Luis Fernández-Galiano   Perfection is route more than target. In the 16th century, the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila praised a life of poverty and humility in The Way of Perfection, and the same title served the writer Pío Baroja to express regenerationist concerns in the earl

Founded in 1989 by four partners and now directed by Kjetil Trædal Thorsen and Craig Dykers, Snøhetta is a Norwegian practice that employs almost 140 people in its two offices, in Oslo and New York. Efficient and poetic at the same time, the archite

Snøhetta   Norway   Located at the southern end of the Norwegian coast, the building holds on to the craggy shore, immerses itself in the water, and rests on the marine floor, five meters below the North Sea level.

Snøhetta   Canada   In Calgary, where half the population uses libraries, this new one of more than 22,000 square meters rises as part of the urban and cultural regeneration of the city center.

Snøhetta   France   Aside from displaying reproductions of cave paintings that date back over 17,000 years, the museum seeks to enhance the landscape and give the region a cultural gem.

Snøhetta   China   The new opera house of Shanghai, with its sculptural roof of spiraling steps leading down to a square beside the Huangpu River, will contain three auditoriums seating 2,000, 1,200, and 1,000.

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Bjarke Ingels   Bjarke Ingels is ecstatic. His son, Darwin, is now one week old, and both baby and mother, the Spanish architect Ruth Otero, are the main characters in the photographic archive of his cell phone, which shows the boundless happiness of his recent fath

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In some of Shakespeare’s works, ghosts play a decisive role in the story, as in Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III, or Cymbeline. In Norman Foster’s work, the specters of some unbuilt projects mark inflection points in his trajectory, and go

Eduardo Prieto   Every avant-garde recognizes itself in modernity, but not all modernity recognizes itself in avant-gardes: thus starts an ‘aesthetic essay’ that explains the complex, often contradictory tenets that gave rise to artistic modernity. ‘Aesthetic essay’

Iñaki Ábalos   At last we can enjoy a book by one of the most active Madrid architects of the generation born in the 1970s. We welcome what could be a renewed interest in architectural essays, and the optimism triggered by the book’s coinciding with the consolidati

Le Corbusier, pavilion in Zurich.

Timber is perhaps the oldest building material. It was the protagonist of mythical tales about the ‘primitive hut,’ and its widespread use since then, in both popular and cultured architecture, can be attributed to reasons having to do with plain co

Kengo Kuma   Switzerland   Located by the Rolex Learning Center built by SANAA on the campus of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), ‘Under One Roof’ is a project that gathers three programs: an art and science pavilion, a technology and information gallery, an

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   Mount Chäserrugg is the easternmost peak of the seven mountains that make up the Churfirsten Massif. It rises up gently from the Toggenburg to the north reaching up to 2,262 meters, and becomes a steep cliff to the south, plummeting almost 1,900 mete

Baumschlager Eberle Architekten   France   Built over a railroad crossing in northeast Paris, the Green Office® enjoy building addresses the particularities of the site. The inner structure, which had to be as light as possible, is formed by pillars and wooden beams, while towards the exterio

Tomohiro Hata   Japan   This house in Hyogo (Japan) pursues two principal objectives which could well be seen as contradictory: on the one hand, to create an intimate abode on a barely 140-square-meter lot with neighbors in all four directions; on the other, to make the dom

Estudio Cano Lasso    United Kingdom   Located in Hackney, one of the most popular neighborhoods in London today, Second Home’s new coworking and innovation branch addresses its context and its program in two ways: through the facade and through the work atmosphere, respectively. Inspired

Tributes to artists tend to be post mortem. A case in point is Le Corbusier and his pavilion in Zurich, designed as a Maison de l’Homme in which to display the collection of the gallerist Heidi Weber, but which after opening in 1967, two years after

One of the most recognized figures in the world of corporate architecture passed away in New Haven, Connecticut, on 19 July. Born in San Miguel de Tucumán (Argentina) into a family of modest means, Cesar Pelli was the quintessential self-made archite

The British architect Norman Foster and the local office of Luis María Uriarte are the winners of the competition to renovate and enlarge the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao, lately one of the most coveted projects in the context of cultural buildings

The job of renovating the Banco Santander headquarters, a massive, grandiose, eclectic building along the Cantabrian capital’s Paseo de Pereda, not far from the Botín Foundation, was given to the British architect David Chipperfield, a renowned exper

A contemporary augur of nature, Olafur Eliasson, born in Copenhagen in 1967, leaped to fame with the gigantic, sublime sun that he recreated in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Now, thirteen years later, he is an anointed artist returning to the Lond

On view through 3 November at the Botín Foundation in Santander is ‘Calder Stories.’ Eighty pieces of different origins are on display in an exhibition that is distinct for two main reasons. First, instead of centering around the American artist’s ca

Scheduled to open at Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum on 2 October, and to stay there until 19 January, ‘Thomas Struth’ is the most extensive showing of the career of the acclaimed German photographer born in 1954. More than 130 works – including a number

Students of the Master of Advanced Studies in Digital Fabrication and Architecture program at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have built ‘Concrete Choreoraphy,’ an installation of columns made of special concrete with the assistanc

There is no doubt whatsoever that robotization and artificial intelligence are proof of great technological progress, but as sociologists and economists keep warning us, they are also a serious threat to the survival of many jobs. Architects, for the

Le Corbusier said that architecture is a problem solved in the floor plan; a sentence which the algorithm recently launched by Wallgren Arkitekter and BOX has completed in this manner: architecture is a problem that is solved through the floor plan,

Evelyn Alonso Rohner, José Antonio Sosa   The most basic information one needed to understand a city – to recognize its hierarchies, know its workings, identify its routes – historically required a physical reality (heights, schemes, structures, geometries, axes). This link between informati