Alberto Ballesteros   Venice has been agonizing from success for decades, but the profession remains bent on rethinking the world every two years through an exhibition that revolutionizes the Lagoon. Aware of the Biennale’s contradictions, and in general of the day-by-day

Alberto Ballesteros   Looking arouses curiosity. This goes for a chemist peering through a microscope or an astronomer through a telescope. Also, whether for a photojournalist with the lens or a painter with trained eyes, observation is a constant that underlies all appro

Alberto Ballesteros   Many good stories are the product of chance. As in a Borges tale, in the spring of 2014 Léa Namer stumbled upon the Sexto Panteón of the Chacarita Cemetery in Buenos Aires: a maze of niches, stairs, and light wells under a meadow. After the katabasis

Alberto Ballesteros   Enrique Morillo   If there is an urban model that nowadays shows clear symptoms of collapse, that’s Venice. The floating city has been sinking for decades under the weight of its own success, completely denatured and at the mercy of speculative policies. The ever more

Alberto Ballesteros   Enrique Morillo   The sacred used to be clothed in the sublime. A vestige of this was seen in the conclave, a ritual that would awaken much less awe if it did not take place in one of the most beautiful enclaves on Earth, where popes tried to make every square centime

Alberto Ballesteros   Enrique Morillo   Waters rise, temperaturas increase, and natural catastrophies keep happening, laying bare our incapacity to take care of the environment and showing that inaction has consequences. In this context of cut-off lows, fires, and extreme droughts, it seem

Alberto Ballesteros   Enrique Morillo   In a city of Byzantine domes, Gothic arches, and Ottoman columns – a crossroads and a meeting point for millennia – stones have much to say. Anyone traversing Venice with sharpened eyes and ears – skirting gondoliers, pizzerie, and souvenirs – senses

Alberto Ballesteros   Enrique Morillo   With last Saturday’s kick-off, the Venice Architecture Biennale unveiled the awardees of its nineteenth cycle, a selection of the best presented works, duly certified by a jury composed of the critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, the MoMA director of research

Alberto Ballesteros   The Barcelona of the past is the one we look to for its exemplary city-making. But, as Oriol Bohigas wrote, the city is not people: the brilliant operations were those focused on public space, on facilities, on infrastructures; meanwhile, Barcelonian

Alberto Ballesteros   Enrique Morillo   The 19th Venice Architecture Biennale has sparked a considerable degree of interest, thanks to its innovative approach and its commitment to the cause of addressing today’s challenges. Does this mean anything to you? Is it not the description of all

Alberto Ballesteros   A laconic title. Behind the cover, an Atlantic scape. Next page, what looks like an attic, delimited by blocks of unfaced concrete. Then a terrace overhanging the garden one perceives to be part of a private house... And so with the next 300 pages: j

Alberto Ballesteros   The past is destroyed, not transformed. Despite efforts to manicure the changes it is undergoing, downtown Madrid is becoming generic, a neighborhood sans neighbors where the only memory worth keeping is that which attracts tourists: walking its stre

Alberto Ballesteros   Computers and cell phones entangle our lives with the network more and more every day, and this is possible thanks to a complex support that does not float on a cloud precisely. Professor Marina Otero has devoted a part of her prolific research work

Alberto Ballesteros   Gong Dong raises buildings to stir emotions. Many architects are able to, but few make this the purpose of their practice, let alone so explicitly; it may be an effect of intellectualism to want to unearth the most emotive words from discourses. The

Alberto Ballesteros   Football is a modern religion with its liturgies, symbols, and preachers. Also temples. Among Spaniards, Santiago Bernabéu Stadium is almost a cathedral, if not by seniority or seating capacity then thanks to its history: sports-wise, having hosted t

Alberto Ballesteros   As in opera, among architects there have been distinguished deaths. But being struck by a tram, disappearing in the high seas, or collapsing in the toilets of a train station are but the final scenes of existences that on the whole were intense, frui

Alberto Ballesteros   After a catchy tune, the screen fades to black and on comes a familiar scene: Carrie writing her column by the window, Michael sipping coffee at a desk full of trinkets, Homer on his couch watching TV… All series build make-believe worlds with recurr

Alberto Ballesteros   Humboldt already pointed out the huge inequality that existed in Mexico, which reveals to what extent the problem plagues the history of the country. Many efforts have been made to rebalance the scale, but in the last six years a Federal Plan promote

Alberto Ballesteros   “The book’s better than the film” is an axiom that embroils us in debates. The matter goes way back to the dawn of humanity: word vs. image. Mary Beard is among those who believe that what we see is as important as what we read, though she put into a

Alberto Ballesteros   There are marvels to be found in the corners of maps. “Here be dragons” was the warning on a Renaissance globe regarding the Pacific’s still unexplored coasts, in line with early cartographers’ custom of filling their maps with fantastic creatures ex

Alberto Ballesteros   “Von Herzen zu Herzen gehen!” The sentiment Beethoven encoded in dedicating his Missa solemnis to Archduke Rudolph is what Paolo Zermani pursues with his most spiritual work. And if the composer of symphonies and sonatas, more than of oratorios, chan

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

Alberto Ballesteros   “I am the only young person in Spain.” With his typical irony a sexagenarian Unamuno exhorted the nation’s youth to engage more with their times, not only politically but also intellectually. But the Basque philosopher was not oblivious to the efferv