Luis Fernández-Galiano   The surreal dwells among us. Far from just being an artistic and literary movement of the past century, surrealism is a dark pulse that shakes the present. The extraordinary popular success of the Dalí exhibition at Paris’s Pompidou and Madrid’s Rein

Eduardo Prieto   There are hardly any ‘surrealist’ buildings, but oneiric architecture goes back a long way, and many currents critical of rationalist modernity have linked up with it.

Óscar Tusquets   On the occasion of the Reina Sofía Museum’s grand retrospective of Dalí, Oscar Tusquets tells of his relationship with the painter, zeroing in on his special passion for architecture.

MAD Architects   China   Dreamlike but not at the cost of profitability, this high-density development distributes its close to 500,000 square meters in two soft volumes colonized by vegetation.

Coop Himmelb(l)au   Austria   A bulbous roof with three skylights suggesting the Holy Trinity and a belfry shaped like a totem pole are the two visual markers of this church, prefabricated in a shipyard of the Baltic Sea.

Rudy Ricciotti   France   The building’s imposing envelope of organic, almost carnal cracks on reinforced concrete strikes a contrast with the rigorous, rather Cartesian geometry of the building’s floor plan.

Édouard François   France   With its anachronic superposition of building types, languages and materials, this social housing block suggests a surrealist exquisite corpse of sorts.

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United States   Milstein Hall is the first new building to go up for Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning in a hundred years. Without succumbing to stylistic mimicry but at the same time avoiding isolation in the environment, the building i

MVRDV   Netherlands   The historic center of Schijndel suffered bombings during World War II, which left voids in its urban tissue. In one of these voids, located between the church, the town hall, and the main street, is the Glass Farm, a building with public amenities s

Manuel Cuadra   In possession of a powerful and unique sculptural language, Clorindo Testa was perhaps the most internationally recognized modern Argentinian architect.

Fernanda Canales   The architect, designer and public administrator Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, recently demised at age 94, was one of the authors of modern Mexico. 

Ausías González   Paolo Soleri, author of urban utopias that anticipated many of the current ideas on sustainability, has passed away at the age of 93.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Argentinian architect and professor Juan Ignacio Azpiazu has completed a titanic task: the first translation into Spanish of Gottfried Semper’s masterpiece, Der Stil. And he has done so remaining faithful to the book’s subtitle, ‘Practical aesthe

Darío Álvarez   “Dear Corbu, everything we have fought for is paralleled in ancient Japanese culture.” With this, written on a postcard of Ryoanji (the legendary karesansui zen garden of fifteen rocks, built in the 15th century as a metaphor of time) sent in 1954, G

Eduardo Prieto   Of all the modern utopias, the one that seeks to preserve or revive the past is the most improbable. Like the observer of Heisenberg, the restorer knows that his footprint alters the object of the work. The theorist, for his part, is aware that prese

Laura Martínez de Guereñu   Radicality, optimism, and transformation are what the work of Jan Brinkman (1902-1949) and Leen Van der Vlugt (1894-1936) suggest. This is what histories of modern architecture tell us, and what we perceive when we visit the Van Nelle factory in Rott

Isabel Rodríguez   This book delves into the design process of the Chinese architect Wang Shu, 2012 Pritzker laureate, by analyzing the evolution of six of his most significant works. These have heretofore received little attention in Europe, so the publication rectife

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos   Spain   The site’s complexity – with a fragment of the Andalusian medieval Ceuta –, the compressed character of the current city, and the marked topography encouraged to think of a unifying proposal that could make both aspects coexist. With this integrating

Henning Larsen   Iceland   In spite of the economic crisis, Iceland saw the completion of its most iconic building: Harpa. Its skin has been designed in collaboration with the artist Olafur Eliasson. 

Eduardo Prieto   The term cyborg was coined in 1960 – a time marked by the challenge of exploring outer space – to define a human being that has been improved by technology, and with the ability to survive in extreme or extraterrestrial environments. Since then, the

In the 13th edition of the International Award Architecture in Stone granted by Marmomacc (Veronafiere), the five following works have merited prizes: Druk White Lotus School by Arup Associates in Ladakh (India); the Stone House by Carl Fredrik Svens

The studio of the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban recently presented a unique cardboard pavilion during a lecture given at IE University in Madrid. Now the firm is about to complete the Tamedia Office Building in Zurich: a four-story, environmentally-

Organic materials are renewable and have excellent hygrothermal properties, and in the medium-term are bound to become an alternative to traditional composites. Today there is an increasing interest in agricultural residues or those spontaneously gen

Today there are several kinds of organic materials that are being developed in search of options to replace petroleum-derived plastic. MycoBond is an example of this innovative type of product. Developed by the New York-based company Ecovative, MycoB

The Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center in Reykjavik, by the Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects, designed in collaboration with the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and the local studio Batteriid, is the 2013 winner of the biennial Mie

The firm Herzog & de Meuron was selected to build Israel’s new National Library in Jerusalem, wrapping up a process that began with the selection of the proposal submitted by USbased Israeli Rafi Segal, which authorship issues eventually prevented fr

The 20th anniversary of the Carré d’Art-Musée-Nîmes Museum of Contemporary Art, a Norman Foster work, surrounds the opening in this French museum of ‘Moving. Norman Foster on Art’. This first art exhibition to be curated by the architect is on view u

François Chaslin   Architecture is in anguish, it teeters; it is in danger of dissolving, fragmenting and dispersing into other professions. It is a death threat that is part of the general course of the world. What will then remain of this occupation, of its old glory