Luis Fernández-Galiano   The volcano of La Palma prompts to comment on the dramatic increase of devastating fires, which suggests the name Pyrocene for our time.

The Chinese architect Zhu Pei, born in 1962 and trained at Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley, set up his practice in Beijing in 2005, and from there he has produced an extraordinary corpus of cultural works that have made him one of the leading fig

Studio Zhu Pei   China   Close to the ruins of what was the most important porcelain factory during the Ming Dynasty, a new museum echoes the forms and materials of traditional pottery-making ovens. The concrete vaults are clad in bricks left over from previous constructions

Studio Zhu Pei   China   A rectangular prism with a hermetic appearance altered only by random perforations is home to a large art center that aspires to be the banner of a provincial city’s cultural blossoming. With its interior streets and open courtyards, the building is

Studio Zhu Pei   China   In an area located far from the city, a small museum is organized like a traditional Chinese house, surrounding a courtyard protected by the generous eaves of perimetral constructions. Resting on the stone walls that rise from a pool of water accordi

Studio Zhu Pei   China   In 798, an entire cultural district located on land which was formerly occupied by Soviet factories, a new art museum completes the program offered by a series of existing sheds. The building’s structure presents brickwork that respects the industria

Eduardo Prieto   Like Oskar Matzerath – the main character of The Tin Drum who at three years of age, already aware of the horrors of adulthood, hurls himself down the stairs in order not to grow further – José Miguel de Prada Poole one day decided not to take part i

Justo Isasi   2 September 2022 marks 100 years since the birth of the Galician architect Ramón Vázquez Molezún. The centenary will be celebrated, among other initiatives, with a retrospective exhibition at the Madrid Institute of Architects (COAM) ...

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The term ‘meritocracy’ was coined in 1958 by the sociologist Michael Young in a book which already then presented the concept in a dark light, The Rise of Meritocracy, where he warned of the danger of creating a new caste based on education and talen

Eduardo Prieto   “One must be absolutely modern.” Since the time Rimbaud wrote this intimidating phrase in 1873, we have been turning it around in our heads. Also in architecture, which was quick to equip itself with the instrument it needs to make good judgments on

Justo Isasi   The science teacher at the board holding a piece of chalk is a scene much seen in movies. Students take down notes as he or she fills the slate with white math symbols. In the fun variant it’s a crackpot scientist; in documentaries or biopics of the

Rafael Moneo   Querido Jacques: He leído la carta aparecida en Domus, y más tarde en Arquitectura Viva 230, y, aunque iba dirigida a David Chipperfield, hablas en ella de tantas cuestiones interesantes acerca del estado en que se encuentra la arquitectura hoy, que

The relations of Spanish architects with Latin America is measured by two other relationships of greater scope: one is cultural in the broad sense of the word, having to do with the intricate web of comings and goings that have stitched our country w

Josep Ferrando Architecture   Argentina   A rectangular block marked by a strong structural order closes up a block of the popular Barrio River neighborhood, completing the premises of a university campus with new facilities. A sequence of concrete portal frames that reduce in number towards

FRPO   Mexico   Right in the heart of the city, a building conceived as an infrastructure concentrating a number of different uses seeks to create a hub of activity on a local and a metropolitan level alike. Public programs are accommodated within a grid of screen s

OAB   Mexico   An office building rises on an irregular plot of land in the form of a fragmented prism clad in a modular lattice of concrete that combines ‘tapatío’ tradition with contemporary techniques. On the various floors, which shrink in area the higher one g

Edition Office   Australia   On a hillock overlooking the environs of Byron Bay, in the western coast of Australia – a forested landscape as virginal as when Captain Cook first sighted it –, a house is designed as a sanctuary for its owner to escape to from a busy professional l

Estudio DIIR   Spain   Vienna’s walls came down to the rhythm of Strauss waltzes. Valencia’s, to the beat of taurine fiestas. And like the Ringstrasse, even without its grandeur, the paseo de ronda that replaced the ramparts of the Mediterranean city became a vibrant trade

LOLA Landscape Architects, Taller architects, L+CC   China   Faced with the unrelenting growth of Shenzhen – half a century ago a simple fishing village but now a cutting-edge megalopolis – a rigorous environmental policy was implemented, unprecedented in the country, to regulate the proliferating industrial a

Munch Museum

“Can only have been painted by a madman.” Edvard Munch penciled this phrase on The Scream, the very famous, disturbing work showing the fjord of Oslo in the background: the same place that is the site of the city’s new icon, the Munch Museum, built b

Jorge Bernabeu   Lightness characterizes the work of the German engineer Jörg Schlaich, who passed away on Saturday, 4 September, at 86 years of age. Aiming for weightlessness makes it possible to reduce materials and dimensions, but it also to make the most of resou

Herzog & de Meuron   United States   Until it closed down in 2011, the Dogpatch power station was the last still-operating infrastructural building in what had been one of the busiest industrial areas on the US West Coast, a neighborhood now undergoing a gentrification process: in the E

Adjaye Associates   United Arab Emirates   In the third city of the UAE, the Al Manakh neighborhood will be the location of the new seat of The Africa Institute, the only organism in the Gulf devoted to studying the culture of African peoples and their relations with Arab countries. The proje

With the same expansionist strategy that led it to open branches in Málaga, Brussels, and Shanghai, the Centre Pompidou will soon be making a landing in America with the help of Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture, which is refurbish

Exactly sixty years after their first installation in Paris – a barricade of barrels denouncing the then recently erected Berlin Wall – Christo and Jeanne-Claude return, albeit posthumously, to the city where they first met. The object this time is t

Ever since the day he came across a camera in the Paris metropolitan raiway, JR – pseudonym of the street artist Jean René – has taken photographs in black and white and enlarged them to stick on walls of buildings for all to see, in a quest to make

A parade of disturbing figures with bowler hats, covered faces, impossible skies, and paintings within paintings make up the iconic cosmos of René Magritte, to whom until 30 January the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum devotes a major retrospective, the fir

It could well be that lockdowns brought on by the pandemic have given us a better grasp of the metaphysical reflected light that Giorgio Morandi found in the everyday, with the still lifes he painted over the seventy-three years that hardly saw him

On view through 22 February at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is an exhibition that delves into the refreshingly refined graphic humor of Saul Steinberg, the brilliant Romanian American cartoonist who gave a new twist to illustration and the journalist

Sergio del Molino   The coronavirus is said to be emptying cities. Myriad news items and articles took this exodus for granted. There is no province that has no record of a town to which two or three families have relocated, fleeing the city, and some places have seen a