The AV/Arquitectura Viva project marks its fortieth birthday this year, and to celebrate this anniversary the first issue of 2025 returns to the theme of its maiden issue: collective housing. And if in 1985 it focused on the Berlin IBA, this time it

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The AV/Arquitectura Viva project turns 40 in 2025, and this is a good time to look back on our DNA. What was initially called Monografías de Arquitectura y Vivienda was a quarterly magazine edited by a public housing company, and of the four issues p

Abel Fernández Villegas   A phantom advances across Europe, and along the way it stumbles upon serious difficulties to find accommodation. Housing is one of the problems that are besieging the Old Continent, immersed as it is in a residential crisis that threatens the very fo

Feld72   Austria   A plot between party walls, partly occupied by an old house, is now filled with a housing block that incorporates the preexisting into a steel-and-glass framework of industrial airs. Above commercial levels that recover the old construction are thirt

Summacumfemmer, Büro Juliane Greb   Germany   A gridded structure offers the members of a cooperative the opportunity to have dwellings that are easy to adapt to changing needs, with spaces that can even be shared among neighbors. Around a kitchen that functions as a distributor, fourteen-square

GWJ   Switzerland   Six blocks have gone up around an inner street towards which the more public zones are oriented with the intention of consolidating a small but very active neighborhood. Attached to the blocks, which contain over a hundred living units, timber framew

Esch Sintzel Architekten   Switzerland   The concrete structure of a wine storage facility has been reused to create a new residential building, thereby significantly minimizing the energy consumed in its construction. Thick pillars in the lower levels, crowned with a truncated cone-shaped

LAN Architecture   France   This 50-meter-tall timber-framed residential block stands in Paris’s 13th arrondissement. Its three main components are a commercial base, 132 apartments, and communal areas for residents, including a 300-square-meter terrace on the 8th floor, a vers

Déchelette Architecture   France   A building intended for social housing presents toward the street an innovative self-supporting screen of tamped earth, in contrast with the wooden facade behind. Like the wooden structure, the blocks of earth came prefabricated and were simply stack

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

López Rivera Arquitectos   Spain   This project for the Balearic Housing Institute (IBANI) is inserted into its urban context, in continuity with the series of gable-roof houses that are added in descending sequence along the streets perpendicular to the stream of Esporles, in the Maj

The magazine AV Monographs has for over three decades been putting together an annual almanac with a rigorous selection of twenty-four building works completed by Spanish practices during the given period. To leaf through any single one of these regu

Marta Peris   Successive crises in the course of this first quarter of the 21st century have awakened us to the need to make contemporary housing resilient. We try to adapt to the diversity of lifestyles and models of cohabitation by rearranging the conventional d

Óscar Miguel Ares   It was in the 1970s that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari formulated their theorem on the “image of thought,” based on the botanical term ‘rhizome.’ Any teaching can be connected to another. All are communicative vessels. In a way, architecture toda

Alberto Veiga   It is hard to sum up in a brief text our experience of building outside Spain over the years. Each work, each client, and each country is a distinct experience, and each case is unique, so it is not easy to draw up conclusions or synthesize clearly t

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The art market is a good example of the conspicuous consumption theorized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class, and two recent texts by outsiders document the extremes of ostentation, fraud, and opacity reached in our time. Orlando

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Two publishers of the Penguin Group and another of the Planeta – the latter with two titles – compete in bringing art closer to the general public. For this they use different literary tools and take distinct approaches, but all four books reviewed h

Jorge Bernabeu   In 1957 Eduardo Torroja published Razón y ser de los tipos estructurales, and the next year it appeared in the United States as Philosophy of Structures. That it was immediately translated – by Jaroslav Josef Polívka, structural engineer of Wright’s

Marta García Carbonero   With near-annual punctuality Fundación Fisac and its director, Diego Peris Sánchez, this time with Javier Navarro Gallego, release a new tome of the series through which they have since 2014 disseminated the legacy of the master from La Mancha. Follo

Jaime Cervera   In the course of his professorship, Ricardo Aroca not only taught students to tackle structures through skill in identifying and solving classic problems, but also to formulate a reflection of the kind that is less a practical instrument for drawing

With the intention of portraying an entire generation, Los años nuevos tells the story of a couple over the course of ten New Year’s Eves, and in it are reflected many of the concerns that assault people in their thirties: employment insecurity, work

h3o architects   Spain   The renovation of an old barn puts in partitions of angular lines that result in a changing visual impression, an effect reinforced by a palette of finishes rendered in electric color tones. A family legend, according to which lightning slipped throu

Casa Antillón   Spain   An unused attic has been transformed into a small studio where a chimney organizes the spaces, with just a curved wall to separate the private from the more public areas. The partition leaves the only two daylight-receiving points on one side, and th

MACH   Spain   Prioritizing the entrance of daylight into a narrow but very deep apartment, a central core of services and storage makes it possible to place all the main rooms flush with the facade. The wall that separated the living room from the kitchen was remo

Pedro Pitarch   Spain   (Text description provided by Pedro Pitarch architectures & urbanisms) Shine on you Crazy DiamondLA MAISON-EN-VALISE / HOME IN A SUITCASE / HOGAR EN UNA MALETA An Architectural Device for the Critique of Everyday Life NOTE: This article is written to

Aramé Studio   Spain   The partitions of an apartment traversed by a narrow corridor were eliminated to reveal the concrete structure in all its glory and harness it as a new organizing element. The bedrooms and the bathrooms are grouped in a compact band to ensure a fluid

NULA.STUDIO   Spain   In order to make the most of the generous overhead space, what was previously an under-the-roof office has been rearranged as a series of virtually assembled functional volumes. In resonance with the beamed structure, a core of timber fixed to the lo

Harquitectes   Spain   Integrated into the landscape of Pals, a municipality of the comarca of Baix Empordà, in Catalonia, this house rises over the remains of an old farmhouse named Mas Geli, of which only two facades with buttresses and a pair of spaces with stone vaults

2021 architekti   Slovakia   Like a Slavic House of Usher, as it were, an 18th-century mansion in a little village seemed condemned to a slow agony for lack of municipal resources to either restore or demolish it. Paradoxically, however, the impact of time has been capitalized o

archigrest, Toposcape   Poland   The Warsaw we know today looks like, but is not, the one that Bernardo Bellotto portrayed almost three centuries ago. That city which the vedute painter immortalized is heaped up on the outskirts, where the debris to which the Polish capital’s histor

40 years of cartoons

If, as one of Carlos Gardel’s tangos says, twenty years is nothing, forty is even less. So the spirit in which this publishing adventure began in January 1985 is intact, and our magazines – stubbornly maintaining their modular layouts, the regular co

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has awarded its 2025 Gold Medal to Deborah Berke, in acknowledgment of a professional career of over four decades that “exemplifies innovation, inclusivity, and sustainability.” She opened Deborah Berke Part

Yoshio Taniguchi has passed away at 87 years of age. The Japanese master completed post-graduate studies at Harvard, and worked with Walter Gropius and Kenzo Tange before founding his own studio in 1975. He is the author of the emblematic expansion o

It happens with the finest of masters that the footprint they leave is silent but indelible. Hence, in the very different trajectories of Kengo Kuma and Riken Yamamoto, one can track the teachings of Hiroshi Hara, who understood practice, reflection,

Until Hittorff discovered the bright colors of Greek temples, we imagined ancient times with the washed appearance of marble. Time erased the coats of paint that had covered buildings and statues, and the aesthetic values that embraced the elegant ne

Unlike Gregorio Fernández or Juan Martínez Montañés with their large works, Luisa Roldán was more known for small pieces and the exquisite crafting of her clay figurines, which some considered “more suitable to her station and sex.” The National Muse

Kenneth Frampton   Dear Luis Fernández-Galiano, By way of wishing you a happy New Year, I simply wanted to express how much I appreciate your faithful contribution to architectural culture world-wide and particularly to Spain, so much so that one has the feeling that y