in Copenhagen, is by now a true star in the international scene

César Cervantes   Luis Barragán died in 1988, having bequeathed all his personal objects to his friend Óscar Ignacio González, and entrusted another friend, Ignacio Díaz Morales, with the task of deciding what institution to donate his library to. Díaz Morales then se

William Curtis   The work of Teodoro González de León spans more than half a century but reveals consistent themes and recurrent forms, and these contribute to a distinctive vocabulary. This personal language draws upon many influences, and in order to situate Gonzál

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Crises suspend construction and stimulate reflection. They halt works of architecture and promote works of theory, and Eduardo Prieto’s book is a fruit of these troubled times, which interrupted his career as an architect to give us, in exchange, his

Juegos Olímpicos de Río de Janeiro

François Chaslin   Twelve years after the publication of Le Corbusier’s correspondence with August Perret, and nine after that of his epistolary exchange with the painter Charles L’Eplattenier (his teacher in La Chaux-de-Fonds), Marie-Jeanne Dumont presents Le Corbusie

Alejandro Bernabeu, Jorge Bernabeu   The world keeps growings taller. Standing out has always been the purpose of skyscrapers, and the dimension for this is height. Program, structure, layout, and circulations are strongly conditioned by the vertical dimension. The importance of height

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   Roche Building 1 goes up in Basel’s new area of urban development. The building, standing 178 meters tall, counts a total of 41 floors and presents a profile shaped like a terraced wedge. This new office building houses approximately 2,100 workplaces

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Italy   Located on the edge of the historic town center of Turin, the Torre Intesa Sanpaolo stands 166 meters tall in two parts: a public and technical plinth, and 26 floors of offices crowned by a greenhouse-lookout containing a restaurant, a hall for exhib

Carme Pinós   Mexico   Located in Guadalajara (Mexico), the tower is part of an entire new urban development of the city, surrounded by buildings of similar height. To distinguish itself from them, it adopts a very expressive, almost sculptural slanted form. This form, how

Harquitectes   Spain   Located in a residential complex of L’Escala, the house goes up on a rectangular-shaped plot with a gentle topography, facing north-south and without preexisting conditions, neither vegetation nor built elements. The program was simple, a second resi

The mediatic opening and closing ceremonies (including the usual fireworks, which in this case could be watched from favelas as well) did not manage to cover up what truly distinguished the Rio de Janeiro Games from previous Olympics: the absence of

The architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha is among those distinguished in 2016 with the Praemium Imperiale, given yearly since 1989 by the Imperial Family of Japan and the Japan Art Association, with an endowment of 15 million yen (111,000 euros). Born in

As in drawings by the 16th-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius, with depictions of flayed human bodies flaunting all their inner organs and workings, the recently opened Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center in New York City – Columbia University Med

Publishers and communications media have traditionally paid close attention to their public corporate image, and have banked on internationally prestigious architects to give that image material form. Suffice it to remember the mythical competition f

The American entomologist Edward Osborne Wilson, whose specialty is myrmecology, says that what distinguishes ants and termites from other invasive species, including human beings, is, in ecological terms, how rapidly they developed: 500 million year

The international accounts of Spain’s construction companies stay on the rise and it is estimated that the foreign projects of the ‘six greats’ – ACS, Acciona, Ferrovial, FCC, Sacyr, and OHL –, valued at 101,748 million euros, already account for as

Ricardo Aroca   The picture of destruction is terrifying: a jumble of stones and wooden beams burying people who never got to wake up, while a recent building still standing amid rubble suggests that the catastrophe was not inevitable. We cannot predict the exact ti