Luis Fernández-Galiano   The chaotic exit from Afghanistan is a cultural drama, as well as a geopolitical failure that questions the leadership of the United States.

Few studios have fared better in reading the panorama of a profession in times of crisis, working with limited budgets, often far from the big cities and with programs that require a genuine dose of sustainability. Indeed, for Harquitectes – establis

Harquitectes   Spain   In the historic center of Gratallops, a municipality of Tarragona province, amid narrow streets and houses between party walls, a winery with a built area of 1,289 square meters adapts to its L-shaped plot. With walls as thick as 1.75 meters at most,

Harquitectes   Spain   The residence presents two central spaces, which receive overhead light in order to curb the excessive shade cast by the trees, and are conceived in bioclimatic terms so that they serve as extensions of the garden. The monolayer solution of the ceram

Harquitectes   Spain   The owners, a couple with two children, wanted a house needing practically no maintenance, with a lot of privacy as well as a good relationship with the garden all year round, and with a large workspace. Only the sun, the geometry of the plot (almost

Christ & Gantenbein, Harquitectes   Spain   The new volume is placed opposite the current venue, the Meier building, with the purpose of including the convent and chapel on Plaça dels Angels, which will become the MACBA’s new center of gravity and a symbolic axis connecting the whole public s

Isabelle Regnier   In 1997, Frank Gehry opened with his Guggenheim of Bilbao a new chapter of the history of architecture and city-building: the irruption of spectacular buildings designed by star architects to harbor private institutions, with which municipal councils

Fernanda Canales   The Venice Architecture Biennale, perhaps the most important architectural celebration in the world, focuses this year on the consequences of construction. It tries to encompass buildings and destruction in equal measure, and also the needs of commun

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The American Jason W. Moore and the Swedish Andreas Malm are part of what they call ‘radical academy,’ a group of Marxist writers who teach on both sides of the Atlantic. Capitalism in the Web of Life and Fossil Capital present complementary (and som

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Catastrophe, disaster, apocalypse: amid the existential fear instilled by climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence, a group of authors encourages us to contemplate the future of humanity with active optimism. The risks that threaten the

Eduardo Prieto   Facts keep contradicting those who still hold, with the obstinacy of those who know they’re wrong, that ecology, sustainability, and ‘green thinking’ at large are fads condemned to intellectual extinction. In times of climate woes, this Zeitgeist exp

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Mi trabajo de editor me ha llevado a establecer vínculos estrechos con muchos de los más grandes arquitectos contemporáneos, pero no ha sido así en el caso de Santiago Calatrava. Pese a ser compatriotas y coetáneos, nuestra relación ha sido episódica

A philosopher who loved architecture, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, wrote in the year 1822 that making holes in the earth was perhaps more natural than raising poles or pillars on the surface, and that it perhaps made much more sense to think of the

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Uganda   On the shore of Lake Victoria, a pediatric hospital seeks to provide medical care to young residents of the area while serving as a center for the training of local physicians and nurses. Equipped with three operating rooms and eighty beds, the hospi

Sharon Davis Design   Nepal   The New York practice of Sharon Davis worked with the NGO Possible Health and the Nepalese government in raising new medical facilities in Achham, one of Nepal’s poorest and most remote regions. Surrounded by mountains in the Seti River Valley, the c

Oualalou + Choi   United Arab Emirates   The Moroccan contribution to the next World Expo seeks to demonstrate how traditional construction systems have the potential to give rise to more sustainable development models. The world’s largest facade of rammed earth encompasses twenty-two recta

Mario Cucinella Architects   Italy   A fruit of the collaboration between Mario Cucinella Arquitectos – based in Bologna and New York – and WASP (World’s Advanced Saving Project), the Italian company specialized in 3D printing, this circular housing prototype made of soil is located in

Germano de Castro Pinheiro   Portugal   Successive operations of dubious quality, carried out in the course of recent decades, had disfigured a 16th-century farmhouse, and in adapting it for use as a family residence the objective was to restore original elements of the construction, conso

Stefano Boeri Architetti   Italy   The accidental fall of a young boy into an abyss of Rome’s Esquiline Hill in the 15th century revealed that cavities until then believed to be natural were partly buried vestiges of the Domus Aurea, Nero’s lavish villa, which his successors had hidde

Atelier David Telerman   United States   To the beat of Pink Floyd, Zabriskie Point ends with the leading character getting into his car alone and driving into the Arizona desert, a mythical place with a hostile beauty that Antonioni used as a visual metaphor of the countercultural breakawa

Heretofore Arles was known for its Roman amphitheater, the same one that Aldo Rossi mentioned as an example of urban permanence. Henceforth – and as a symbol of there really being nothing permanent – the historical and rather depressed city of Arles

On 30 June, the architect Roberto Valle passed away at the age of 70. He was born in Orense, studied in Madrid and Valladolid, and made the latter his home, setting up a practice there after his 1976 graduation and serving the provincial government f

Foster + Partners   United States   Crowned by a large roof, the office building designed by the British firm led by Norman Foster for PGA Tour recently opened beside the Ponte Vedra Sawgrass golf club in Florida. The three-story building is arranged around a central atrium, maximizing

Diller Scofidio + Renfro   United States   The curving forms stretching from both sides of a railyard in the city of Colorado Springs connect the US Olympic & Paralympic Museum, a work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro that opened in 2020, to America the Beautiful Park. Also designed by DS+R, t

Heatherwick Studio   United States   The location was the original Pier 54, on Manhattan’s southwest riverside, where the survivors of the Titanic disaster docked. Together with his wife Diane von Furstenberg, Barry Diller had been a key supporter of the celebrated High Line Park in New

It is to go up on what is currently a parking lot in front of the flagship store at Nuevos Ministerios. A property of the department store chain since 2014, this is one of the most coveted sites on Paseo de la Castellana. The building will have a tot

Barozzi Veiga   Spain   The Barcelona Ciutadella del Coneixement initiative aims to transform the area around Ciutadella Park into a southern European hub for innovation in biomedicine, biodiversity, and planetary well-being. The BIST, which will be the first piece in the d

Rubio Arquitectura   Spain   The Val-verde project is the 2021 winner of Reinventing Cities, which seeks to recover and upgrade the iconic Clesa industrial complex, a work of Alejandro de la Sota in Madrid’s Fuencarral-El Pardo district that is currently in a state of abandon. T

Counterspace Studio   United Kingdom   This year’s summer pavilion of the Serpentine, the popular gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens, opens to the public on 11 June, a year after it was supposed to, thanks to the Covid-19 crisis. It was designed by Counterspace, the South African firm

According to statistics gathered by the World Health Organization, as much as 93% of the children of the world are constantly breathing in polluted air. Airbubble is a project developed by the London firm ecologicStudio that endeavors to address this

Carmody Groarke   Germany   A cylindrical pavilion clad in folded aluminum sheets gives ancillary service to the world’s only theater found on the premises of a fully operating daily market of fresh food produce. Facing the brutalist hangar designed by Hermkes that now includes

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The contest between the United States and China traces the outlines of the second Cold War. Both Xi Jinping’s assertive expansionism and Joe Biden’s determined policy of containment paint an oft-repeated historical fresco, that of a power on the rise