From Los Angteles to Moscow. Renzo Piano is not one of those masters who take on a late style, and who through it break with their previous output to become daring. The Genoan’s career has been a meditated but constant move forward, and he has stayed

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Climate kills, science saves. During this summer of drought and fires, the best news have been scientific. Energy, inflation, and war made the covers, but some of the achievements in science cast light on a troubled world: the James Webb spatial tele

At the age of 85, Renzo Piano is not one of those masters who take on a late style, and who through it break with their previous output to become daring. The Genoan’s career has been a meditated but constant move forward, and he has stayed true to hi

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   United States   The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) of the United States, which year after year extols Hollywood movies with its Oscar awards, inaugurates its much awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on 30 September. The institution will in

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   United States   Renzo Piano has completed his third construction for Columbia University's new Manhattanville Campus in Harlem, which with three other academic buildings is part of the first phase of the masterplan that the Italian architect drew up in collaboration

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   France   In dialogue with the grand courthouse building next to it, the new seat of the law bar association completes the judicial complex that has activated the peripheral Batignolles district. A metro station under the site made it necessary to dispense wit

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Russia   Built between 1904 and 1908 in Bálchug (Bolotny óstrov), a river island in the heart of Moscow, GES-2 was a power station. The old plant is now a space conceived as an experience of going from visual to performing arts, via a welcoming civic space. T

Miguel Fernández-Galiano   The appearance of new ‘softwares’ makes it possible for artificial intelligence to generate images of extraordinary quality by means of word prompts.

Ignacio Nieto de la Cal   The web revolution that the metaverse is bringing about creates new opportunities in which architects can play a more significant role.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Published at the same time, the books that the art historian Estrella de Diego and the writer Antonio Muñoz Molina have devoted to the Prado may seem like parallel endeavors, but could not be more different. Both arose from invitations to give semina

Eduardo Prieto   On the vade mecum that Vitrivius wrote around 30 BC, De Architectura libri decem, mighty rivers of ink have flowed in the writing of a good part of Western architectural theory; rivers of ink to annotate, translate, and emend a text we consider found

Iñaki Ábalos   The publication of On Bramante is a major event. It fixes in place the hitherto latent position of a generation that has left many manifestations and an editorial roll-out resembling that of the magazine San Rocco, directed by Pier Paolo Tamburelli i

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Spain’s current debate on historical memory prompts us to transcribe a speech given on 29 October 2004 in Madrid, at a ceremony organized by the government and the Institute of Architects to remember professionals purged in the wake of the Civil War.

Modernity has had a curious destiny: to devour itself like the god Saturn his offspring. Conceived as demands of a present that wanted to be the future, the modern tenets have suffered the passage of time like few things are able to do, to such a deg

Foster + Partners   Spain   This retrofit project breathes new life into a historic industrial building in Madrid, creating a sustainable exemplar of building reuse and revitalizing the surrounding area. With over 10,000 square meters of new office space, the project unifies a

Fernández-Abascal + Muruzabal, GFA2   Spain   Subtle interventions enhance a necessary cleaning job in the project of reconstructing a deteriorated port facility and then fitting it out as home to an institution’s collection of artworks.

Jovino Martínez Sierra Arquitectos   Spain   After a meticulous work of fine tuning, several cultural uses will reactivate what now is the only surviving building of a lock manufacturing plant with deep roots in the memory of the place.

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   Spain   Since the day in September 1908 that a journalist working for La Veu de Catalunya gave the region a name which described its dramatic geography and topography, the Costa Brava – a rugged land of fisherfolk – has honed its image as a paradise by the s

Manuel Bouzas, Santiago del Águila   Spain   As part of the 2021 celebration of A Cel Obert, a festival of ephemeral architecture held in Tortosa (Tarragona), this monumental-scale, over 6-meter-high lamp is the work of the architects Manuel Bouzas and Santiago del Águila, in collaboration with

Brendeland & Kristoffersen   Sweden   The history of many a city is tied up with that of its principal church. Lund Cathedral’s story begins with its construction in the 11th century – with the help of a troll, as the legend goes – and to it we owe what is the oldest primary school in al

Charles III and Architecture

Not since Louis XIV had the world seen a monarch playing architectural critic. The recently enthroned Charles III has little in common with the Sun King, but does emulate him in his passion for cities and buildings, and though the heyday of monarchie

The career of Andrés Jaqué can conceptually be described as being halfway between architectural design and critical activism, and geographically it is divided between Madrid and New York City, where he has been teaching since the year 2013, and direc

Anyone driving northwestward from Las Vegas for three hours, into the Nevada desert, will find the torrid plain giving rise, like a mirage, to some geoglyphic formations with pyramid-like constructions at the center. They resemble the remains of an e

Pezo von Ellrichshausen   Australia   A building formed by 36 concrete columns set against the sky and a circular ramp that leads up to a viewing point help to give character to what is otherwise a dull suburban commercial area.

Lucien Kroll has died at the age of 95. A critic of the excesses of modern functionalism and the author of participatory projects like the Mémé housing complex at the University of Louvain, the Belgian architect defended the idea of architecture buil

The young Japanese who landed in Paris in the 1960s to hone his gifts in clothes design could not have imagined himself one day garbing the world’s intelligentsia, from the tight black turtleneck jerseys of Steve Jobs to the voluminous coats of Zaha

It could happen that Fruto Vivas will without much thought be tagged as Hugo Chávez’s architect, but over and above the fact that he supported and worked for the dictator, from the ambitious Great Mission Housing Venezuela (GMVV) to Chávez’s mausoleu

Javier García-Gutiérrez Mosteiro   Esta noche, 5 de septiembre, a causa de un derrame cerebral, ha fallecido Pedro Navascués Palacio. Somos muchos —y de muy distintos campos disciplinares— los que sabemos qué supone esta pérdida. Pedro Navascués (1942-2022) ha sido un nombre esencial

Iñaki Ábalos   There are major parallelisms between the generic 27ºC ceiling imposed by the Spanish government and the current Technical Building Code that regulates energy use (as against regulating temperature) in constructions, much of which echoes Germany’s Pas