Luis Fernández-Galiano   Perhaps like us, buildings live in time and perish in space. They are built over years or decades and often last centuries, suffering the ravages of weather, use or conflict, experimenting metamorphoses or changes and in the end being demolished or c

The early moderns saw the past as a hindrance to eliminate or at least transcend and ‘go beyond.’ But as modernity matured, becoming less and less ‘modern,’ the past tended to shed its bad reputation and eventually carved an actual niche for itself i

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Italy   Fulvio Irace “I think it is very possible that just as you cannot be critical of oxygen, you cannot be critical of shopping. Shopping for me is another word for modernization.” In 2001, when Rem Koolhaas disseminated his manifesto on shopping as “the

Dominique Perrault Architecture   France   Characterized by its exquisite deference to the surroundings, the intervention on the Pavilion Dufour at the Palace of Versailles manifests itself externally only through a discreet, delicate staircase. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The recent opening of a Torroja Museum in Madrid’s Zarzuela Racecourse will help to improve his recognition in the histories of modern architecture. 

Juhani Pallasmaa   With the publication of Robert McCarter’s monograph ‘Steven Holl’ for pretext, Juhano Pallasmaa takes stock of the American architect’s singular work. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Triggered by a visit to Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, the most important critical work of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron to date uses transparency as a litmus paper for examining the nature of artistic and architectural modernity, in a j

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architecture can build pluralism. In a world shattered by the tension between globalization and nationalism, the built environment can provide stages for this conflict to be choreographed, bridging the gap between the cosmopolitan and the local throu

Miguel Nevado   A good part of multistoried residential construction was executed, from the start, in wood. This was how it was until the time between the early 19th century and the early 20th, when things changed. Its availability, its versatility, and the favorabl

Aires Mateus   Portugal   The domestic projects of Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus are characterized by an unyielding faith in geometry, and express themselves in the form of abstract and exquisite volumes that establish a relationship through contrast with the landscape, u

Victor Hugo said that the history of a civilization is not written in monuments, but in its sewers. Nowadays, these sewers are borders between nations, boundaries heated up by friction between unequal economies and cultures, which end up igniting. Eu

Created in 1981, the Gold Medal for Architecture that is given by the Spanish Association of Architecture Institutes (CSCAE) – on this year’s jury of which have sat Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Manuel Gallego, Francisco Jarauta, and Jordi Ludevid – has gon

Architects make a widely varying use of metaphor. Sometimes metaphors serve to establish connections among different disciplines, as when modern architects declared that buildings had to be ‘machines.’ Other times, metaphors make it possible to unch

Speaking of metaphors, Toyo Ito also often resorts, with greater or lesser success, to analogies and comparisons. His latest major work, the building for the National Taichung Theater – a complex with an area of 34,000 square meters and whose constru

If there is a common note in the career of Antonio Cruz and Antonio Ortiz, from their splendid housing on Doña María Coronel street in Seville (1974-1976) up to the stadium, currently under construction, for the Atlético de Madrid Football Club, that

Like many of Spain’s small museums, especially the modern art ones, Cuenca’s was a private initiative. In 1961, the Spanish-Filipino painter Fernando Zóbel started looking for the ideal location for a museum of Spanish abstract art, but it was in 196

Felipe Fernández-Armesto   Environment always clings to culture, conditioning people’s responses, limiting their potential, stimulating their inventiveness. It seems reasonable to suppose that in the early stages of cultural divergence environment drove innovation, as human co