Fluid Forms. By the time he had passed his 40s, the precocious Ma Yansong was already at the helm of a practice based in three countries and boasting a long list of works that demonstrate a fondness for buildings “flowing with people” and throbbing w

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Play is something serious. The Neoplatonists used the oxymorons serio ludere and iocare serio to refer to a light way of dealing with matters of importance, in the Socratic tradition of seeking truth through dialogue. In the contemporary world, game

Few architects can claim to have materialized their most ambitious ideas at a young age, but Ma Yansong (Beijing, 1975), by the time he had passed his 40s, was already at the helm of a practice based in three countries and boasting a long list of com

MAD Architects   China   En una ciudad conocida por su clima extremo, un espacio consagrado a las artes escénicas despliega sus sinuosas formas como si hubiese sido moldeado por los severos elementos. Como una topografía que emerge de los humedales circundantes, el centro re

MAD Architects   China   This seamless-looking white structure molded in concrete contains a sinuous library and a block of mixed amenities – cafés, public restrooms, a nursery room, among others – for the citizens of Haikou, capital of Hainan, China’s southernmost province.

MAD Architects   China   The practice established by Ma Yansong in 2004, MAD Architects, which runs offices in Beijing, Los Angeles, Rome, and Jiaxing, was commissioned by the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum to design this venue for its annual summits in Yabuli, in the nort

MAD Architects   China   The Beijing-based firm of Ma Yangson, MAD Architects, was commissioned to build the Quzhou Sports Park, a complex spanning almost 700,000 square meters, in the city of Zhejiang. Surrounded by trees, the facilities – including a swimming pool and a ho

Jorge Gorostiza   In movies and TV series, the penchant for bare architecture has produced much footage oscillating between the clean image and the ominous atmosphere.

Aida Navarro Redón   Architecture has played an influential role in the development of video games, as much in formal and technical as in narrative terms.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Two books cover the figures of two eccentric critics, Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) and Reyner Banham (1922-1988). Debra Bricker Balken has published the first complete biography of a New York intellectual usually associated with the promotion of abst

Eduardo Prieto   It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, the place and years of a utopia so radical it aspired not so much to end the old system of the czars as to upend human nature itself. The new world o

Carlos Jiménez   Midway through his Scientific Autobiography, Aldo Rossi muses: “Perhaps the observation of things has remained my most important formal education; for observation later becomes transformed into memory. Now I seem to see all the things I have observed

Fernanda Canales   El escritor Juan Villoro ha sido nombrado miembro honorario de la Academia Nacional de Arquitectura de México, un honor que compartió con el arqueólogo Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, descubridor del Templo Mayor. La laudatio correspondió a la arquitecta Fe

Juan Villoro   En 2010 sobreviví en Santiago de Chile a uno de los terremotos más violentos de la Tierra. Hasta ese momento me intrigaba que en sus Odas elementales Pablo Neruda hubiera dedicado versos al edificio. Es comprensible que un poeta celebre la cebolla, e

All prizes are questionable, as is the very concept of a ‘prize.’ Created to recognize the talent and achievement of an author or the efficiency and beauty of a building, architecture awards tend to end up being partisan tools of promotion or predict

Co.Creation Architects   Bangladesh   The result of workshops in which members of the community were invited to rethink their public spaces, a series of operations restored the riverbanks as spots for encounters and enjoyment. In the manner of Indian ghats – ritual platforms beside the w

Rizvi Hassan, Saad Ben Mostafa, Khwaja Fatmi   Bangladesh   In several of the camps scattered around the country to take in people fleeing from nearby Myanmar, six communal spaces try to contribute to easing the difficult situation. Raised with the most readily available materials and the techniques of Rohing

andramatin   Indonesia   A remote Javanese region has equipped itself with a small aerodrome to attract those wanting to escape the massified international circuits and uphold a more sustainable tourism model. The terminal evokes the constructions of the local tribes with i

ASA North   Iran   A rhythmic roof of concrete beautifully poured on the site culminates the transformation of an old brewery into the home of the Iranian capital’s first independent museum. Elaborately bonded walls complete and enhance the remains of a 1920s manufactu

East Architecture Studio   Lebanon   A pavilion renovation is the first operation undertaken to recover the fair premises that Niemeyer designed as a symbol of a then thriving country, and which were left to rot after a bloody civil war. Lack of documentation made an exhaustive study of

DAW Office   Senegal   The Barcelona firm headed by David García Martínez, Daw Office, designed this educational facility currently under construction in Thionck Essyl, in Senegal’s Casamance region. The project adapted to the needs and the economic situation of the local

Russell Jones   United Kingdom   In contrast to the materiality of the Edwardian constructions in the neighborhood, the house is embedded in nature thanks to the use of Siberian larch and Douglas fir both indoors and outdoors.

Renesa Architecture   India   There is no doubt that we live surrounded by what Debord acidly called the marchandise vedette, articles that compete to be displayed in the most irresistible way possible, appealing to our senses and our wallets. In architecture, this dictate of pub

Mailitis Architects, J. Pogas Birojs   Latvia   Every five years the city of Riga is the venue of one of the largest song festivals in the world, held since 1873 and able to bring in a colossal choir of 20,000 members. Such congregations were a delight for Soviet leaders, who in 1955 transferred

A Winter of Discontent

Like the Titanic but with no Viennese waltzes. In its Winterreise, this year Europe sails more to the beat of the Schubert cycle that with melancholy sings of isolation and cold. Isolation because of the disunity it is demonstrating to a world where

Níall McLaughlin Architects   United Kingdom   A work of the London practice of Niall McLaughlin, the new library in the historical setting of Cambridge University has for 2022 won the Stirling Prize, awarded by Royal Institute od British Architects (RIBA). The ensemble of simple brick volumes re

When in 1977 the English rock band Pink Floyd flew its famous inflatable pigs amid the chimneys of Battersea, part of the power station – built in two phases under the direction of Sir George Gilbert Scott, author too of the plant that is now Tate Mo

Aires Mateus   Switzerland   The Pôle Museal, an urban regeneration plan that in scale and ambition has no precedent in Switzerland, mainly aims to transform the city of Lausanne into a world-class cultural-innovation hub and revive a degraded space next to the train tracks. Int

Kleihues + Kleihues , Klaus Schuwerk    Norway   With 54,600 square meters of floor space and a collection of over 400,000 works, this is the largest art museum in the Nordic region. Officially named National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture, the building is a fruit of the fusion, in 2003, of

Wingårdhs    Sweden   On the island of Djurgården, close to Stockholm’s city center and Skeppsholmen Island (location of Rafael Moneo’s Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet), Liljevalchs Konsthall has a new wing. A work of the Swedish practice of Gert Wingårdh, the rectang

Few scientists get to attain the status of a pop icon: Isaac Newton with his apple, Alberto Einstein with his equation… and Nikola Tesla, whose contribution to electromagnetism – in addition to the induction into the olympus of science that lending o

Like his alter ego with the unmistakable quiff hairstyle and inseparable fox terrier, Hergé has embarked on a journey around the world, with a stop in Madrid. On view through 19 February at the Círculo de Bellas Artes is a blockbuster exhibition on t

In its desire to document stories on the margins of official history, rescuing them from oblivion, the Reina Sofía Museum brings to light the biography of the psychiatrist from the Catalonian city of Reus, Francesc Tosquelles, one of the fathers of i

Eduardo Prieto   Bruno Latour was one of the last specimens of a species on the brink of extinction: the intellectual. To be precise, a specimen of a class of that species: the French intellectual. And to pursue the taxonomy further, a specimen of a more slanted, con