Public Places. The visible head of one of Italy’s busiest architecture practices, Mario Cucinella is the author of numerous projects which, more than a distinctive style, share a fundamental idea: the use of technology in making headway towards the g

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In a new epiphany of unease, a crowd chose a symbolic building as a frame for its protest. On 6 January 2021, Trump supporters stormed into the United States Capitol to try to overturn the election of Biden; and on 8 January 2023, Bolsonaro followers

Three decades after starting out in the profession under Renzo Piano, Mario Cucinella (Palermo, 1960) now runs one of Italy’s busiest architecture offices, carrying out from his offices in Bologna and Milan a continuous stream of projects that, more

Mario Cucinella Architects   Italy   Applying its principles, a regional agency for the environment incorporates passive energy-saving strategies into its offices, minimizing the need for climate-control systems. Besides providing daylight aplenty, a roof with 112 greenhouse-type skylig

Mario Cucinella Architects   Italy   The thorough refurbishment of a group of medieval houses included an underground extension and a terrace that provides a close-packed Tuscan town with a new public space. An interior route threads together the existing constructions and gives visual

Mario Cucinella Architects   Italy   A parish center located in the very heart of Calabria presents solutions for an architecture that is loaded with references but does not forget to incorporate sustainable mechanisms. The temple is fitted into a sinuous white volume around which the S

Mario Cucinella Architects   Italy   A 19th-century palazzo has been adapted to house a collection of Etruscan art, part of which is displayed in a hypogeum reminiscent of funerary constructions of the Lazio region. Continuous rows of Florentine sandstone give contour to a grotta dug un

Kurt W. Forster   Taking at once from the latest in technology and from tradition, Isozaki created original buildings that very well reflected the spirit of the moment…

Pepa Cassinello   The German photographer Sibylle von Kaskel took mythical images of Torroja’s work that gave him exposure and the praise of other masters…

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The world changed on 24 February 2022, but the start of the war in Ukraine was produced by the tensions in the tectonic plate of Eurasia. There is no way to understand the conflict without knowing the history of Russia, nor without penetrating the he

Carlos Reyero   We tend to think that young people are rebels. In truth, all they want is a change of order. At no other age does one rely so much on peers for recognition in the face of a vague adversary. In the final analysis, what they pursue is a revolutionary i

Eduardo Prieto   The battle of ‘modernity’ was waged not only in the field of forms and techniques, but also in that of ideals. It has been necessary to acknowledge that modernity was ‘ideological’ for it to be assessed with detachment, and that the modern ideology h

Jacques Herzog   Querido Luis, What can we architects do in times overshadowed by war in Europe, social inequality, and environmental crises, which are threatening survival in large parts of this planet? It is imperative for us to engage with these issues, to seek an

Architects are generally trained in the modern idea that their job is to build a new world, so they try to raise new buildings or even design entire parts of cities. But the profession today is more and more about building on what is already built, a

Hugh Broughton Architects   United Kingdom   The efforts to preserve a Norman castle have concluded with the insertion of a timber platform that covers the ruins while tracing a more accessible interior visitor route. The framework raised over four solid pillars also holds up a series of suspen

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

Feilden Fowles   United Kingdom   A university refectory provides a counterpoint to the Victorian campus around it and combines its traditional ceremonial role with the warmth of a more informal space...

Mae Architects    United Kingdom   In West London, close to South Park in Fulham, the English firm Mae has completed a building with timber and bricks where 35% of the construction is composed of recycled materials, prioritizing the use of bolts as structural fixing in order to simpli

HW Studio   Mexico   The perpendicular crossing of two paths, along with their respective stone walls, organizes the house in independent quadrants, which separate a garden at the entrance, a parking, the living area, and a workspace.

Risco   Portugal   So eager to modernize, the 19th century’s rulers did not properly weigh up the potential effects of their disentailment policies, leaving a vast pool of church property unprotected. In the case of the Convent of Beato António, what the 1755 earthquak

OKRA   Netherlands   The reconstruction of this canal of Utrecht (Netherlands), carried out by OKRA, has won the 11th European Prize for Urban Public Space. Created by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), the award has since the year 2000 biennially h

A legacy

“I do not seek. I find.” Picasso’s famous statement, sometimes seen as arrogant, in fact could not be more on-target an elucidation of the work of an artist in continuous metamorphosis. Never knowing what direction he wanted to go, the Málaga-born ma

In obstinate resistance to real estate speculation, the small early 20th-century St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church stood in the vicinity of the World Trade Center like an anachronistic residue of 1920s Manhattan, but was completely destroyed in the

Cabrera Arqs   Mexico   Meant to be a place for reflection, silence, and prayer, and for a community whose members practice different religions, this underground chapel disappears in the landscape of San Antonio Baspul, a locality within the municipality of Chicxulub Pueblo

BUZZ - Büro Ziyu Zhuang   China   Working out of offices in Berlin, Beijing, and Shanghai, the practice of Ziyu Zhuang took on this project in Qingdao. Located within the Zangma Mountain Tourism Resort, it is a reinterpretation of traditional church architecture, maintaining elements

Neither the dictator Primo de Rivera nor the Republic saw the materialization of the dream of a hub in the north of the capital that would untangle the city’s rail network. This was not achieved until the years of Francoist developmentalism, when Cor

Vaillo + Irigaray    Spain   The firm Vaillo+Irigaray Architects has won the competition to give the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) a new building in San Sebastián. The research center wants a unique, immediately recognizable image that will also serve to organize

Estudio Segui, arquitectura y planeamiento, Pereira-Royo Arquitectos   Spain   The team formed by Pereira-Royo and Estudio Seguí, in collaboration with the consulting firm García Diéguez, has won the competition to enlarge the Bretón de los Herreros Theater in Logroño, capital of La Rioja region, giving it new staging facilitie

He gave his practice a revealing name – Vastu-Shilpa, which in Sanskrit means ‘ability to create structures’ – that would harmonize the ancestral lyricism of the Mahabharata with the confident tone of Vers une architecture. And he strove for the same

With deep gratitude I bid farewell to a longtime friend and companion. Behind us lie six decades of designing together – in our shared student pad and, since 1965, in our office. What started as a two-man enterprise with a small ad in the Hamburger A

Carlos Jiménez   As good fortune and the grace of friends would have it, I found myself amid a festive crowd of Joan Manuel Serrat enthusiasts during a recent visit to Madrid. Unexpectedly, there I was on a wonderful seat, a longtime admirer of the poet and musician