Luis Fernández-Galiano   From virus to vaccine, 2020 has been a year on pause. From the detection of the first cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan to the announcement of the efficacy of vaccines, we have lived a period of virtual life, locked up in domesticity and our contact with ot

If the work of Rafael Moneo had to be tied to a single word, it would be ‘context.’ In both senses: attention to context as material capacity to intervene, with sensitivity, in different places and landscapes; and attention to context as spiritual c

Rafael Moneo, Mathias Schütte   Germany   In 2005, the Berlin city council called a competition to define the massing and set the guidelines for a block bordered by Schinkelplatz, Strasse an der Kommandantur, Niederlagstrasse, and the small square shaped by two Schinkel projects: on one hand

Rafael Moneo, Clara Moneo, Valerio Canals   Spain   The Descendientes de J. Palacios Winery was located in the town of Villafranca del Bierzo. Its facilities were spread in different structures and warehouses, so it became necessary to reconfigure and gather them all in one building. The desire to ble

Eduardo Prieto   To mention Richard Buckminster Fuller is to mention an amateur who wanted to change the world. It is to evoke the image of a visionary committed to the tiresome craft of surprising without respite, amazing without let-up. It is also to evoke the no l

Norman Foster   I had wanted to collaborate with Otl Aicher on the graphics and signage for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. Frustratingly, the politics of commissioning on that project ruled it out, but I remember someone asking me why we needed him and responding,

Luis Fernández-Galiano   How did the prosperity of the West come about? Two monumental works by American professors offer unexpected answers. Walter Scheidel, who teaches classical culture, history, and human biology at Stanford, argues that it was the failure of the Roman E

Eduardo Prieto   One attribute of the genius is falling into oblivion. The temporary oblivion to which figures now gracing Olympus descended, from Velázquez to Lautréamont, Borromini to Tesla, and into which also dropped the two blurry architects that two recent book

Alberto Ballesteros   A detour in 1948 led a young graduate on a road trip through the USA to an outlying city where he would live and end his days. Thus began the link between Howard Barnstone and Houston, an urb whose 1950s heyday many architects thrived in, creating a

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The texan cliché of bigness applies to this hefty book. Nevertheless, the work of Miró Rivera – set up in Austin but with roots in Juan Miró’s Spanish and Miguel Rivera’s Puerto Rican education – is more intimate and succinct than this volume, with i

Ignacio Nieto de la Cal   The astonishing ease with which an imported microscopic virus is bringing our current wellbeing and the global economy down on their knees is making us rethink our way of living and reconsider our priorities. It is starting to look less like just a s

Justo Isasi   It is fitting to use the name of the nurse Isabel Zendal, a key figure in the extraordinary expedition that took the smallpox vaccine to the confines of the Spanish Empire early in the 19th century, for the Community of Madrid’s new hospital for epid

Arquitectura Chile 15   Spain   With the health crisis that broke out last spring, the government of the Community of Madrid, through its regional health service, took several measures to try to curb the pandemic and provide urgent attention to the ill. The IFEMA field hospital mad

Davide Macullo   Switzerland   The canton of Graubünden is one of the most extraordinary parts of Switzerland, not only because of its complex cultural tradition – including three official languages – but also because of a landscape of sublime contrast between soaring mountains an

Héctor Fernández Elorza   Spain   “Our Lady of Communications”: that is how Leon Trotsky, when he visited the Spanish capital, christened with irony the monumental building erected by Antonio Palacios and Joaquín Otamendi in the year 1919, and which the people of Madrid have ever sin

Romera y Ruiz Arquitectos   Spain   This project encompasses 5,484 square meters on the seafront of Las Palmas – capital of Gran Canaria island – in the area of the naval base and the Santa Catalina dock. Carried out by the local practice of Pedro Romera García and Ángela Ruiz Martínez

What has perhaps been the worst year in half a century, 2020, comes to a close with a hope-inspiring image: the picture of elderly people and nurses receiving the first doses of the vaccine. Hope-inspiring because it a sign that the thick fog in whic

A master of contemporary architecture, Alberto Campo Baeza received Spain’s National Architecture Award, given by the Ministry of Public Works with a prize of 60,000 euros. With this the jury composed of Álvaro Siza, Manuel Gallego, Estrella de Diego

After twelve years of planning and building, the office of David Chipperfield has completed the new Kunsthaus Zurich extension, the fourth in the history of the neo-Greek building raised in 1910 by Karl Moser, who would be the first CIAM president. U

Desde su apertura, el Museo de Bellas Artes de Houston se ha nutrido de colecciones legadas por pudientes benefactores que han tenido que acomodarse en sucesivas ampliaciones del edificio neoclásico original. En la estela de las adiciones de Mies van

The Australian architecture firm Hassell has in collaboration with the Dutch studio OMA finished renovating the Museum for Western Australia in the heart of the city of Perth’s cultural precinct. Its new aboriginal nickname, ‘Boola Bardip’ (many stor

The firm led by the British architect Norman Foster has been selected to design Guangming Hub, a high-density urban development linked to the railway that runs through Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. Following the model known as TOD (transit-orie

As many as 300,000 people crossing the border between continental China and Hong Kong on a daily basis are served by Huanggang Port Area, a strategic enclave for which the London-based firm Zaha Hadid Architects has drawn up a highly ambitious regene

The Barcelona practice led by Benedetta Tagliabue has placed first in the international competition to redevelop Century Square on East Nanjing Road in the city of Shanghai, strategically located between People’s Square and The Bund.The scheme submit

It was the destiny of a modest magazine published during the Great War in the neutral Netherlands to revolutionize the visual arts with its abstractions, straight lines, and primary colors. And although Piet Mondrian was one of the ideologists of the

Ever since Solomon R. Guggenheim traveled to Europe with Baroness Hilla Rebay for a guide and met Wassily Kandinsky in his Bauhaus classes, the wealthy industrialist’s foundation has been closely tied to the oeuvre of the Russian master. Now the Basq

In Rome, the National Museum of 21st Century Art – or MAXXI for short – will from 26 February through 1 August bring together more than 800 drawings, plans, photographs, and models of the prolific work of Aldo Rossi, not to mention letters. The item

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The year 2021 begins with three black swans, sounding like drum beats after the Christmas truce: the assault on the United States Capitol by a mob devoted to still-President Trump, the historic snowstorm that has paralyzed Spain, and the sudden spike