Luis Fernández-Galiano   In troubled times, a house offers shelter. If the world around is out of joint, the temptation to shut oneself in the amniotic penumbra of the private realm is understandable, because the domestic isolates us from the convulsions of the world outside

From the Atlantic to the Mediterranean coast through Madrid and Navarre, this Spanish tour of ten domestic experiments is also one of the landscapes they are located in.

Irisarri + Piñera   Spain   Colonizing the granite walls of an old Galician farm construction with several new structures of light build, the dwelling echoes the spirit of the place.

FRPO   Spain   Fragmented into small pavilions whose outlines adapt to the trees of a dense pine forest, the house was built using an industrialized system of counter-laminated wood.

Elii   Spain   With its enclosure of recycled wood and polycarbonate panels, the building is formed by industrialized modules organized around an inner garden courtyard.

Alcolea + Tárrago   Spain   Built with loadbearing walls of reinforced concrete and boards of pinewood, this house for a young couple with small children frees up as much land as possible without sacrificing views.

Lagula Arquitectes   Spain   Along a spiral topography, a ‘povera’ latticework of ceramic brick blocks envelops a faceted volume whose various domestic spaces are organized underneath an inclined roof.

bosch.capdeferro arquitectura   Spain   An 18th-century building, compact and traditional, combined with an industrialized light porch, forms a dwelling that opens up to its beautiful natural surroundings.

TEd’A arquitectes   Spain   Compacta y construida con materiales locales, la casa se organiza en forma de cruz, abriéndose a cuatro patios interiores que matizan el clima y gradúan la percepción del exterior.

Alfredo Payá Benedito / Noname 29   Spain   The masonry walls and the bold white volume of a traditional house are at the origins of a project based on the gradual transition from interior to exterior and vice versa.

Adhoc msl   Spain   Industrialized and portable, this house conceived as a small self-sufficient machine has the capacity to colonize different kinds of places, from natural enclaves to city centers.

Blancafort-reus arquitectura   Spain   Open to the landscape and organized around a courtyard, these three dwellings for three sisters share a compact volume and a language based on the use of local wood.

Richard Ingersoll   A metaphor of the accumulation of knowledge, Auriti’s Palazzo Enciclopedico is the ‘leitmotiv’ of the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale.

François Chaslin   In its year as European Capital of Culture, Marseille’s urban redevelopment projects have aligned with the construction of exceptional buildings.

Mauricio Vicent   Now on show in the French city of Nîmes is a selection of diverse art works that together reflect the personal tastes and intuitions of the British architect.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Richard Ingersoll did his doctorate in Berkeley with Spiro Kostof, and has spent many years revising and updating A History of Architecture: Setting and Rituals, the capolavoro of his master, who died prematurely in 1991. The process has been so long

Miguel Ángel Damián Sanz   Borges once said that he wrote tales because he knew no other way of telling stories that was as direct. Maybe for the same reason Ángel Martínez García-Posada – professor at the Seville School of Architecture – uses the tale to recall thoughts and a

Darío Álvarez   The dream of Paradise: with this phrase Nieves Fernández Villalobos synthesizes the experimental quest of one of the most exceptional couples of the history of architecture, Alison and Peter Smithson, a quest which had its paradigm in the ‘House of t

Carlos Sambricio   Rarely does a foreword tell so much about the contents of a book. Here the author speaks of his visit to Borromini’s Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Ignoring the trite discourse on the elliptical plan, the continuous entablature or

Gonçalo Byrne, Diogo Seixas Lopes, Patricia Barbas   Portugal   Complemented by two small glazed pavilions opening on to the street, a potent shell of reinforced concrete shelters the ruins of Lisbon’s Thalia Theater, built in the year 1845.

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Renzo Piano has designed an elemental ergonomic house, built with wood and incorporating a sophisticated mesh of installations that guarantees the inhabitant’s energy self-reliance. 

Among the products of translucent concrete currently on the market, the Lucem Lichtbeton system, developed by the German firm of the same name, stands out for its technical caliber, and especially for its competitive selling price, which is not much

Pascual Bolufer   Ever since the opus caementicium of Roman times, concrete has been in evolution. It is now even possible to elude its opaque and gray state in favor of the ‘translucence’ of concrete products loaded with optic fiber, which lets light go through the s

Luis Müller   In the period 1948-1951 the Argentinian Amancio Williams designed three hospitals that were to be built in a subtropical climate of intense sun and rain. He proposed a roof set high in the buildings in order to leave a large space beneath it for air

Breathing his last on 13 June in Madrid, Javier Carvajal Ferrer was born in Barcelona on the same year, 1926, that Antoni Gaudí breathed his. Carvajal studied architecture during the dull early years of Franco’s rule, and already then forged his firm

On 22 June, a few weeks after receiving the Mies van der Rohe Award for the Harpa Concert Hall, completed in Reykjavik, Finland, in 2011, Henning Larsen passed away in Copenhagen. A graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, trained under a

Luis Fernández-Galiano   A specter haunts the world: the rebellion of the middle classes. In the latest episode, the cities of Brazil and Turkey have been the scene of an uprising against political and economic elites by young people summoned through social networks and prov