Luis Fernández-Galiano   Urbanization has destroyed the city. Paradoxically, as Franiçoise Choay points out in the beautiful text printed here, the unanimous extension of the urban has radically transformed the nature of the European city. The stubborn persistence of toponym

Françoise Choay   Europe today is triumphantly urban. Rural areas and rural populations are shrinking day by day, while the number of megacities, conurbations, urban communities, technopoles, and technology hubs is multiplying. The current situation is the result of t

Stanislaus von Moos   A generation ago, when Lewis Mumford rejected Le Corbusier's 1925 Plan Voisin, calling it the ‘city of yesterday's tomorrow’, the ville contemporaine seemed to have found its place among the ashes of history as a symbol of everything that had gone wr

Ignasi de Solà-Morales   The vicissitudes of urban form over the last fifty years are the story of a passion. Since the Renaissance, architecture has considered, with Leon Battista Alberti, that a city was nothing more than a large house, and that a house was nothing more th

Grimshaw Architects   United Kingdom   The Waterloo terminal, the destination for trains traveling through the Channel Tunnel, is the first monument of a new era in rail travel. The project site is just wide enough to accommodate the terminal's five tracks and is bounded by the old statio

Alsop & Störmer   Germany   The ferry terminal, located at the western end of the building, is operational, and the ground floor spaces, intended for waiting rooms for the future cruise terminal, have been leased to various companies pending more favorable times. The eastern en

Rafael Moneo, Manuel de Solà-Morales   Spain   In the year 1986, the architects Rafael Moneo and Manuel de Solà-Morales won an invitational competition for a complex urban program on a wide trapezoidal site located between Avinguda Diagonal and Carrer Déu i Mata, on the one hand, and Numància and

Santiago Calatrava   Canada   The ECB Center, where the project is located, is an irregular block that brings together examples of the entire range of buildings that make up the city's commercial district: two characterless skyscrapers, a five-story building that acts as a podium

Juan Antonio Ramírez   Finally, a major exhibition on Joseph Beuys. The shaman artist, the enigmatic clown, the mythical object of so many references, now appears in a traveling retrospective through major European cultural centers (Kunsthaus Zurich, Reina Sofía Madrid, an

Alberto Pieltain   Tadao Ando recounts that, when he was young, he found a collection of sketches by Le Corbusier and felt the spirit of the master within him. He thought that by tracing his drawings day after day, he would become his spiritual heir and decided to meet

Claudia Conforti   On February 23, Professor Manfredo Tafuri, one of the greatest architectural historians and critics of the century, died at his home in Venice. The end was expected; and yet, his lucid stoicism and passionate determination to continue his studies, re

Jorge Torres   The year 1984 saw the passing of three important figures in recent architecture: José Antonio Coderch, Josep Maria Sostres, and Joaquim Gili. The first of these is our most renowned figure of the second half of the century; Sostres' works and writing

Carme Pinós, Enric Miralles   Spain   The building was positioned on a corner to encompass its garden from its terraces, and to be seen from the road as an access ramp. From the village, however, the building appears as an open room behind a high wall. Three platforms suspended in a fan-

Bolles + Wilson   Germany   "Keeping anguish at bay by absorbing its causes..." In the famous phrase that opens Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri captured the debilitating contradiction of the avant-garde: its secret, tormented complicity with the progress of capitalism.

Bolles + Wilson   Germany   While Münster's library is clearly the product of an architectural competition, a rhetorical tour de force that might almost seem overly determined were it not for its role in the city's identity, the nearby university's Technology Center is, despite

Ignacio Paricio   Most of the voices discussed in these articles had been forgotten, like the construction elements they pointed out, in the pursuit of geometric abstraction that characterizes most contemporary architectural production. However, the element discussed

Jorge Sainz   Isozaki was certainly not a pioneering architect in the use of computers to draw his projects, but he was one of the first to harness the full potential of this computing tool to visualize architecture in a radically new way. Thus, his design proposa

Carlos Verdaguer   The slow process of cultural recovery that took place in Spain during the postwar period reached a turning point in the mid-1950s, coinciding with the beginning of economic liberalization brought about by the end of autarky. Since the 1940s, and espe

Jorge Sainz   He was able to draw with either hand. He was a student, professor, and director of the Madrid School of Architecture, editor-in-chief of the magazine Arquitectura, and a member of the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts. He wrote a treatise on partitio

Jorge Sainz   There are two ways to republish old, somewhat outdated treatises. One is to do so modestly, in an inexpensive edition that makes them affordable for students. Another is to reproduce them in conditions similar to those of the original, which usually

José Ignacio Linazasoro   Urban analysis studies played a major role in the 1970s, when they provided solid support for an architectural understanding of the city. This produced a varied repertoire of works of varying interest that, over time, has drifted toward routine studi

Adela García-Herrera   Abraham Zabludovsky (1924) is one of the most prolific figures in his country and, together with Teodoro González de León (1926), one of the most prominent representatives of the ‘official’ trend in Mexican architecture: that of pre-Columbian monumen

Adela García-Herrera   The Arc-en-Rêve Architecture Center in Bordeaux is becoming another important reference point for contemporary architecture. It organizes trips, courses, debates, conferences, and, above all, exhibitions. For the publication of some of its catalogs,

Adela García-Herrera   'With him came scandal' is the expressive title used by another illustrious provocateur, Óscar Tusquets, for his introduction to the luxurious and extremely expensive monograph published by the German publishing house Wasmuth on the work of Alfredo A

My Uncle Rem K

The current focus of architecture in Madrid revolves around Félix Candela (1910), who has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the Polytechnic University of Madrid, while an exhibition of his work has also opened in the capital (Canal de Isabel II g

Just after turning thirty, and suffering from cancer that had been diagnosed only five months earlier, José Manuel Horcajadas, architect and graphic designer for the magazines A&V and Arquitectura Viva, passed away in Madrid on March 16. While still

François Chaslin   At just fifty years old, Christian de Portzamparc is the sixth European architect and the first Frenchman to receive the Pritzker Prize. In Portzamparc's case, the prize rewards one of the most poetic figures on the architectural scene, a creator of

The massive turnout for the third edition of Europan shows that this European initiative has definitely taken root, becoming one of the main alternatives for young architects, who can test their talent in a stimulating environment of international co

Work has just been completed on one of the buildings that José María García de Paredes (1924-1990) left on the drawing board: the auditorium in Cuenca. After the Manuel de Falla Auditorium in Granada (1978) and the Villanueva Hall at the Prado Museum

Madrid recently acquired a work by Viennese architect Hans Hollein, but it is a building that cannot be seen. The prestigious Austrian architect, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1985, has come to Madrid thanks to Banco Santander, whose Madrid headquart

Barcelona has a new space dedicated to contemporary architecture and art. The Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), directed by Josep Ramoneda, occupies the Casa de la Caridad, a group of nineteenth-century buildings surrounding a large c

The seventh International Congress of the International Confederation of Architecture Museums (ICAM 7) is being held in Madrid from May 8 to 14. At the same time, the Círculo de Bellas Artes is hosting an exhibition (until June 12) curated by Martha

From May 25 to June 19, the Barcelona branch of the College of Architects of Catalonia (Plaza Nueva, 5) is hosting a retrospective exhibition of the work of Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (Rome, 1914–Sao Paulo, 1992). In issue 24 of Arquit

Luis Peña Ganchegui (1926) has retired as a professor at the San Sebastián School of Architecture and has become a professor emeritus there. To mark the occasion, and at the initiative of students and teachers, an exhibition has been organized at the

The sixties, London, pop music, the Beatles, and, in architecture, Archigram. Those nostalgic for that mythical, youthful, and optimistic decade have the opportunity to see, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (from June 22), and from the Kunsthalle in V

Faced with the fascination generated in the mid-15th century by the discovery of the laws of perspective, Alberti recommended that architects not use this method of representation to define their projects. On the contrary, he believed that the most u