Luis Fernández-Galiano   Water dilutes the certitudes of architecture. Its liquid state erodes physical foundations and disintegrates the discipline’s conceptual base. Marx warned that under capitalism ‘all that is solid melts into air,’ and Marshall Berman picked up the bat

Architecture is built with matter and gravity, yet buildings do not always look material and grave. It is true that classical tradition conceived the discipline as a balance between utilitas, firmitas, and venustas, that is, as a progression from fun

Luis Vidal, Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Spain   The Botín Centre, a space for art, culture and education, projecting into the Bay of Santander, restores the ties between the historical part of the city and the sea. The freeway separating the park from the sea has now been rung underground through

Francisco Mangado   Spain   With the idea of creating a new sector for visitors for the thousands of tourists that travel to this Balearic island every year, in 2005 a competition was called to design the new Congress Center and Hotel on Palma’s waterfront, parallel to the beac

AL_A (Amanda Levete Architects)   Portugal   The new Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon is iconic towards the Tagus estuary, and urban and landscape-like in the direction of the historical neighborhood of Belém. 

Paul Goldberger   Relatively few architects have solved the challenge of giving physical expression to the desire for a legacy. Of course any architect’s oeuvre is itself a physical expression of his or her legacy, and for most, the built work that they leave behind w

Grafton Architects   Peru   The unique condition of Lima, its relationship to the Pacific Ocean, with 40m-high cliffs defining the boundary between the city and the sea, was a starting point in the conception of this project. The infrastructure for learning is imagined as a ‘ne

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Six-Day War began a new chapter in the troubled history of the Middle East, a shaken geography whose fractures extend far from its epicenters. On 7 June 1967 the Israeli army seized East Jerusalem, paving the way for a ‘unilateral unification’ of

Julia Ramírez Blanco   Forensic Architecture is a research group based in Goldsmiths, University of London. It is also the name that the group has given to a new field of exploration. Using techniques belonging to architecture, Forensic Architecture analyzes images, sounds

Rosa Urbano   Good lighting does not only make things visible. It also directs our gaze, influences perception, draws attention to details, orients, gives form to objects, and relates them to points of space. Uniformity in the distribution of lighting levels is an

MUKA arquitectura   Spain   On a plot with a 2.2-meter facade, the use of a paving of pressed clay taken from the edges of the slabs generates a latticework in which the alternating arrangement of the ceramic module with rope and sardinel filters incoming light. 

In Santander 23 June was opening day for the Botín Centre, now the most important exhibition space of the Cantabrian capital. It completes an iconic cultural route along Spain’s northern coast that stretches from the City of Culture in Santiago de Co

In 2012 the Avery Library at Columbia University bought from the Wright Foundation the huge archive that the architect put together in the course of his career of almost seventy years: 55,000 drawings, 125,000 photographs, 300,000 letters, and innume

The partners José Selgas and Lucía Cano have committed themselves to an architectural style that is as recognizable as it is risk-laden. Their organic geometry, unrenounceable artistic vocation, and penchant for creating diffuse atmospheres make the

This year’s summer pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery has just opened to the public, to little surprise with respect to the computer rendering that was presented a few months ago by its author, the Burkina Faso-born Berlin-based architect Diébédo Fra

The first ‘documenta,’ organized in Kassel as a branch of a horticultural show, was held in 1955 with the purpose of acquainting the public with what the Nazis had banished as ‘degenerate art.’ It quickly became something else. Held every five years,

The night of 24 June 2017 will always from now on be associated with an image worthy of catastrophe movies: the 62-meter-tall Grenfell Tower being devoured by flames and painting the sky red. The blaze was just the visible part of the tragedy that wa

Beyond the economic crisis or the territorial tensions between the two countries that form it, the Iberian Peninsula has a big problem: pyromania. One summer after another, on both sides of the border between Spain and Portugal, fires make headlines.