Luis Fernández-Galiano   We need emptiness as we need silence. The tiring ‘empty Spain’ controversy draws our attention to the depopulation of vast territories, but does not explain the advantages of having geographical spaces not colonized by sprawl. Some activists prefer t

The social coherence and commitment demonstrated by Grafton Architects, established in 1978, in Dublin, by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, has garnered this year’s Pritzker Prize, the first ever to be conferred on a partnership of women. Arquite

Grafton Architects   United Kingdom   A warehouse of ideas, a labyrinth of interlocking volumes, layers of welcome joining community and university, Town House came into existence born of Kingston University’s progressive educational vision. In this building, sound and silence, exuberant

Grafton Architects   France   Originally a Celtic city, Toulouse, the capital of the southern Occitane Region of France, is known today as La Ville Rose – The Pink City – because of the terracotta brick of the city’s buildings. The School of Economics is positioned on a key site,

Antonio Lucas   Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara were brainstorming for a name for their studio. It was 1978. They combined their surnames, switched their names around, sometimes drifting toward a more abstract or poetic formulation to go by as an architectural d

Vladimir Belogolovsky   We used to be fascinated with the future and newness, we are now scared of it and comforted by nostalgia. Before, we were obsessed with crafting beautiful objects and buildings, today we are much more concerned with raising issues and creating social

Rem Koolhaas   While today the countryside is largely off (our) radar, an ignored realm, considering its condition and future was a priority as recently as the last century – the Soviet Union, the New Deal, Nazi Germany, Mao, and the EU were experimenting with vast

Luis Fernández-Galiano   One Hundred years ago, in 1920, Edith Wharton published The Age of Innocence, a novel about the New York of the ‘Gilded Age’ that many know through the 1993 Scorsese film. If the writer described a vanished society in a time which after the Great War

Jorge Gorostiza   In 1925 the architect and film set designer Robert Mallet Stevens wrote that in cinema, “architecture acts,” is one further actor. Since then, numerous buildings have appeared on screen whose roles in the plots are as important as that of any member

One of the visual premonitions of the coronavirus crisis now hitting us with such rage was the construction in Wuhan of two huge hospitals in little more than fifteen days. With its good points – astonishing speed, logistical mobilization – as well a

KAAN Architecten   France   Accommodating a multipurpose program, the building is resolved with prefabricated portal frames of concrete that play a part in optimizing the use of available indoor space. The monolithic block is composed of a base reserved for retail spaces and a

FAR frohn&rojas   Germany   This building located in Berlin presents a rigorous catalog of pieces of prefabricated concrete which are typically seen in warehouses and industrial sheds. Inside the studios and dwellings that make up the six-floor building, prefabricated finishes

Summary   Portugal   The completely modular, prefabricated structure of reinforced concrete made it possible to comply with the proprietors’ flexibility requirements and execution time frames. The structural modules were prefabricated with elements of reinforced concrete

Anna & Eugeni Bach   Spain   In the gridded extension of La Bisbal d’Empordà (Girona), an old chocolate factory has been transformed into a studio and family home that gives importance to the building’s original character. Hence we have a construction where loadbearing stone fac

Wutopia Lab   China   To build a church within a church: this was the intention of Wutopia Lab for one of Shanghai’s most emblematic bookstores. The first church addressed by the project is an Orthodox temple raised in 1932, the walls of which have been kept intact and th

Batlleiroig   Spain   A work of Enric Batlle, Joan Roig, and Iván Sánchez, the track called the Camino de las Guixeres is part of a larger project for the Igualada Green Ring, the objective of which is to generate a series of footpaths and bicycle lanes around the city’s

Rem Koolhaas at the Guggenheim. The colonization of the field.

The rural world is the future. So says the great guru of international architecture, Rem Koolhaas, in the major show that recently opened its doors in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York. The title, ‘Countryside, the Future,’

1927-2020 Having contracted the coronavirus, the 92-year-old Vittorio Gregotti succumbed to it on 15 March. He was one of Italy’s most recognized architects and a theorist of importance much followed and admired in Spain during the years of postmoder

The partial liberalization of the market for architectural projects in China has in past years led to a hatching of young practices bent on exploring paths other than those of official corporativism or the ‘weird architecture’ of international stardo

Among the thousands of cultural facilities that have enriched China’s tourist infrastructure in the course of the past years, the Wencheng Forest Visitor Center in Xikeng, near the city of Wenzhou, stands out. Carried out by GLA Design, the building

A screen-like building, seemingly trivial but with a scale and urban position that make it a monument, has given OMA / Reiner de Graaf the victory in the contest for the new headquarters of the National Railway Company of Belgium (SNCB), beside the B

For centuries architects were at the service of religious powers-that-be, and temples had priority over all other kinds of buildings. Maybe this explains why so many of today’s veterans are so eager to be commissioned to build churches and chapels. A

The franchise model has reached museums, and with energy, at least for the Carmen Thyssen Collection, whose homes in Madrid, Barcelona, and Málaga will soon be joined by a fourth one in Girona, thanks to a competition where the Madrid firm Nieto Sobe

Directed by Miguel Martínez and Pau Batalla, the firm Emac – an acronym for Mediterranean space for contemporary architecture – carried the day in the ideas competition for a preschool and primary school situated in La Pobla Llarga, a municipality in

The Barcelona practice headed by Boris Bežan and Mónica Juvera, Bax studio, won the invitational competition that was organized for the creation of the Dimnikcobau office complex in the industrial zone of Moste, located in the east-central part of th

Luis Fernández-Galiano   To stop the virus, the globe is raising walls and grinding to a halt. The interruption of travel to contain the spread of the coronavirus and the increased difficulties for the transportation of goods have put globalization in reverse mode, and both