Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architecture has a difficult relationship with color. If heroic modernity embraced a clinical, hygienic white, subsequent revisions extended the palette to the natural tones of raw material, but without giving up on the ascetic ideal of chromatic rel

With the scheme it drew up for the competition to extend the Kunstmuseum Basel, Christ & Gantenbein – set up in 1998 by Emanuel Christ (Basel, 1970) and Christoph Gantenbein (St. Gallen, 1971) – became known outside Switzerland, and it has since cons

Christ & Gantenbein   Switzerland   The eclectic amalgam of buildings forming the city’s foremost museum welcomes a fragmented volume that rises on the border of the park and traces the new exhibition route. The new wing attaches itself to the academic composition to close it off, but

Christ & Gantenbein   Switzerland   Located in a picturesque valley, a building quotes from local forms and the industrial aesthetic to house a customer center and testing facility for a global technology firm. A structural grid pursues optimal occupation of the irregular site, with fi

Christ & Gantenbein   Switzerland   Apart from harboring new services for the renowned chocolate company, the project seeks to generate an immersive and dynamic spatial experience. The new flagship building is a rectangular brick volume that reformulates the appearance of the chocolati

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Late in 2018 we published the two volumes of Alexandrine Years, which presented – in two languages, Spanish and English – a collection of articles that appeared in El País from 1993 to 2006: the first one, The Age of Spectacle, covered architecture d

Mauricio Vicent   With his persistent efforts in defense of colonial heritage, Eusebio Leal is credited as the mastermind of the careful restoration of Old Havana.

Julia Ramírez Blanco   The painter and also architect Juan Serrano was one of the founding members of Equipo 57, which pioneered geometric abstraction in Spain.    

Llátzer Moix   Federico Correa had close links to the panorama of his native Barcelona and was teacher to several generations of architects.

Juli Capella   Nonconformist and of strong convictions, Enzo Mari through his designs extolled the value of artisanship in the face of industrialization.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Aphoristic in his teachings, Louis Kahn was torrential in his letters. Those he wrote to Anne Tyng, his collaborator and lover, mother of his daughter Alexandra, were published in 1997 under a title (The Rome Letters 1953-1954) that alludes to the ti

Samir Younés   This book is dedicated to the art of building cities – an art that has been in retreat for several decades but one that is enjoying a vital rebirth since the rise of Modern Traditional Architec-ture more than forty years ago. Nir Buras’s massive and

Eduardo Prieto   Echoing Aristotle, Leon Battista Alberti proclaimed that in architecture, virtue lies in the middle ground: in moderation, balance, the right proportions. The thesis holds for many architects, but especially for Rahul Mehrotra, whose work has managed

Alberto Ballesteros   Robert Capa said that if a photo wasn’t good, it was because the photographer didn’t get close enough to the subject. This holds true for a lot of architecture, self-absorbed and withdrawn from the woes of an increasingly globalized, degraded, and un

Eduardo Prieto   “May you live in interesting times”: the curse that has fallen upon us resembles the one that befell Europeans in the 1930s. The 1937 Paris International Exposition was the last major cosmopolitan event held in Europe before the apocalypse, and desp

It would be hard to name a continent as ignored as Africa, or depicted in more simplistic terms. In Africa lay one of the cradles of civilization – not to say cradle of the human species. Its history has been dotted with moments of crisis but also of

Toshiko Mori   Senegal   The New York practice of architect Toshiko Mori was commissioned by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and the non-profit organization American Friends of Le Korsa (AFLK) to give the remote Senegalese town of Fass a school that can serve 300 childr

Local Studio   South Africa   Applying the principles of urban space to a small developing community, the facility provides spaces where guests can engage with one another as well as with the nature around. Both blocks of the hostel have an outer gallery that connects the modules

Architectopia   Kenya   The construction of two preschool classrooms completes an educational complex that has managed to thrive in a Kenyan village thanks to successive charity efforts and local initiative. For the raising of the two rectangular volumes, the project involv

Albert Faus   Burkina Faso   Shortlisted in the international section of the 2020 FAD Awards, the project submitted by Albert Faus Madrid (Barcelona, 1972) involves reorganizing the Bangre Veenem educational complex, with its existing primary school serving the village of Youlou

Guillermo Hevia, Catalina Poblete   Chile   In Chile’s Los Ríos Region, along the shore of what is one of the South American country’s largest lakes, stands this vacation home designed for a big family. Its construction system – composed of a frame of timber beams and pillars on props – is rem

GPY Arquitectos   Spain   Jameos del Agua is a natural space and a cutural center conceived by the artist and architect César Manrique, and is part of the network of Art, Culture and Tourism Centers (CATC) of Lanzarote. The intervention, developed in phases over more than twe

Italy   Facing the Sicilian coasts and with the imposing presence of Mount Etna in the distance, forty-six freestanding columns stand eight meters tall along the waterfront promenade of Reggio Calabria, forming an orthogonal grid over the sinuous scheme of t

The US Election

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.” This line of the replicant in Blade Runner referred to robotic battles in remote worlds, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to apply it to phenomena we are living right now which, indeed, are pretty hard to b

As part of the Textos críticos series published by Ediciones Asimétricas, Luis Fernández-Galiano has gathered twenty articles that look at architecture and the city from an ecological perspective. The real estate bubble, the transformations in the la

In collaboration with local firms PPA Architectures and Taillandier Architectes Associés, Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture has built MEETT, the city of Toulouse’s new convention and exhibition center. With its 155,000 square meter

Reminiscent of those rooms in mansions of the European nobility and bourgeoisie that were full of motley objects in a clutter, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – Rotterdam’s leading cultural institution, which brings together the legacy of the two illus

The Beijing studio Zhu-Pei has built a museum adjacent to what is left of the thousand-year-old imperial pottery-making complex of the prefectural city of Jingdezhen, a porcelain capital of the world, China’s Sevrès. The building is composed of a ser

On marshland where lotus plants abound, a pair of mid-20th-century granaries that were in disuse have been brought back to life as a 2,448-square-meter art exhibition gallery, thanks to a project carried out by the Shanghai-based firm Roarc Renew, wh

In the capital of the Indian state of Odisha, the New Delhi-based firm Studio Lotus has built new offices for the Department of Agriculture. As a government building it was conceived at the outset strictly for official use, but the architects propose

Michael J. Sandel   When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, the United States, like many other countries, was unprepared. As the contagion spread, the wealthiest country in the world found itself unable to provide even the medical masks and other protective gear that