Luis Fernández-Galiano   ‘Think global, act local’: the ecologist motto, made popular during the 1970s but with roots in the work of pioneers like the urbanist Patrick Geddes or the engineer Buckminster Fuller, encourages us to combine environmental awareness with community

Jesús San Vicente   Work in underprivileged contexts is a field for experimenting with new ways of conceiving architecture which are more open, participatory, and distanced from global ‘show business’. 

NLÉ   Nigeria   Unlike traditional water structures, where the posts dig into the bottom of the lake or river, this school floats. It was built with sustainability strategies by a poor community of Lagos.

LEVS architecten   Mali   Compressed earth is the basic material used in this school in the land of the Dogon people which in structure, type, and decoration echoes local building conditions.

Diébédo Francis Kéré, Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   Within the education complex of Gando, the library is located between the two volumes that make up the school and its extension, so a covered courtyard is generated between them. Resorting to the same technique used in the other two pieces that const

Building Trust International   Thailand   The Mae Sot school is the first case in a large program involving the application of a light transportable modular system where industrialized elements and local materials can be combined.

Undurraga Devés arquitectos   Chile   La participación de la comunidad ha permitido el desarrollo de estas viviendas, que cumplen los requisitos básicos de habitabilidad sin contradecir las tradiciones.

BC Architects & Studies   Burundi   The school’s compact walls of rammed earth and its heavy roof clad with ceramic tiles are both in keeping with the traditional typologies, materials, and techniques of Burundi.

TYIN Tegnestue   Thailand   The challenge of this small library in the old marketplace of a Bangkok slum was not so much to deal with a scant budget as to involve an unmotivated community in building it.

Sharon Davis Design   Rwanda   Built with traditional building materials and techniques, this new training center intended specially for women is an oasis of peace and education in a very underprivileged context.

Anupama Kundoo    India   The orphanage was built with a technique, never before used, that involves baking the building’s mud structure, to later use it as an oven for making ceramic elements and materials.

Marina Otero   An exhibition at New York’s MoMA shows how, in Wright’s vision of the American city, density and dispersal were two sides of the same coin. 

Nicolás Cabral   A major exhibition explains the evolution of modernity in Mexico through architecture, design, and magazines.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The hermetism of the latest art either fascinates or irritates. The writer Enrique Vila-Matas, who participated in Documenta 13 by sitting down to write in a Chinese restaurant, was euphoric at what he saw and experienced in Kassel, and he tells abou

Ana Esteban Maluenda   When in 1962 J. M. Richards saw Carlos Flores’s book Arquitectura española contemporánea and said that Spain was “experimenting furiously,” the world was not aware that such a change was even incipient. Spanish architecture evolved at a formidable ra

Eduardo Prieto   The population of Spain was only 28 million in 1949, but growing at a rate of 300,000 per year. The country was devastated, and migration from the countryside was beginning to crowd cities. Building homes was a pressing concern. The contribution of E

David Rivera   In the 1970s, the historian Marc Ferro tried to bring film studies into respectable academic domains, and found himself faced with lack of sympathy on the part of his austere colleagues, for whom the ‘seventh art’ was mere show business for the masse

David Mencías   In popular architecture, lattices involve the art of seeing without being seen. The lattice as an element for closing openings, integrated in the enclosure, is much seen in traditional architecture. Use of it has been widespread for both cultural and

Mecanoo   United Kingdom   With a population of a million, Birmingham is one of the United Kingdom’s leading financial and educational centers. Its urban core has historically been maltreated, however, so the past two decades have seen ambitious plans for it launched with the

Werner Tscholl   Italy   The production of 176,000 liters of whisky by Italy’s first and only distillery of this beverage takes place in a building reflecting the company’s pioneer character through a rigorous organization and an expressive facade. The emphatic division of t

Kengo Kuma   Japan   Inspired in the jiigoku-gumi technique – in which the carpenters of traditional Japan would join wooden strips to one another to form a highly rigid and self-supporting lattice – this wood building houses a shop that sells pineapple cakes. The system

Manuelle Gautrand Architecture   France   Close to the Arch of Triumph, in one of the most luxurious neighborhoods of Paris, stands this banking office building, occupying a parcel that opens in two directions. The main side looks toward Avenue de Friedland, the rear towards a garden courtya

ACH arquitectos   Spain   In the southern part of Las Palmas, the bold volume of this university building stands out in a context defined by urban voids. The program is organized in two parts: one for departments, teaching, and administration, and the other for research. The

OAM arquitectos   Spain   The building’s location on low-consistency terrain that has been much used by humanity through the ages, presenting Roman and Moorish strata at shallow levels, determined the kind of foundation system to be used for this office, residential, and comm

Abalo Alonso Arquitectos   Spain   The idea of this preschool was to evoke a forest. In a newly developed part of Orense’s university campus, the building for use and accessibility reasons is one-story, and it is built with the structural economy of vernacular architecture. Four scree

On view from 14 March to 18 May at the ICO Museum in Madrid is ‘The Architect is Present’, an exhibition that, in a paraphrasing of Marina Abramovic’s ‘The Artist is Present’ performance, takes stock of the work of five influential international prac

In the local imagination, the modernization of Azerbaijan and its opening to the West is associated with three milestones: in 1996, after independence, the TV tower of Baku, an icon 310 meters tall, was completed; in 2001, the Azerbaijani abandoned t

Mackintosh is to Glasgow as Gaudí is to Barcelona: no architecture guide is complete without mention of the most admirable example of Arts & Crafts, the Glasgow School of Art, nor without naming it Scotland’s most important modern construction. T

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Crimea is not critical; Ukraine is. On its territory we shall witness a struggle that will shape the future of Russia and of Europe. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia suffered a catastrophic decade of demographic, economic,