The association culture of Barcelona’s Sants neighborhood nourishes the practice of Lavol, a collective grounded on participatory and horizontal structures, in the awareness that only in a community spirit can current problems be addressed and market

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The DANA of Valencia has violently struck the territory and the consciences. On one hand, it reminds us of our failure in the moderation of climate change, which is making meteorological catastrophes more frequent and intense; on the other, it faces

The deep-rooted association culture of Barcelona’s Sants neighborhood revealed to a group of young professionals setting up an office there what would become the foundation of their practice: the idea that architecture is less about projects per se t

Lacol   Spain   Raised in 1926, these listed old industrial sheds in Barcelona’s Sants neighborhood were used for building naval ships. After undergoing refurbishment, the one that takes up half the block harbors offices of various entities (including Lacol Arquitec

Lacol, Laboqueria Taller d’Arquitectura   Spain   A large foyer gives access to the dwellings and a multipurpose hall that doubles as a dining room and, at the request of the residents, can be used separately to connect with the area’s fabric of community associations. Harnessed for acoustic filteri

Lacol   Spain   Soaring prices determined the choice of the usual concrete structure, the basic unidirectional scheme of which proved ideal for establishing an efficient arrangement of twelve living units and shared facilities and amenities provided on the ground fl

Lacol   Spain   Over and above the neighborhood’s street-level shops, the dwellings are organized around a courtyard and a staircase that has landings thanks to the existence of an alternative passageway along the outside. By means of a large ceiling fan, the heat t

Josep Maria Montaner, Zaida Muxí   The cooperative that calls itself Lacol came into being in 2009 as an initiative of young architects and students averse as much to the usual logic of hierarchical study programs as to professional exploitation. It was also a bit more than ten years

Carlos Jiménez   Filmmakers might cast a city as a backdrop, or as an essential character in their cinematic narrative. I recall Stockholm as a distant, haunting witness in Ingmar Bergman’s early films, just as Tokyo lingers in the interiors of Yasujiro Ozu’s hypnoti

Eduardo Prieto   The observance of the centenaries of illustrious people is but a late version of the tradition of paying homage to the powerful, or a cultivated version of the celebration of children’s birthdays, besides a symptom of contemporary superstitions, whic

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In their latest books, both Vishaan Chakrabarti and Albert Pope propose new models for the city. But whereas the Calcutta-born New Yorker defends a pragmatic utopia that inserts ecological architectures into the existing urb, the Rice professor advoc

Iñaki Bergera   Architecture is a spatial and material reality bound to its perceptual nature, created from the architect’s scopic and analytical baggage, documented and disseminated through an imagery filtered by the photographer’s eye. The architect decants realit

Eduardo Prieto   The medieval sages never saw elephants, but read Pliny’s descriptions and drew them, to then include them in picture books they called bestiaries. A bestiary of sorts, made not of animals but of unbuilt buildings, is this volume put together with the

munarq   Spain   This project builds on the resources available in the area. A specific type of soil defined by its excellent cohesive capacity is used to build all the walls. So the building is raised with local materials and techniques, incorporating the traditiona

labaula cooperativa   Spain   Until the time Eusebi Guëll moved his textile factory there and established a workers’ colony with the help of Gaudí, Santa Coloma de Cervelló was just a farming village on the banks of the Llobregat, and its modest past is still evidenced by the old

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   Although Portugal is mainly a maritime country, its inland is traversed by mighty mountains, largely unknown of but whose beauty will not be unfamiliar to those who have read authors like Eça de Queirós or Miguel Torga. In one of those ranges, on a m

One is hard put to name a country that has a more beleaguered modern history. The rapacity of the West sought to turn Vietnam into both a productive, profitable colony and a geopolitical outpost in the Far East. First to arrive were the French, who p

VTN Architects   Vietnam   The architecture firm’s own offices incorporate modular concrete planters that do much to create a comfortable microclimate and provide a laboratory for the testing of ecological seeds. The experimental character of the building showcases the practic

G8A Architects, rollimarchini architects   Vietnam   With vegetation-coated facades, this factory of the Swiss company Jakob Rope Systems, which specializes in rope and stainless-steel cable products, is located in an industrial area of the Vietnamese city of Thuận An, 50 kilometers from Ho Chi Minh C

Tropical Space   Vietnam   This office building, covered by brick walls with a concrete structure, is located on a quiet street in Ho Chi Minh City. The functional areas are divided by a continuous vertical void, favoring the access of natural light and air circulation. The of

ARB Architects   Vietnam   Hanoi ARB Architects, directed by Nguyen Ha, was commissioned by the artist Xuan Hinh to build a museum devoted to Dao Mau, the worship of mother goddesses which was established in Vietnam in the 16th century, and declared a UNESCO-listed religion in

Trump vence a Harris

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Republican Donald Trump returns to the White House – which he occupied from 2017 to 2021 – after defeating the Democrat aspirant Kamala Harris in extremely neck-and-neck presidential elections that have laid bare the ideological division of the

During the afternoon of 29 October, torrential downpours brought on by a ‘DANA’ –isolated depression at high levels, what it used to be known as ‘cold drop’ – triggered catastrophic flash floods in different parts of Spain, with an especially severe

Just days before the presidential elections in the United States, the most contentious of recent decades and also the most existential for the world at large, the major organs of the international media hardly had space on their front pages for other

Luis Fernández-Galiano   If the images of cars dragged by the flood waters along a street in the municipality of Sedaví are the best picture of the violence of nature in its catastrophic reply to the artificial environment, that of volunteers crowded together along a footbri

Valencia, which suffered from catastrophic inundations in 1957 and 1982, has cores of its population in zones susceptible to flooding. These aerial photographs show its state before and after the DANA of 2024, with the deviated bed of the Turia River

In its architecture section, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale has this year gone to a native, Shigeru Ban, who is thus again acclaimed for a firm social commitment, as when he won the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord in 2022, and for the material inn

Kengo Kuma, OODA architecture   Portugal   The Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian has reopened after almost four years of renovation works. It is located on the campus of the Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian. The main feature of the intervention carried out by Kengo Kuma – in collaboration with t

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   The new University Children’s Hospital in Zürich-Lengg, Switzerland’s largest medical center for children and adolescents, comprises two buildings: a low-rise acute-care facility on the south plot, and a cylindrical construction for research and teac

Carbajo Barrios   Spain   Developed by a group of owners constituted as a cooperative, this project for 34 dwellings in Santiago de Compostela is situated in the area around the Ermite de Santa Marta, next to Rúa Monte de Conxo. This way of associating reduces construction co

Taller Básico de Arquitectura, MRM arquitectos   Spain   In Mutilva, a town belonging to the municipality of Valle de Aranguren, Navarre, this social housing development takes an L shape opening out to views of the landscape while shielding itself from north winds. Rising on a concrete base, the building u

MAIO   Spain   A falta de una fórmula mágica para hacer frente a la crisis habitacional, la construcción de viviendas de alquiler social se ha convertido en una de las claves de la intervención pública y ha producido algunos de los edificios más notables de los últ

In the wake of the enormous success of a similar anthology held in its New York base, the Guggenheim Museum brings to Bilbao the oeuvre of Hilma af Klint, the Swedish artist and mystic who, inspired by her devotion to theosophy, can perhaps be consid

Female creators have been relegated to the second row of history, and in its firm endeavor to give them center stage, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid presents the first retrospective on the German Gabriele Münter ever to be put together in Sp

After sojourns in Alcoi and Avilés, it is the turn of the Valencian Institute of Modern Art to host the complete exhibition that commemorates the centenary of the birth of Juana Francés, the only female member of El Paso, a collective of Spanish abst

Joseph Rykwert died on 18 October at 98, breaking the thread that for a half-century has guided architects in the labyrinths of history. Born in Warsaw in 1926 and evacuated with his family to England at the outbreak of World War II, Joseph studied a