Luis Fernández-Galiano   Density matters. Accustomed to publishing in great detail works of unique qualitative value, we often forget how important their quantitative context is. And yet, this aspect often determines whether they succeed or fail. In the residential field den

Norman Foster   With a foreword by Norman Foster, Vishaan Chakrabarti’s book shows through intuitive diagrams the advantages of the dense city in terms of land and energy use, transportation and social cohesion. 

JDS Architects   Denmark   Without losing out on density, this residential complex located at the port of the city of Aarhus opens up, fragments, dislocates, and forms facets, all in pursuit of natural light and views.

Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP)   United Kingdom   With its hypertrophic triangulations and huge crystalline surfaces, the envelope of the four new residential blocks recalls the industrial past of this riverside area.

OFIS Architects   France   This 192-unit student residence in Paris occupies a very narrow lot, presenting a random-looking wooden facade on one side and a triangulated metal wall on the other.

MAD Architects   Canada   While the stacking accomplished in these two high-rises helps to densify the neighborhood through residential uses, their wiggly shapes make them a visual landmark in the city.

Isay Weinfeld   Brazil   The traditional type of residential layout around a courtyard adopts an unexpected vertical and dense scheme where privacy is ensured but homes are also opened to views.

Steven Holl   China   This complex situated at the heart of the city of Chengdu is organized in sculptural mixed-use blocks arranged around a green public plaza that alludes to local tradition.

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Netherlands   De Rotterdam is conceived as a vertical city: three interconnected mixed-use towers accommodating offices, apartments, a hotel, conference facilities, shops, restaurants, and cafes. The towers are part of the ongoing redevelopment of the old harbor d

Francisco G. de Canales   Rafael Moneo: A Theoretical Reflection from within the Profession is the first major retrospective on the oeuvre of the Navarrese architect. 

David Chipperfield Architects   Mexico   The Jumex Museum by David Chipperfield in Mexico City rises as an icon amid complex circumstannces. The British architect’s first work in Latin America solves three paradoxes: how to insert a building into a tight plot with fragmented surroundings; h

Eduardo Prieto   “The hand is the window on to the mind.” Kant’s remark suggests that there can be no ideas without objects, just as there can be no architecture without matter and fingers to caress it. The world touches us: Juhani Pallasmaa has devoted his entire c

Fernando Quesada   This boos is the second edition of a dissertation defended in 1982. Addressing the disintegration of style in architecture, it is structured in three parts. In the first, in relation to the decline of classicism and the triumph of eclecticism during

Darío Álvarez   Architects always needed to subject the design process to a certain order. That modern architects did too is shown in this brief but intense look at a compositional strategy widely used in the 20th century: the grid. With his usual rigor the author d

Eduardo Prieto   David chipperfield lives in the present without ceasing to look at the past. The literary critic Harold Bloom, referring to writers’ clash with predecessors, spoke of the ‘anxiety of influences’. But Chipperfield is an architect who can bring out the

Maite Báguena   Intense research and over a hundred hours of talks with Paulo Mendes da Rocha form the material of this rewriting of the São Paulo architect’s trajectory. Illustrated with original plans, it conveys the thrill of one who finds, studies, and stores la

Eduardo Prieto   In the olden days, wood was not only a common building material, but the material par excellence. The etymology of madera (wood) reminds us of this, the word coming from materia (matter), and this in turn from mater, which for the Romans was not only

AAVP architecture   France   The Casarès-Doisneau intermunicipal school and social center in the French city of Saint-Denis comprises two buildings organized around a courtyard and characterized by the strong stamp of wood, as much in the structures as in the finishing touches.

Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architecten   Netherlands   The design of this cultural center in a suburb of the city of Amersfoort, in the Netherlands, is the result of modularizing, composing, and interlocking a series of simple wooden volumes of cubic forms and varied dimensions. The geometric and the co

51N4E   Belgium   This center for assisted living is located in a clearing of a small forest in Zoersel, a village on the outskirts of the city of Antwerp (Belgium). Its irregularly sinuous floor plan follows the positions of the trees, in an endeavor to endow the bui

Gramazio & Kohler   Switzerland   Located at 2,883 meters above sea level, in the Monte Rosa Massif of the Pennine Alps, is this mountain shelter, a fruit of collaboration between the architecture department at ETH Zurich and the SAC (Swiss Alpine Club). It is a unique construction o

Carlos Quintáns   Spain   Located in an exceptionally beautiful valley in the heart of the Ancares region, in the Galician province of Lugo, this house rises on preexisting ones: a palleiro (straw loft) and an eira (threshing floor) beside it. The new building makes use of th

The enormous wounds that the works on the widening of the canal have left on Panamanian territory suggest the voracious nature of the project; the same voracity that, due to malaria and too much optimism, previously led Ferdinand de Lesseps’s company

Since its first edition back in the year 1988, the competition Europan has been a major incentive for architects below the age of forty, for whom capping a first award has constituted an unequaled opportunity to build for the first time, often even a

Althouth it has lost some respectability because of the proliferation of banal sequels, the Guggenheim Effect begun in Bilbao remains feasible in certain contexts. The people of the French city of Lens will probably agree with this statement, witness

All that is solid melts into air: Karl Marx’s statement can be applied to the real estate market of a Spain steep in crisis. In the past, people counted on one day retiring from the same company that gave them the job of their life, after years of go

With its population of 4,500,000 and its strategic location, straddling Europe and Asia, Georgia is the black sheep of the Caucasus, at least in the eyes of Russia, which disapproves of the Georgian aspiration to become part of NATO and the European

Fernando Valderrama   The palindrome ‘A man, a plan, a canal: Panama’ is current news thanks to the billions being claimed in cost overruns by the consortium executing the work, led by Sacyr. Circumstances may indeed have come about that make it impossible to finish the w