On Two Continents. Sou Fujimoto has managed to find in Europe the same rural beauty and urban complexity that fascinate him so much in his own land, and in 2016 he opened a branch of his Tokyo practice in the French capital. Arquitectura Viva present

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The landscape is a product of human action. We do not know what the future of the environment shaped by climate emergency will be like, but we do know that those landscapes will be defined by deliberate choices. Haiti’s deforestation contrasts with t

As happened to Soseki, many Japanese travelers return home disappointed that Europe was not what they had expected. But Sou Fujimoto (Hokkaido, 1971) knew how to find in the Old Continent the same rural beauty and urban complexity that fascinate him

Sou Fujimoto   Hungary   A sinuous roof that merges with the lush vegetation of the historic Városliget crowns an exhibition center devoted to the rich musical tradition – cultivated and popular – of the Magyar country. The undulating disk of the roof, perforated in an irreg

Sou Fujimoto   Switzerland   A rigorously orthogonal grid is used as a composition tool in working out a flexible arrangement of the different programs housed within a center for university-level business studies. The regular scheme generates cubic modules stacked in a stepped f

Sou Fujimoto   Japan   The renovation of a 1970s brutalist building and the construction beside it of a ‘green tower’ are the latest chapters of a hotel establishment’s history of more than 300 years. Contrasting with the original building, which preserves its enclosure ev

Sou Fujimoto   China   In a tourist village nestled in the mountains, a new hotel and a complex for exhibitions, conferences, and art galleries are unified by a gossamer canopy woven with natural fibers. Sustained by slender metal profiles, the pergola emerges like the ea

Sou Fujimoto   China   A pavilion with a passable roof shaped like a ribbon is the most recently completed standout in an ambitious long-term plan to regenerate the waterfront of a harbor city. As a reaction to the topography of the promontory it sits on, a thin plate of c

Rowan Moore   Siempre con mirada activista, Ai Weiwei reflexiona en el Design Museum sobre el valor de los objetos cotidianos y sus procesos de fabricación.

Lluís Alexandre Casanovas   The rearrangement of the Reina Sofía Museum’s holdings has been a chance to bring alternative media, including architecture, into its exhibition discourse.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford, and his works have a dimension commensurate with his planetary themes. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) was a bestseller which spread the world’s history onto zones like the C

Alejandro Bernabeu   Chicago’s cool. So begins ACS’s tenth book on cities, though it’s not that simple. The myth of Chicago is not only due to its place and history. Its hydraulics, buildings, and bridges are important, but not enough to cover the city’s significance. Ne

Alberto Ballesteros   There are many Chicagos besides that of the postcard picture: the rough Chicago of meatpacking that Sandburg lyricized, the sordid Chicago of gangsters that Algren novelized, the marginal Chicago of Chicanos where Sandra Cisneros grew up. The same go

Eduardo Prieto   It is hard to think of a contemporary architect who has stirred up so much consensus among colleagues and within the culture world, and even in that world inhabited by the fauna – exotic to many – of the ‘general public.’ The consensus around Siza an

Eduardo Prieto   An architect has to have a strong sense of self – a creative ego made of tastes and phobias – to be of any worth, but this personality often ends up in blatant hostility and rivalry with others in the profession. Not the case of Moneo. His selfhood,

In education, too, there have been classes. While the great universities born out of medieval enlightenment took up large and sometimes luxurious buildings, primary education practically remained restricted to the domestic scale – to small classrooms

Diana Kellogg Architects   India   Within the GYAAN Center, designed by the New York architect Diana Kellogg, stands this school built with local sandstone that welcomes more than 400 girls from families living below the poverty line, in a region where female literacy barely reaches 3

Daaz Office   Iran   A project of the NGO Iran-e-Man, this educational center for children is also a gathering and learning place for people of the Iranian village of Seyed-Bar. The budget was limited but the villagers took part both physically and financially in realizi

JEJU.studio   Tanzania   The Polish firm Jeju Studio, led by Iwo Borkowicz and Adam Siemaskiewicz, was commissioned by the Wayair Foundation to build a preschool and primary school in the refugee settlement of Ulyankulu, in western Tanzania. The inhabitants of Ulyankulu fled

Gonzalo Mardones    Chile   A set of basic volumes that are easily recognizable to the children is oriented towards an arcaded courtyard in order to guarantee a learning environment free of external distractions. The exposed structure and the insigne pine wood finishes have the

Ignacio Borrego   Spain   Football is the most important of the least important things, and such adoration for the king of sports games has birthed a house located on the sunny side of the Madrid mountains, one which seeks to reconcile the slope with the flatness required by

Happel Cornelisse Verhoeven architecten   Netherlands   Although senates are, in general, bodies made up of elected citizens, they have not managed to shake off a certain elitist whiff. At least by etymology, the senex (the elders of the tribe) and the patricians, peers, and heroes congregate in them. Sen

Bach arquitectes, Jaume Bach, Anna & Eugeni Bach, Bayona Studio, Alba Colomer    Spain   A joint work of the architects Jaume Bach, Anna Bach, Eugeni Bach, Xevi Bayona, and Alba Colomer, with the collaboration, too, of the civil engineer Lluís Pauné, this urban intervention emphasizes the geometry of boundaries between what are known as

Biennale Architettura 2023

In spite of everything, biennials maintain their influence on themes tackled by artists and architects. At the least, they reflect certain preoccupations, and in the best of cases they contribute to giving form to ‘agendas,’ albeit only while the spo

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM-UPM) has the tradition of having its veteran teachers give a final lecture prior to retirement, but Luis Fernández-Galiano, who retired as chair professor of architectural design during the pandemic, could not

Set to open on 29 April, the exhibition ‘Parque del Drago, 1998-2023: 25 years around the thousand-year-old dragon tree,’ curated by Fernando Menis, will be presented by Luis Fernández-Galiano at the Visitor Center of Dragon Tree Park, in the Tenerif

The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wished death to find him planting his cabbages, and it is a similar devotion to gardening that we find in Íñigo Segurola, a Basque agricultural engineer and landscapist who for a time was also the presenter

The fitting out of a space for holding events has transformed El Jaral de la Mira, a peaceful estate located up in the sierra of Madrid, once upon a time used by King Philip II as a hunting ground. Although a large part of the property is still taken

On view through 7 August at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is a journey through the six-decade career of Norman Foster. Taking up almost 2,200 square meters of floor space, the exhibition presents 130 projects of his through an unprecedented selection

Forty models from the studio of the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor are on view until 16 September 2023 in a building he himself designed, the Werkraum Haus in Andelsbuch (Austria), built with the participation of local artisans. The exhibition is cura

The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, is proud to present ‘Heatherwick Studio: Building Soulfulness’ from Friday, March 17 to Sunday, June 4, 2023. This exhibition is the first one in Japan to showcase twenty-eight major projects of Heatherwick Studio. By look

Martin Wolf   The renewal of capitalism and democracy must be animated by a simple, but powerful, idea: that of citizenship. We cannot just think as consumers, workers, business owners, savers, or investors. We must think as citizens. Citizenship must have three a