Radical Work. For Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja, and Lera Samovich, a mix of diversified training, international experience, and above all shared obsessions have carried the day over mere physical ties to the city they work in,

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architecture longs for the exact pleasure of the garden. Photographer José Manuel Ballester – who was already on the cover of ‘Utopías útiles’ with his stripped-down version of The Garden of Earthly Delights – is showing De arboris perennis at the Bo

It is desirable that every generation rebel against its elders, but in Porto the weight of its influential school stamps a degree of know-how that is difficult to shed. Notwithstanding, for Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja, and Ler

fala   Portugal   Exuberant rooms are assembled between two antagonistic marble masks. Unorthodox everyday spaces are built in accordance with a clearly defined syntax and grammar...

fala   Portugal   The Portuguese firm fala – set up in 2013 by Ahmen Belkhodja, Filipe Magalhães, and Ana Luisa Soares – built this transparent guesthouse-studio that takes up the entire width of a narrow garden. Connected to the property's main house by paths of woo

fala   Portugal   Under a cheap metal roof, the interiors form a unity characterized by whiteness and precision, while the outside expression is that of a loose juxtaposition of constructive elements...

fala   Portugal   Six dwellings in two buildings – four identical and two exceptional – surround a communal garden hidden inside a city block, with one architecture tying together the fragmented reality...

fala   Portugal   The renovation respects the building as it is, with its protected, listed main facade, the result of a vertical stacking of various extensions which have functioned well together. The rear facade, less cared for, rises only two levels. The house is

fala   Portugal   An off-center column acts like a hinge and divides each level into equal quadrants. On the lower level, undivided, the column levitates slightly from the ground...

fala   Portugal   In a complex but simple project, a warehouse is taken as an idea of a house, becoming a living room. Scale, materiality, and a ‘kind of memory’ are equally important...

fala   Portugal   Two curved walls run smoothly through both levels, gently dissociating private and public. A longitudinal axis is highlighted by two metallic masks. Users become actors and spectators...

fala   Portugal   A maximum buildable volume was found to be a distorted box, in a project mostly about its interior form. Rising two levels, five houses pretend to be one: a plural wedding cake...

fala   Portugal   An arc conforms to the odd shape of the plot. Steps serves to organize everyday life. A slope directs rainwater. An eccentric form confronts a suburban backdrop...

Josep Maria Montaner   With his multifaceted work, which went far beyond the confines of construction, the eminent architect became one of the leading figures of the Renaixença.

Javier García-Gutiérrez Mosteiro   Characterized by a heavy historical-artistic baggage, the career of the Burgos-born master was closely tied to the flourishing of the modern capital.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   New readings inject sap into revered trunks. The British Academy and the Getty Research Institute have revisited two classics of art history, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, no doubt the masterwork of Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), and T

Lorenzo Ciccarelli   The more famous a building is, the more it is wrapped in myths and clichés, and the more we gain from those who take pains to delve into its history. The Centre Pompidou (1971-1977) is one of the iconic constructions of the 20th century. It helped re

Alberto Ballesteros   “Von Herzen zu Herzen gehen!” The sentiment Beethoven encoded in dedicating his Missa solemnis to Archduke Rudolph is what Paolo Zermani pursues with his most spiritual work. And if the composer of symphonies and sonatas, more than of oratorios, chan

Eduardo Prieto   Crises in publishing, paper supply, reading, humanism, economics, architecture... have jeopardized books, magazines, newspapers, and the usual modes of passing on knowledge. It is no mirage: there is much less reading done now than before, and readin

Jorge Torres   A hundred years after it was published, Vers une architecture remains a source book for anyone wanting to know how the surge of modern architecture happened in the early 20th century. It is most certainly the most circulated, criticized, and interpre

Ptolemy, the Greek pharaoh of Egypt, ordered the building of the Mouseion of Alexandria in the year 280 BC, and in doing this, what he was inventing was not so much a place where erudites could come to study under the sponsorship of the State, but ra

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Turkey   At the edge of the medieval Galata district, facing the Bosphorus, a building with industrial airs has replaced the obsolete facilities of what was the country’s first museum of contemporary art.

SANAA   Australia   The Victorian building of one of the country’s principal art institutions has now been enlarged with a cluster of interconnected pavilions that go about adapting to the topography of the site.

Studio Gang   United States   The 154-year-old American Museum of Natural History across the upper west side of Central Park has a new wing that establishes a fluid connection among the institution’s various buildings. The new educational programs of the AMNH are organized around

Napur Architect   Hungary   After a century and a half of moving around, the state-owned ethnographic collections finally have a permanent home next to the Városliget city park, under a huge passable roof.

Christian Kerez   Czech Republic   This house, with the appearance of a brick fortress, goes up in a quiet suburb northwest of Prague, within close proximity to Villa Müller by Adolf Loos. The construction – which can be divided into three apartments – is formed by sixteen tangent cyl

EFFEKT   Norway   Considered the father of modern skiing, Sondre Norheim turned into a full-fledged sport what up to the mid-19th century was little more than a traditional means of locomotion, and popularized the slalom – in the local dialect, a course along a smooth

Estudio Além   Portugal   Portugal was born in Guimarães. At least that is what the – modern – inscription on one of its walls says, in allusion to the fact that the first independent Portuguese king, Afonso Henriques, established his court in this town, after defeating the a

Royal Collections

Like a jewelry box, a treasure chest, or a Wunderkammer, the Royal Collections Gallery opened its doors in the city of Madrid last 28 June to showcase its extraordinary architecture, in addition to its no less extraordinary collection of objects whic

That a country as glued to its past as the UK should be the cradle of avant-garde architecture might seem a paradox, but high-tech is as British as Perpendicular Gothic and Tudor Style, thanks to a group of professionals who inherited the best of 19t

Neri & Hu Design and Research Office   China   Amid the tourist boom that the region is undergoing, a young art center has endeavored to relieve its tight installations with an urban landmark that will give it more visibility.

Behet Bondzio Lin Architects    Taiwan   The cemetery in Hsinchu, known as ‘the wind city’, is located high up on Xiangshan Hill, overlooking the sea and exposed to gusts crossing the Taiwan Strait. Protected by an introspective concrete skin, the main volume harboring the columbarium is fo

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   Spain   The Madrid practice of Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano has won the international competition to refurbish, restore, and expand St.Clare’s Convent as the new home of the Pontevedra Provincial Museum. Their scheme was selected over those of the ot

Tuñón y Albornoz Arquitectos   Netherlands   The team formed by the Spanish practice of Tuñón y Albornoz and the Belgian firm Dhoore-Vanweert Architecten has won the public tender to revamp the Landbouwbelang block in the Dutch city of Maastricht. Covering a built area of 40,500 square meters,

Fenwick Iribarren Architects   Serbia   The Spanish firm Fenwick Iribarren Architects (FIA) designed and developed the project presented by Serbia for the 2027 Belgrade Expo, and it has carried the day over the other bids to host the event, including that of the city of Málaga. The Expo wi

“At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea.” With these verses from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Juan Muñoz returns to his native land, and seventy decades after his birth, when he would have b

After decades of supporting young artists, the Botín Foundation has decided to give its former grant-holders a greater presence at its center in the city of Santander, through works of theirs that also serve to create fresh views of the institution’s

“Dissolution and accumulation; propagation and separation; particulate obliteration and unseen reverberations from the universe—these were to become the foundations of my art, and they were already taking shape at this time.” Yayoi Kusama. Japanese a

Luis Fernández-Galiano   For many, this title is an oxymoron. It seems that associating modernity and beauty is as provocative as writing frozen fire or the sound of silence. To use André Bretón’s famous line, “[modern] beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all,” intro