Although the emptying of the countryside is now a matter of importance on a state level, it is still those close to rural environments who are most active in ensuring that the wrongly understood idea of progress responsible for vacating that world do

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The tragedy in Gaza is summed up in one image. The Palestinian photographer Mohammed Salem captured with his camera the mourning of the world through two figures intertwined by pain: the 36-year-old woman Inas Abu Maamar embraces the body of her five

Much as it is the locus of our best literature, Spain’s countryside was a matter of concern only for those living there, practically until Sergio del Molino gave a name to its depopulation. Now that the emptying of towns is an issue of importance on

Óscar Miguel Ares   Spain   The void between two houses on one same block of the urban core is filled by a roof that connects a succession of domestic spaces – some protected overhead, others exposed to the open air. The dynamics of the thresholds under the roof create a dialo

Óscar Miguel Ares   Spain   In addition to serving lunch menus at tables, an establishment located on the town square provides a home-delivery service to facilitate the everyday life of elderly residents. The quintessential space for socializing in small municipalities, the bar

Óscar Miguel Ares   Spain   In the comarca of Montes Torozos, amid wheat fields and by the river Bajoz, Castomonte in the province of Valladolid features a stretch of the Camino de Santiago pilgrim route that comes from Madrid, and has a census count of 309. Using its wind-powe

Óscar Miguel Ares   Spain   Up in the Torozos Mountains, in the comarca of Tierra de Campos, the small municipality of Valverde de Campos in Valladolid province has a population of slightly over a hundred. The surpluses produced by wind farms were invested in this building with

Shiromi Pinto   After Sri Lanka became independent in 1948, De Silva returned and set up a studio in her family home in Kandy, becoming one of only two women in the world at the time to establish an architectural practice in her own name. From there she began design

Iñaki Bergera   On view this summer of 2024 at Museo ICO is ‘Moments in Architecture,’ an exhibition originally set up at the Vitra Design Museum. It comes to Madrid as part of the PhotoEspaña festival, but this is not the first time for the spectacular photography

Jorge Bernabeu   Javier Manterola always went the extra mile. Mentor to us all, he infected us with his love for bridges, his daring to push farther, his search for new paths, and his aesthetic sensibility. He left us on 11 May at the age of 87, leaving us his ideas,

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Arnold Toynbee famously said that “history is not just one damned thing after another,” and Peter Turchin has set out to try out the British historian’s intuition through a colossal data base from which to deduce patterns of development of social org

Jorge Torres   In February 1951, Le Corbusier went on his first trip to India. The Government of Punjab – the state that emerged in the northwest after the split of the British Raj – had tasked him with the urban planning of the new regional capital, Chandigarh. As

Carlos Sambricio   Unlike texts penned from the plane of erudition, this book is testimony of wisdom acquired over decades of practical experience. Urban legend has it that in the late 1960s, Terán tried to publish maps and plans he had been collecting for years, but t

Alejandro Valdivieso   The anthropologist Marvin Harris stressed in his book Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (1999) how much postmodernity had done to make science and reason – associated with the pressure and oppression of totalitarian regimes – give way to emotio

To think of monasteries and Portugal is to think of the novel Memorial do Convento (published in English as Baltasar and Blimunda), where in Baroque prose José Saramago intertwined the pursuits of a group of heterodox characters with the construction

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   In establishing its foundation, Porto’s most famous bookshop makes one of the country’s earliest constructions coexist with a sculptural pavilion that echoes its volumes on a contemporary note. The premises were reconstructed in the 20th century unde

Eduardo Souto de Moura, Luís Peixoto   Portugal   The 18th-century edifice that completed Portugal’s largest monastery now harbors a hotel establishment that endeavors to highlight the value of the heritage site without stagnating it.

João Luís Carrilho da Graça   Portugal   A Manueline abbey gains back its original configuration when freed of additions made over time that overburdened its loadbearing structure and had the effect of distorting its simple proportions.

Solar   Spain   Flaunting its name, the Madrid Moderno development was in 1906 dubbed in the newspaper ABC as “the most European of Madrid neighborhoods”: an ensemble of garden-city schemes of which barely twelve small houses remain, survivors of real-estate pressur

Arquitecturia   Spain   An old construction on the premises of the agricultural cooperative of Flix – a municipality in Ribera de Ebro, a comarca of the province of Tarragona – has been turned into a cultural center. Counting a built area of 524 square meters, the new spac

Burgos & Garrido, Bernabeu Ingenieros   Slovenia   The coachmen of Maribor were much relieved when in 1913 the Austrians inaugurated what is known as the Old Bridge over the Drava, which replaced the timber structure that had been a serious bottleneck…

Chipperfield in Galicia

David Chipperfield figures on the world scene through his offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai. And his architecture has addressed the demands of the most prestigious clients. Nevertheless, for twenty years now the British Pritzker laureate

Many architects are hesitant to acknowledge the influence of mentors, but Josep Llinàs has always been explicit in this regard, in particular about his devotion to Jujol and Sota. Combining the former’s vital spark and the latter’s rational serenity

When she was almost a septuagenarian, Suzanne Valadon portrayed herself with her breasts exposed, a pearl necklace, and a defiant gaze. In this way – free of prejudices, flirty and provocative – she summed up her life and work. Accustomed to her pres

“How our group is dwindling, our first fighting and heroic group, how few of us are left.” As the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro reported in a letter written to his mother, this was a lament Picasso uttered at María Blanchard’s funeral in 1932. The tw

Eduardo Mangada   José Luis Romany was a deeply religious man, not only in the faith he professed but also in the open, kind way with which he treated everyone, a far cry from hierarchies, in solidarity with the world’s disinherited and dispossessed. This silent fervo

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Our continent has gone to the polls at a critical time, and architecture cannot be indifferent to the great dilemmas of the moment, for its own future is essentially tied to climate change, to the protagonism of existing constructions, and to demogra