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

Alberto Ballesteros   Lie back in an armchair, open one of those thick monographs architects like to publish, and you are likely to find what you expect: plans, sketches, photographs, and notes the firm in question has put together in the process of designing and raising

Alberto Ballesteros   Ancient Mandarin had no word for ‘architect.’ Builders were craftsmen, skilled but unschooled folk who did not mix with erudites and elites. So in China it took time for Western-style architectural practice to take root, through the decaffeinated mod

Alberto Ballesteros   Peter Zumthor makes little noise. The Swiss architect has for over a half-century produced his serious, transcendental work barely leaving the Grison Alps, making anyone wanting to see him pilgrim to his remote refuge, with the result that he is vene

Alberto Ballesteros   Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The greatest metaphysical question is the opening line of one of rock’s most famous hymns, and the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody rings as one leafs through this book: between the oneiric forms of the photos

Alberto Ballesteros   Scheherazade told stories in order to survive. The human being has always honed ingenuity at critical moments, and this book proves so. It looks at a refugee camp in the Jordanian desert where Syrian migrants forced to stay put have to harness their

Alberto Ballesteros   “Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place where nature had done more... To be mistress of Pemberley might be something.” So did Jane Austen imagine the incarnation, in manor houses of the English countryside, of a productive, social, and a

Alberto Ballesteros   The ideas of Vitruvius have been questioned for some time. The figure inscribed within a perfect geometry sums up the worldview that since Leonardo has kept the human being at the center of existence, but on a planet of increasing degradation and ine

Alberto Ballesteros   Like the children of Oedipus, the San Giorgio Bridge is the fruit of tragedy. That of 14 August 2018, when the Morandi Bridge collapsed, killing 43 and leaving hundreds homeless. The destruction dramatically cut two neighborhoods apart and eliminated

Alberto Ballesteros   A detour in 1948 led a young graduate on a road trip through the USA to an outlying city where he would live and end his days. Thus began the link between Howard Barnstone and Houston, an urb whose 1950s heyday many architects thrived in, creating a

Alberto Ballesteros   A Rosetta Stone of sorts on the cover shows a graphic evolution of a word: ‘formgiving,’ an English verbal combination calqued on the Danish term for design. The transition from archaic glyphs to the galactic typography of rockets augurs the incommen

Alberto Ballesteros   Robert Capa said that if a photo wasn’t good, it was because the photographer didn’t get close enough to the subject. This holds true for a lot of architecture, self-absorbed and withdrawn from the woes of an increasingly globalized, degraded, and un