Luis Fernández-Galiano   Buildings made for sound are also made for sight. My generation learned the rule that auditoria are constructions to be judged with one’s eyes closed, but in truth few buildings are enjoyed with such wide open eyes as those raised for music. Be they

Ignacio García Pedrosa   The philharmonic typology designed by Hans Scharoun has been the model for the grand auditoriums built in the last decades, all conceived as landmarks in their respective cities. 

Plantas Floor Plans SeccionesSections

Ateliers Jean Nouvel   France   An envelope of aluminum scales with patterns inspired in Escherian motifs protects a large balconied concert hall designed in the manner of Scharoun¹s Berliner Philaharmonie. 

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Greece   Como parte del complejo de la Fundación Stavros Niarchos, la Ópera Nacional de Grecia se organiza siguiendo al pie de la letra los dictados de un ‘teatro a la italiana’ tradicional. 

Fernando Menis   Poland   Located in the small Polish city of Torun – whose old quarter is on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1997 – the Jordanki Cultural and Congress Center goes up in a green ring around the historic center and looks out onto the river. This strategic

Herzog & de Meuron   Germany   Located in the middle of Hamburg’s HafenCity, the Elbphilharmonie marks a location that was known to the public but not really accessible, and that will now become a center of social, cultural and daily life both for locals and visitors. The site is

Mark Wigley   A major exhibition currently on view at the Jewish Museum of New York presents the work of Chareau in the light of the concept of interior. 

Oliver Wainwright   Packaged in boxes of 2.5 x 2 meters, the shelter designed by Ikea for refugee camps weights 169 kilograms and can be assembled in just four hours. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Few buildings deserve an intellectual biography and the Pompidou is one of them. On the occasion of its anniversary, the historian and critic Francesco Dal Co has masterfully braided together the narratives behind this extraordinary work, where the p

Francisco López Groh   “Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.” These words of the economist Simon K

Ricky Burdett   Even in the short time of my involvement as a trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation in this ‘futuristic’ project, the future has become a reality. We all know that technology is moving so fast that we can’t keep apace of developments. But in the ca

Cristián Izquierdo   Chile   The floor plan of this house designed by Cristián Izquierdo, sitting on a dune facing the sea in Morrillos (Chile), adopts a cross-shaped arrangement that allows using it in different ways during the year. Sometimes it is a large vacation residence f

It has been four decades now since the world of architecture, and of culture in general, was shaken by the irreverent forms of the Centre Georges Pompidou, a huge artifact, at once powerful and ingenuous, that seemed to have landed right in the heart

On 27 January, the British architect, critic, and historian Kenneth Frampton, born in 1930, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). The laudatio, delivered by Alberto Campo Baeza, acknowledged his teaching life

It is obligatory for every able Muslim to travel to Mecca at least once in life, granting they have the resources to. This makes the city of Islam’s holiest site one of the most crowded on the planet. To help deal with the serious problem of accommo

Santiago Calatrava has been having a chain of anni horribiles in which he has had to face problems like the degradation of some of his icons (namely the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia and the Adán Martín Auditorium in the Canarian island o

The visionary multimillionaire movie mogul George Lucas has announced that the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will finally be going up in the city of Los Angeles – in Exposition Park, near the Natural History Museum and Coliseum. This news puts an end

The financial crisis has to a large extent discredited the model of huge real estate and urbanistic operations associated with the construction of icons, yet in truth, day after day, projects of this kind continue to proliferate from one end of the w

Fulvio Irace   Leonardo Benevolo (Orta San Giulio, 25 September 1923–Cellatica, 5 January 2017) was for decades the most internationally influential historian of architecture and urbanism. His books made him a classic in schools across half the world, required read