Luis Fernández-Galiano   Living apart is living less. The isolation that prevents the spreading of the virus will transform our habits, and the immediate future appears like a landscape of elementary particles that drift, avoiding contact, to settle at the vertices of a regu

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Covid-19 was identified in Wuhan in December 2019, but it was not until mid-January 2020 that it made our news headliness. What follows is a chronicle by Luis Fernández-Galiano of the first one hundred days of the presence here of this new viral dise

John Gray   The deserted streets will fill again, and we will leave our screen-lit burrows blinking with relief. But the world will be different from how we imagined it in what we thought were normal times. This is not a temporary rupture in an otherwise stable

Slavoj Žižek   We keep hearing that we are living one of those dystopian situations Hollywood has accustomed us to. But what movies, exactly, are we experiencing firsthand? When several American friends of mine sent messages about firearms stores running out of sto

Richard Ingersoll   I doubt there is anything else we can talk about since the inauspicious arrival of covid-19. The speed of contagion and the glut of fatalities, including large portions of doctors and nurses doing their jobs, have in less than a month forced at least

José María Ezquiaga   Over the past years, reminding each other that the decisive battle against climate change would be waged in cities, little did we know that these were in for another battle, an insidious, cruel, invisible one. The great epidemics of the past have lef

Paz Martín   The covid-19 pandemic has put homes for elderly people in the limelight. According to a note from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) that was published in April 2020, the mortality of residents in these centers far exceeds that of old peopl

Ramón Araujo   Architecture plays an important role in the response to catastrophes of all kinds, and this role is raising a great amount of interest in society. Nevertheless, it must be made clear from the start that in emergency architecture, many conventional fe

Eduardo Prieto   Rome, 35 ad. An epidemic strikes a city recently decked with marble monuments. A city, moreover, that has since time immemorial boasted the Cloaca Maxima, which Augustus had ordered cleaned, enlarged, tended to by a maintenance corps, and placed unde

The book titled The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of An Empire offers a new view of the decline of the fall of Rome. Straying from the biographical, economic, ethical and social interpretations made to date, the author believes that the

In the 1920s, leaders of the modern avant-garde gathered at the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) coined a word to refer to all the basic needs of a house: Existenzminimum, or ‘minimal existence.’ The term did not take root at on

estudioHerreros, MIM-A Arquitectes   Spain   The program – which combines subsidized and free-market housing – practically requires filling the available volume. This limitation, along with the demands of efficiency and simplicity, represents a challenge for the development of a project with so

Lacol   Spain   The la Borda process was launched in 2012, within the context of a program to recover Can Batlló, where a group of neighbors set up a group to collectively address the issue of access to housing through a cooperative system. The architects’ cooperat

Thomas Lussi , Lola Domènech   Spain   The idea of raising this apartment block came after four friends, with ages between 55 and 65 and living in Lucerne, decided to build a second residence in which to spend periods of time and also with sights set on retiring in Barcelona, a city they

Studio Velocity   Japan   This enclave in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, has two main defining features. One is its combination of low density and extensive occupation of land, which gives rise to an expansive fabric built close to the ground. The other is the presence of hedges th

Esrawe Studio   Mexico   This is the fifth branch, in Mexico City, of the famous Tori Tori chain of Japanese restaurants. It is located on the ground floor of a corporate building in the modern business district that gives it its name, Santa Fe, and in addressing the culinar

unparelld’arquitectes   Spain   The core of Olot has the same problem that many historical towns have to contend with: the indiscriminate demolitions that result in empty lots going abandoned, disfiguring the street and ultimately destroying the urban decorum of public space. In th

Pandemics and Social Distancing

One way To distinguish liberal democracies from totalitarian regimes is by comparing the aesthetics of their respective popular demonstrations: on the one hand, organic masses whose chaos is an expression of spontaneity or freedom; on the other, crow

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The philologist Pilar Vázquez Álvarez, who was part of the editorial staff of AV/Arquitectura Viva in 1991-92, passed away in Madrid last 10 May. During the five years before joining us she had translated art and architecture books for Hermann Blume,

François Chaslin   The French architect Michele Andrault passed on 5 April in Montrouge, just five months after Pierre Parat, with whom he formed a duo in 1957 that would be highly successful in the period 1960-1980. Together they carried out numerous projects, includi

François Chaslin   On 5 April death befell the French architect Bernard Schoeller, known for his work in the studio of the Arsène-Henry brothers, with whom he carried out a lot of social housing as well as the third of the skyscrapers at La Défense in Paris: the 100-me

1948-2020 On the first of May, in the Barcelona of his birth in 1948, the architect, historian, critic, and publisher Carlos Martí Aris died of the coronavirus. He was a cultural reference for the entire profession and a member of the brilliant gener

A descendant of two presidents of the United States, Jacquelin Robertson died on 9 May. A part of his youth was spent in China. He graduated from Yale University, having there moved in the company of Louis Kahn, Vincent Scully, Josef Albert, and Phil

1940-2020 The year of the plague also claimed the life of a highly influential and original art critic: Germano Celant. Born in Genoa with the war in full swing and trained under Eugenio Battisti, a leading art historian of the 20th century in Italy,

1926-2020 The “father of modern Iraqi architecture” breathed his last on 11 April at 93 years of age. He was born in Baghdad into an affluent and well connected family; his father, in fact, was president of the National Democratic Party, and this pro

Luis Fernández-Galiano   From a wet market came to us ‘bad news wrapped up in proteins,’ and Wuhan was set to become China’s Chernobyl. But the mass confinement there was a success story, and the new Silk Route brought face masks and equipment to Europe. In the ideological a