Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architects design space, but also time. Imagining the city after the pandemic, they strive to reconcile the need for social distance with the convenience of proximity: on one hand, space is fragmented to avoid contact; on the other, uses are gathered

Based in Rotterdam but running offices in São Paulo and Paris as well, KAAN Architecten was set up by Kees Kaan, Vincent Panhuysen, and Dikkie Scipio as a new professional venture after the 2014 closure of Claus en Kaan, the firm they had worked toge

KAAN Architecten   France   This new complex acts as a transition between a motorway built over the historical Vauban fortification and the Eurartisanat Campus of Lille, which the same architects designed. Coexisting in the building are the emphatic boldness of its geometry, th

KAAN Architecten   Belgium   The building is conceived as an oasis of calm that manifests itself exteriorly through few but sculptural openings striking a contrast with the lines of the surrounding landscape. Affixed to the terrain, the crematorium is an ode to order and peace,

KAAN Architecten   France   Located within a university campus of 600 hectares, the institute building is characterized by the elegant screen of reinforced concrete that forms its facade. The exterior surface of the building presents a grid whose geometry is slightly different

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Born into a well-off family of non-practicing Jews, young Peter only became conscious of his origins when the upheaval of the United States’ entry into the war stoked the flames of antisemitism. With both sides of the family coming from the eastern a

Luis Fernández-Galiano   As a youngster, Norman, the son of a working-class family from Manchester, took an interest in machines and airplanes, dreamed of a science-fiction future, and discovered the world through his readings in the public library. After two years working f

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The passing of Marc Fumaroli, an eloquent defender of European culture, has coincided with the Spanish release of The Europeans, the book by British historian Orlando Figes on the making of cosmopolitan culture in the continent, and this encourages r

Ginés Garrido, Francisco Burgos   Burying the most urban stretch of Madrid’s A5 motorway – 3.5 kilometers from the exit of the Avenida de Portugal tunnel to the intersection with Avenida de Los Poblados – is an old demand of locals. Even back in 2007, at the time of the undergroundin

One of the main obsessions of modernity was the idea of aligning architecture with the factory. Standardization, serialization, modularization, prefabrication, and the recourse to pieces prepared in the workshop were some of the strategies applied in

Josean Ruiz Esquíroz   Spain   Ever since the first cargo ship carrying intermodal containers docked in Bremen in 1966, their growth and development in international trade has been spectacular. Shipping containers are icons of our globalized society. Almost everything we buy trave

straddle3, Yaiza Terré, Eulia Arkitektura   Spain   The aprop program for provisional housing launched by the City of Barcelona is designed to offer a swift, efficient, and pragmatic response to emergency situations caused by shortage of housing, keeping neighbors from having to leave gentrified distr

LOT-EK   South Africa   Part of a large-scale urban transformation project, this intervention is a response to the post-apartheid generation’s desire to introduce and adopt new models for living. Rising on a triangular plot of land, the building is formed by 140 shipping co

GRX Arquitectos   Spain   Bordering with Albacete, Murcia, and Almeria bot located within Granada province, the municipality of Puebla de Don Fadrique belongs to the comarca of Huéscar, at the foot of La Sagra peak. The Granada-based GRX Arquitectos – Álvaro Gor, Carlos Gor,

Barkow Leibinger   Austria   The only opera that Ludwig van Beethoven wrote, Fidelio, has not ceased to attract music connoisseurs since it premiered in Vienna in 1805. For the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the Theater an der Wien has presented – with set designs by

AZAB   Spain   Globalization also affects urban planning by imposing on it too a loss of the contextual and social values that are transferred to plans and buildings. In this way, the spaces let go of their referential qualities, traditions, landscapes or memory to

Cancel Culture

With its allergy to rhetoric, modernity seemed to have achieved the feat of making us indifferent to monuments. Hundred, thousands of statues and busts colonized public space without our really knowing who they were. We didn’t care. We simply thought

1925-2020 Born into a Galician family of intellectuals, Antonio Bonet Correa studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Santiago de Compostela and then at the Sorbonne. He returned to Spain in 1958 and later held chairs in

Located in the western Polish city of Wroclaw, which was the German Breslau, the Concordia Design building highlights the Dutch firm MVRDV’s capacity to deal with all kinds of situations. In this case the situation could hardly have been more complic

Inspired and financed by the recently deceased Charles Jencks (see Arquitectura Viva 219) as a posthumous tribute to his wife, the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres are a network of places devoted to giving emotional support and practical information and

In the village of Rudrapur, located in the Dinajpur Disrtict of northern Bangladesh, the German architect Anna Heringer – in conjunction with Veronika Lang and the non-profit organization Dipshikha – recently completed a therapy center for people wit

Commissioned by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and the non-profit organization American Friends of Le Korsa (AFLK), the New York-based architect Toshiko Mori has raised a school for children aged 5 to 10 in the remote Senegalese town of Fass. A

Albert Faus   Burkina Faso   Shortlisted in the international section of the 2020 FAD Awards, the project submitted by Albert Faus Madrid (Barcelona, 1972) involves reorganizing the Bangre Veenem educational complex, with its existing primary school serving the village of Youlou

The British partnership of Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke – in collaboration with the Belgian firm TRANS Architectuur and RE-ST – has won the bid to build an extension to Design Museum Gent (see AV Proyectos 99) that will improve circulation and the

Seattle will be crowning downtown with a 361-meter tower containing 1,080 residential units in the higher floors and coworking and retail spaces in the lower levels. Assigned to ODA, the New York architecture firm headed by Eran Chen, the project bea

The practice of Héctor Mendoza and Mara Partida has won the ideas competition for the Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology of Cantabria in the city of Santander. The jury, which included Fuensanta Nieto of the firm Nieto Sobejano, appreciated the uni

Norman Foster   The history of cities and the buildings that comprise them is inextricably linked to the ever-recurring pattern of disease and issues of public health. There are countless examples. The Cholera outbreak of the 1850s, which decimated the population o

Pablo Canga   In front of a thick cloud formed by seawater evaporating and coming in contact with lava from the erupting Hawaiian volcano Kilauea, a pair of tourists smile and pose for a selfie. This is the picture on the cover of Our Happy Life, the catalog of a

Eduardo Prieto   In liquid times like these, it is problematic to call architecture ‘science.’ Problematic and, as Ramón Araujo says, polemic, because he opines that architecture is more reason than invention, and because for him, the process behind projects is scien

José María Sánchez   The book starts with a small drawing where José María García de Paredes superposes the perimeters – on plan – of some of his churches, as if one project could explain the shape of others through a series of almost intangible geometrical relationships

Gabriel Ruiz Cabrero   Whoever holds this book and sees its weight as a promise of density won’t be disappointed. Sober like Julio Cano Lasso’s work itself, the cover – showing an abstract floor plan perforated by courtyards – is a preview of the content’s reflection on tr