European Heritage. Almost unanimously, the 2023 Pritzker laureate’s most admired forte is the sensitivity with which he operates on existing buildings, where he enhances the patina of time while applying his refined grammar, always knowing exactly wh

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Dystopia exists, and can be found in El Salvador. In this small Central American country of abrupt geography, tropical climate, and the highest population density on the continent, President Nayib Bukele has launched an unprecedented social experimen

Almost unanimously, the latest Pritzker laureate’s most admired forte is the sensitivity with which he operates on existing buildings, where he enhances the patina of time while applying his refined geometry, always knowing exactly when to express it

David Chipperfield Architects   Germany   The firm of the British architect David Chipperfield has finished refurbishing the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and it will reopen to the public on 22 August 2021. One of the icons of 20th-century architecture, the museum is the only building buil

David Chipperfield Architects   Germany   The former St. Vincenz hospital, situated in the medieval town center of Paderborn, has been converted by the firm of David Chipperfield into a new headquarters for the company Jacoby Studios. Originally a 17th-century Capuchin monastery, the ensembl

David Chipperfield Architects   Italy   Built on the north side of Piazza de San Marco, one of the most recognizable squares in the world, the Procuratie Vecchie was designed by the architects Mauro Codussi, Bartolomeo Bon and Jacopo Sansovino in the first half of the 16th century, under t

David Chipperfield Architects   Spain   Spain’s leading bank has renovated its headquarters to showcase its rich collection of artworks, and with this it creates a new cultural hub for the city to which it is intimately bound. A gateway between city and sea, the arch that connects the twin

David Chipperfield Architects   Greece   David Chipperfield Architects Berlin has won the contest to revamp and enlarge the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, located in the capital's Exarcheia neighborhood, which possesses one of the world's major collections of prehistoric and anci

Mark Crinson, Richard J. Williams   The breach between the studies of art and architecture is discussed with the help of images by the professor and photographer Joaquín Bérchez.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli   In Bramante’s light, the architect and erstwhile editor of ‘San Rocco’ magazine reflects on the prospects today of a public art that embodies a shared, common experience.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   When reviewing the latest work of the historian, professor, and academician José Manuel Sánchez Ron – which follows Como al león por sus garras and El poder de la ciencia – so great is the challenge of tackling its size that I only dare to apply the

Pablo Canga   Four decades, 784 pages, 600 photos, 85 projects, a coffee-table format measuring 41.2x29.8 cm and weighing 5.75 kg. Such is the monumental scale and ambition of a monograph that expounds on the trajectory of an icon of contemporary architecture. Big

Paulo Martins Barata   In the wake of a retrospective of the Lisbon architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça at Casa da Arquitectura in Matosinhos, the catalog gathers not only the documentation of the ten key buildings presented, but also the proceedings of the debates and c

Eduardo Prieto   The movie Mary Poppins portrays the British suffragists as amusing characters, but does remind us that the fight to emancipate women was an English movement. The scene of the Victorian mother marching with her sister-suffragettes to the cry of “Woman

Juan Miró   A dignified dwelling for everyone was a critical goal of the social agenda of the architects of the Modern Movement, and banning windowless bedrooms can be considered one of their major achievements. In the 20th century, through local or nationwide r

Perhaps because they came from trees, human beings have always had a yearning for heights. First there were the pyramids, the ziggurats, and the towers of Babel, stairs up which to climb to the heavens in pursuit of the gods. Then came the spires of

Álvaro Siza   United States   The Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza has completed a residential high-rise at 611 West 56th Street in New York City, his first work in the United States. With a limestone cladding striking a contrast with its neighbors, the slender, 137-meter tower c

David Chipperfield Architects   United States   This project is situated in Midtown Manhattan, facing the New York Public Library and overlooking Bryant Park. The building, rising 32 floors, consists of a hotel that extends to the 13th floor, with a further 18 floors of private residences. Both pr

Adjaye Associates   United States   Located in the Lower Manhattan financial district, near Tribeca and South Street Seaport, 130 William will rise 240 meters tall, making a bold architectural statement and a unique addition to Manhattan’s iconic skyline. The mixed-use high-rise is des

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United States   In Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, the development called Eagle + West presents two high-rises which complement one another and a smaller third building. The towers – rising 30 and 40 floors – inclu

ArchStudio    China   An everyday universe with echoes of Taoist cosmology and Confucian hierarchy, the Chinese courtyard-house has for thousands of years been the archetype that organizes family life. Although in the last century it had detractors who found it obsolete a

Atelier Oslo   Norway   Not long ago voices began to be heard in certain presidential residences to the effect that the press was the ‘enemy of the people’: an accusation paradoxically alluding to the play through which Ibsen wanted to uphold, among other things, the vital

Maat-Ontwerpers, Bart Lens   Belgium   Miraculously unscathed by the industrialization that the Belgian province of Limburg underwent after coal was discovered there early in the 20th century, Hoge Kempen is an extensive land of forests and heaths that in 2006 became the country’s first –

Disembodied minds

Natural or artificial? The dialectic between the two concepts – which is probably one of the most fundamental in human history – unfolded in two directions. Through science and art, human beings aspired to imitate and surpass nature all around them.

Shortly after a Pritzker sans surprises and sans risks came the announcement of another of architecture’s leading accolades, the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, which for its part has opted to celebrate the ‘off-limits’ and hitherto ignored trajectory

Lluís Jubert - Taller d’Arquitectura, Ferran Pelegrina i Associats    Spain   The project is located in La Joncosa del Montmell, in the comarca of Baix Penedés, where the old vineyards come together on the interior slopes of the massif that lends its name to the municipality. At the end of a pleasant promenade from the town c

Born in Montevideo and raised in Buenos Aires, Rafael Viñoly was a New Yorker at heart, because the Big Apple is where he made it to international stardom as an architect. There, sadly, he ended his days on 2 March, at only 78 years of age. After a l

With the wit and bonhomie that characterized him, Arno Lederer would say that he tried to avoid “the pallor of the corpse from modernity.” Perhaps in the trail of Behrens, Poelzig, and Mendelsohn, the Swabian architect sought to confer a sensual mate

The architect Eugene Kohn passed away last 9 March at the ripe age of 92. He was one of the three pillars of Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, founded in the economically complicated 1970s to become a multinational enterprise running offices on three con

José Ignacio Linazasoro   The architect Miguel Garay was born in 1936 in San Sebastián, where his career unfolded and whose architecture school he designed and taught in. Shortly after completing my studies I got a call from him, with the proposal for the creation of a Cultur

Luis Fernández-Galiano   It is trite to quote Talleyrand (“Ceux qui n’ont pas connu l’Ancien Régime ne pourront jamais savoir ce qu’était la douceur de vivre”) to summon up the Rococo sweetness of aristocratic life before the Revolution, and many of my generation learned to