Luis Fernández-Galiano   After many years of large interventions, Spain is now moving on to times of minor surgery. If not all ailments require open-heart surgery, not all social demands call for the construction of large buildings: the health of citizens is preserved and pr

Time continuously stores information in matter, making it a document. That by reading matter we can understand time is something well familiar to archaeologists, voracious exegetes of the remains of past civilizations, interpreters of those entropic

AleaOlea arquitectura i paisatge   Spain   Santa María de Vilanova de la Barca is a Gothic church of the 13th century that was partially destroyed in 1936 during Civil War bombings. Since then the building has remained in a state of neglect and only the east facade, some fragments of the aisl

BSA Barrio & Sainz de Aja   Spain   The architectural site that has reached  our days is part of a group of 11th-century  buildings around a Benedictine monastery outside the city of Burgos, a crossing point in the Way of Saint James. The church, with three naves and several chapels,

Héctor Fernández Elorza, Manuel Fernández Ramírez   Spain   The Hermitage of the Holy Sepulcher in the Extremaduran town of Jarandilla de la Vera, built in the 17th century, was used as a prison in the 19th and as an elementary school in the 20th, after losing its roof. The intervention has involved consolida

Ferran Vizoso   Spain   Destroyed in the Battle of the Ebro in 1938, the town church of Corbera d’Ebre became an icon of what the population had to endure. It has now been transformed into a multipurpose hall, but in a way that preserves the memory of the Spanish Civil War,

Flores & Prats   Spain   In the historic center of Palma, Casal Balaguer is a large noble house from the 14th century, refurbished in the 16th and extended in the 18th. At the end of the past century, the City Council decided to convert it into a cultural center, making the

El Fabricante de Espheras   Spain   Considered one of the maximum exponents of Valencian Renaissance nobility architecture, the palace-castle of Betxi has since 1997 been listed as a site of cultural interest in Spain’s heritage register, which ensures it a very high level of official

Arquitectura-G   Spain   Like others in the area, this masia (Catalan farmhouse) was built on rocky ground. It had to be adapted to the slope of the terrain, which, in combination with various enlargements and modifications carried out over time, gave rise to a labyrinth of

CUAC Arquitectura   Spain   The project for an architectural studio at Calle San Jerónimo 17, just a few meters from the church of the same name, in the city of Granada, involved a radical transformation of a commercial space that had served different purposes in the course of

Archikubik, Enllaç arquitectònic   Spain   The unearthing of the Rei Martí water storage deposit, built late in the 19th century, was accidental. The old cistern of the estate of the Torre Bellesguard, a work of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona’s Sarrià-Sant Gervasi neighborhood, had been hidden ben

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos   Spain   The location is a plot that was originally occupied by three small dwellings embedded in the old wall of the castle of Oropesa, a town in the central Spanish province of Toledo, and serving as a nexus between the castle and the Church of Our Lady of

Rodríguez + Pintos arquitectos   Spain   The castle of Santa Cruz is a modest building which is part of a series of small forts, watchtowers, and fachos that were erected in the 17th and 18th centuries along the banks of the river Miño as border strongholds. Santa Cruz does not stand out in

Castillo-Miras arquitectos   Spain   The restoration of the Nasrid tower of Huércal-Overa, built in the 14th century, has in theoretical terms pursued a dichotomy between the timeless solidity of a preexisting, medieval construction and the lightweight, provisional character of a contem

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The architecture of Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta combines romantic rauxa with rational rigor. Based in Olot, the capital of La Garrotxa – a Pre-Pyrenean region in Catalonia, filled with extinct volcanoes and pleasant landscapes that h

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Après nous, le déluge. Two recent essays open with the phrase attributed to Madame de Pompadour when French troops fell to the Prussians in 1757, and both stretch its usual interpretation as an epitaph of the Ancien Régime to use it as an emblem of t

Raúl González Bravo   If there is a material that clearly illustrates how technological progress is applied to architecture, it is aluminum. Despite this metal’s presence in numerous areas of everyday life, it is, from a historical perspective, very recent. Not until the

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   United Kingdom   The project is the result of a competition that was organized by the Bristol Royal Infirmary for the purpose of renovating the frontage of its main building, raised in the 1960s. The objective was not only to give the institution a new image, but al

Dorte Mandrup   Denmark   The Children’s Culture House presents a bent volume between the two party walls of the lot. The bend solves the height difference between them, while color and texture distinguishes them from the adjacent brick buildings. The greater part of the prog

Kengo Kuma   China   A wavy skin of textile appearance wraps this 134 meter-tall office building located in the district of Hongkou, in Shanghai. The tower contains 95,000 square meters of office space in 29 stories (private units in the higher floors, shared workplaces

Bernardo Bader Architekten   Austria   Designed by Bernardo Bader and located in the picturesque Austrian village of Laterns, 1 kilometer above sea level, the Haus am Stürcherwald adopts the type and material quality of traditional farmhouses and the typical Walserhouse of the region, but

The direction that the Pritzker Prize seemed to have marked by honoring the likes of Alejandro Aravena and Shigeru Ban in the last cycles gave no inkling that this year’s winner would be RCR, a trio whose radical architecture, a priori, does not tall

When he was 18, Diébédo Francis Kéré was awarded a scholarship to be a carpentry apprentice in Germany, but the fact that wood is scarce in his country, Burkina Faso, led him to decide to study something more useful: architecture. Now an internationa

The prefab shelter has been one of the obsessions of modern architecture, but the fruits of this obsession have been meager in terms of social and economic impact. As a matter of fact, prefabricated dwellings – except in their most profitable and ban

The cloud of uncertainty that Madrid urbanism has in recent years gotten itself trapped in – with cases like Operation Chamartín, the redevelopment of the area around Vicente Calderón Stadium, the intervention in Canalejas, or the revamping of Edific

Unlike in Spain, where prime ministers are uninterested in architecture, in France it is a tradition for French presidents to leave a ‘monumental’ legacy. Beyond emulating Napoleon or Louis xiv, they know that only presidential power can carry out pr

Fernando Valderrama   Already in its inaugural issue, back in June 1988, this magazine made room for commentary on architecture’s new digital tools, which were changing the way architects graphically represented the buildings that they imagined, and gradually even the act