Luis Fernández-Galiano   The escalation of the war in the Middle East opens Pandora’s Box, Israel bombarded Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities, killing nuclear scientists and military leaders, and Tehran responded launching ballistic missiles over Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Kersten Geers and David Van Severen draw buildings of bold shapes and exact spatial sequences, in a bid for conceptual clarity that the Belgian architects also show in their writings and lectures. In this ambiguous position between practice and theor

With the clear line of their cartoonist compatriots, Kersten Geers and David Van Severen draw their buildings with bold shapes and precise spatial sequences, in an eagerness for the conceptual clarity that they also demonstrate in their writings and

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   A crematorium is an important public building. It has, however, a conflicted attitude towards self-expression, torn between its technical content and its ceremonial character. To overcome this, the building is designed as a big inclined table, of whi

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The new municipal library of Sint-Martens-Latem, in the Belgian province of East Flanders, presents a saddle-shaped roof delimited by a circular perimeter that makes it cut a distinctive figure in the village center. The Brussels firm OFFICE Kersten

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The centripetal layout of a house enhances the connection between indoor spaces and the exterior and facilitates circulation for one of the resident family’s members, a wheelchair user. Varying in proportions and ceiling height, all the rooms of the

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   Transformed into an academic center, an old slaughterhouse has doubled its capacity through the insertion of a mezzanine floor that at the same time serves to stabilize the facades. With a smooth finish to differentiate it from the original frame, an

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The brick partitions of an industrial construction in the vicinity provided the inspiration for the revamp of this house as a succession of rooms separated by thick walling. From the street side to the rear of the plot, the walls gradually become tal

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Sweden   A vacation house rises on a slope as a simple prism propped up by ‘pilotis’ in order to alter the terrain as little as possible and give the occupants good views of a nearby lake. Inserted into the block, executed with untreated cross-laminated timbe

Óscar Tusquets   An imprudence it may be on my part to declare that the Greek Doric temple has corners of objectionable design, but I am taking the risk, in the hope that the learned reader will not take offense. It is known that the shape of the temple comes from th

Juan Miró Sardá   The Architecture Schools of Madrid and Barcelona have always carried on a certain degree of rivalry. However, in the 1960s two of their most promising graduates, Antonio Miró (1931-2011) and Fernando Higueras (1930-2008), discovered an affinity that

Abel Fernández Villegas   It has taken barely forty-five years for there to be a Spanish edition of Genius loci. Paesaggio ambiente architettura, a book by the Norwegian critic and historian Christian Norberg-Schulz which first came in Italian in 1979. In the interim it has b

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Three Spanish academics defend reason, freedom, and science with ambitious works in several volumes, and a German philosopher culminates a trilogy on 20th-century thought glimpsing the dawn of a new Enlightenment. The philologist Darío Villanueva has

Ángela García de Paredes   Women Architects at Work, de Mary Anne Hunting y Kevin D. Murphy, relata en una cuidada edición cómo en la Escuela de Arquitectura y Paisajismo de Cambridge en Massachusetts, entre los años 1916 y 1942, un considerable número de mujeres estudió Arqui

Alberto Ballesteros   Many good stories are the product of chance. As in a Borges tale, in the spring of 2014 Léa Namer stumbled upon the Sexto Panteón of the Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires: a maze of niches, stairs, and light wells under a meadow. After the katabasis

Enrique Morillo   A rare bird in the contemporary architectural scene is OFFICE. Few architects have managed to combine practice and theory with acumen, but for Kersten Geers and David Van Severen – as for their admired Rossi and Venturi – they are inseparable, and th

El Mehdi Belyasmine, Khalil Morad El Ghilali   For several decades Morocco has been undergoing a profound transformation, driven by new territorial, climatic, and geopolitical dynamics. And in a country where millenarian medinas are to coexist with colossal urban projects, architecture has become

Bofill Taller de Arquitectura   Morocco   As part of an urban development with sustainability intentions, an educational campus focused on the green sector is laid out as a network of streets and squares. The main avenue, lined with residential buildings and many academic faculties, is a pro

Oualalou + Choi   Morocco   Two hundred meters long but barely eight wide, the building is a succession of volumes attached to a retaining wall, sometimes pushed into the ground and in other cases lifted to capture views of the surroundings. The area for receiving visitors and

Studio KO   Morocco   The acclaimed French fashion designer’s creations are shown beside the villa of beautiful gardens that so inspired him, in a building clad in bricks laid in the manner of the weft of a fabric. Behind terracotta walls – opaque and porous to withstand

Groupe3Architectes   Morocco   Despite the desert climate, a lattice of local references ensures that a terminal can be built as a transparent and obstruction-free space where travelers can easily find their way around. Positioned parallel to the takeoff runway, the long building

Mossessian Architecture, Yassir Khalil Studio   Morocco   The Medina of Fez – one of Morocco’s oldest cities, often called its cultural capital – was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981. An ambitious urban-regeneration project has revitalized Place Lalla Yeddouna and its surroundings, in accordance w

Alventosa Morell Arquitectes   Spain   In Matadepera, a municipality in the comarca of Vallès Occidental, in Barcelona province, a young couple built their first home on a 600-square-meter plot that was part of a larger property of the family. Located at the foot of the majestic massif of

Atienza Maure   Spain   Not far from the chimney chutes that embody the industrial memory of Sant Adrià de Besós, the offices of a technology firm – and also the residence of its founder – have settled in what was once a printing company within a block set between party wal

Associates Architecture   Italy   Brescia marble may not be as famous as the Carrara that sculptors like Pisano and Michelangelo used, but the basin around the city is one of the largest producers of ornamental stone in Italy. In celebration of both its geological diversity and its t

Norman Foster a los 90

Granting that it is a statistical mirage, one possible characteristic of great architects is longevity, judging from the venerable age that many of them have reached, from Michelangelo and Wren to Wright or Niemeyer. Living in incessant creative stim

It is not rare for the Spanish Association of Architecture Institutes to bestow its Gold Medal on two bodies of work. Nevertheless, whereas on other occasions the jury sought to award dissimilar trajectories in an endeavor to reflect the diversity of

Diller Scofidio + Renfro   United Kingdom   V&A East Storehouse has opened in London, offering an experience that breaks away from the traditional concept of a museum. Located in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, within the East Bank cultural quarter, this publicly accessible storage facility fuse

Although he disappeared at 23 years of age during an ethnographic expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern Dutch New Guinea in 1961, Michael, the youngest of Nelson Rockefeller’s children, managed to build up a good treasure of non-Western arte

From 6 June to 26 October the Serpentine Pavilion of 2025 can be visited by the public in Kensington Gardens, London. A work of the Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum, the founder of Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), this year’s pavilion is named

From 19 to 24 June the city of Logroño is the scene of a special edition of Concéntrico, its International Festival of Architecture and Design, celebrating its now ten years of exploring public space. Since its founding in 2015, the event has for a f

Until July Versailles is hosting the third biennial organized by its two schools of higher education in architecture and landscaping. The theme this time around is ‘The Living City,’ and besides contributions of international participants including A

For Juan Navarro Baldeweg, build and create are verbs that are conjugated identically, given that both express the same impulse. So it is that everything in his oeuvre has a place in a coherent vision, such as the elements of what he calls a “prior h

In the context of the PHotoESPAÑA festival, the foundation of the Spanish insurance company Mapfre brings the first major retrospective exhibition of the photographer José Guerrero to Madrid. Born in Granada in 1979 and trained as a technical archite

Tras protagonizar la participación española en la última bienal veneciana de arte, hasta el 14 de septiembre se podrá ver en la Biblioteca Nacional la ‘Pinacoteca migrante’ de la hispano-peruana Sandra Gamarra: una revisión del concepto hegemónico de

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Three months before turning a hundred, Françoise Choay died on 8 January, and her intellectual legacy makes it inexcusable not to publish an obituary, no matter the delay. The French historian, who situated the origin of architectural theory in Leon

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Luxembourg-born architect, writer, and draftsman Léon Krier, one of the key drivers of the postmodern movement, passed away on 17 June in Palma de Mallorca, where he had been living since 2013 with his partner Irene P. Stillman, in a house near t