Luis Fernández-Galiano   From the classical Grand Tour to the contemporary road movie, the journey has always been a route of discovery. Be it a study tour or a random wandering on wheels or rails, moving to other physical, social and cultural geographies is both an educatio

José Miguel Iribas   Since the advent of modernity, the form taken by hotel buildings and complexes has evolved in parallel with notions like leisure, tourism, or business.

Estrella de Diego   Photographed non-stop and presented as icons of immediate consumption, sculpture-buildings are fetishist attractions of contemporary mass tourism.

In their particular responses to climate, reinterpretations of local materials, and rapport with the landscape, the hotels featured in this section reflect the genius of place.

Felipe Assadi   Chile   Situated in the Patagonian pampa, three hours away from civilization, the pavilions of this hotel are built with local materials and raised from the ground in the manner of stilt houses.

Rick Joy Architects   United States   At the foot of a deep canyon, in a valley surrounded by spectacular rocky formations, stands this hotel which in its tones and textures mirrors the landscape surrounding it.

José Carlos Cruz   Portugal   In arrangement and materials the white volumes of this hotel which organically colonizes a meadow of holm oaks and olive trees evoke Islamic and vernacular architecture.

Atkins   Oman   Perched on the edge of an impressive gorge, built with massive walls of local stone, the hotel modernizes the gravity-based system of irrigation that is part of Omani tradition.

PLaT architects   China   Surrounded by interminable dunes, by the Yellow River, is this new, completely prefabricated hotel complex that spreads on the sand in a form recalling that of yurt camps.

A21Studio   Vietnam   A circular depressed courtyard filled with water acts as a climate regulator for this resort inspired in Vietnamese tradition and built by local stonemasons and carpenters.

Kristin Green   Vanuatu   In an unexpected way, this hotel in the South Pacific springs up from the beach with its bold walls of raw concrete, conceived to resist the beating of the region’s cyclones.

Richard Ingersoll   Encyclopedic, hypertextual, and exhausting, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s exhibition lacks the bite of his best intellectual proposals.

Miguel Falomir Faus   Joaquín Bérchez’s photographs take us on a symbolic journey through El Greco’s life and art, and his special relationship with architecture.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The intellectual testament of a historian who left us too soon, the Mies of Detlef Mertins is a colosal interpretation of the German master’s work using canonical projects that serve to introduce different themes through extensive and very generously

Archintorno   Mexico   Designed by the team Archintorno in collaboration with the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Polytechnic University of Turin, this innovation center is situated in the town called Pensamiento Liberal Mexicano, in the state of Oaxaca, a

Rural Studio   United States   This greenhouse is part of Rural Studio Farm, a project which was launched back in 2010 to bring back into use the systems of planting organic foods that had been largely abandoned in industrialized countries, especially in the United States. The bui

Architectural Association (AA)   United Kingdom   The wood drying hut that a group of students enrolled at the Architectural Association in London have put up in Hooke Park, in the southern part of England, serves as a place to store in good conditions the material to be used by other groups in buil

RWTH AAchen University   South Africa   Containing a laboratory and classrooms of Ithuba Skills College in Gauteng, in South Africa, this building was designed and executed by volunteers from Aachen University in the course of a semester that lasted two semesters. The volume is inspired in

University of Stuttgart   South Africa   This house for children in need and volunteers helping them is part of a larger project: the masterplan that, under the name Village of Hope and on the initiative of the NGO Thembalistha, a group of students from the University of Stuttgart has been

Masaki Ogasawara, Keisuke Tsukada, Erika Mikami   Japan   The tsunami of 2011 razed the coast of Tohoku in Japan and the subsequent nuclear crisis dramatically threw light on the fragility of conventional construction and energy generation infrastructures. Since then several initiatives have been made to ac

CoCoon Berlin   It is said that nothing is as practical as good theory. But it’s also true that nothing is as intellectually formative as good practical experience, so university programs that lead to actual constructions are always memorable for students and teache

On 13 June, at the Baluarte auditorium and convention center of Pamplona, the Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad wrapped up its third biennial international congress, closing a series that began in the year 2010 with the motto ‘More for Less’, continu

In the spirit of “returning to the disciplinary values of the profession,” the FAD Architecture Award has gone to ‘Assisted pedestrian route from the center to Saint George’s Castle’, carried out by João Pedro Falcão de Campos to connect Lisbon’s hig

In the wake of Peter Zumthor’s courtyard, Herzog & de Meuron’s oval, and Sou Fujimoto’s poles, we have Smiljan Radic’s translucent stone. In charge of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, the Chilean architect is for sure the least known in the list

Although its walls have yet to be decked with drawings, oil paintings, engravings, and other works of art, one can already get a good idea of the spaces contained in the newly completed Soulages Museum, designed by the firm RCR and built in collabora

With the closing this last June of the major but brief exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum in Toledo, the year of El Greco seemed to languish. This was just a momentary mirage, however, for now the Prado Museum has inaugurated a no less important ret

The work of Richard Hamilton (1922–2011) – polyhedral, uninhibited, long-winded, indifferent to distinctions between genres – is hard to classify. This is a fact that, if possible, gives even greater importance to the major exhibition that up to 13 O

Peter Eisenman   If two things can synthesize the work of one man, then for Massimo Vignelli, the internationally known graphic designer, those two icons would be the Swiss type of Helvetica and the color Super Warm Red. The first issue of Oppositions, the now well-k