Luis Fernández-Galiano   Five centuries ago, Thomas More situated his Utopia on an imaginary island; fifty years ago, César Manrique built his on a real island. Lanzarote got its name from the Genoan navigator Lancelotto Malocello, linking itself to Arthurian legends through

Enrique Morillo   Mere mention of another catalog of architecture photographs, the outcome of an exhibition, may make one yawn, especially if the cover promises a new comparison between two figures with little in common, and its flap asks about the role photography sh

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

Ana Esteban Maluenda   “Mexican Modernist architecture came into its own during the twentieth century… [and] effectively prevailed thereafter. Indeed, the influence of Mexican Modernist architecture… is still alive and well today, shaping the production of current architec

Angela Pang   Architects who paint – from Le Corbusier to Zaha Hadid, among many – illustrate the interdependence of art and architecture, although most architects treat art as a representation and a conceptual tool. Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen, how

Ginés Garrido   The one-family house has been a fertile field for experiments, revealing strategies applicable to more complex projects. This is the area Felipe Assadi has operated in, and the book presents eighteen houses built from 1997 to 2024, mostly in natural

Luis Fernández-Galiano   There has been much abuse of the oxymoron serio ludere in describing works where rigor comes with a smile, but what better way to describe the designs of Carme Pinós. Gathered in a Madrid space and simultaneously in a small book, the Barcelona archit

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Ever alert as we are to what is said about us abroad, any article printed in the foreign press causes a stir in Spain. In the same way, books by Hispanists spark special curiosity. So it is surprising that the elegant volume by J.B. Trend, The Civili

Alejandra Galache   What do a crustacean, the Joseon dynasty, and Lebanon’s capital have in common? Little more than being in one improbable question. For Lina Ghotmeh, the answer is in microwaves. This book is an eclectic array of visual essays, spiced up with brief no

Enrique Morillo   With the debates on the importance of preserving heritage over and done with, disputes on what was worthy of that pedigree status began. Grand monuments easily made the cut as historical treasures, and then with more effort industrial, modern, and la

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

Ángela García de Paredes   This book on Navarro Baldeweg is more than a monograph. Nineteen chapters describe both his architectural career and his work as a painter and sculptor, and recurring themes (intersections and confluences, balances and tensions...) are explained thro

Jacobo García-Germán   In cultural terms, architectural activity involves permanent revising, updating, and redescribing, and the fresh look offered by this presentation of Jaume Bach’s fifty-year practice demonstrates this. Leading the renewal of programs, types, and lexi

Alberto Pieltain   “Travel is discovery, travel is life. When you set out on your travels, you look for one thing and find another. A journey is a bit like going to some big library and looking for a book. It’s true that you’re looking for one book, but while you’re se

Alejandro Bernabeu   The region of New England is located in the Appalachian Highlands, on the Atlantic coast of the United States: a territory divided by the Connecticut River and dotted with lakes, mountains, marshes, and sandy beaches; gentle landscapes of woods and w

Luis Fernández-Galiano   These two histories of history give narratives an influence on architecture, so we could perhaps call them operative historiographies. The book by Crison and Williams, which calls for a reencounter between architectural history and art history, claim

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The only surreal work by Le Corbusier is not by him. As the monumental monograph by the Aachen University professor Wim van den Bergh shows, the very famous image of the grass-floored terrace with Paris’s Arc de Triomphe rising behind a wall where a

On view through 1 September at the César Manrique Foundation in Tahíche (Lanzarote) is an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of Lanzarote. Arquitectura inédita, a book the Canarian artist published in 1974. It has been reprinted many times

Jaime Cervera   In the course of his professorship, Ricardo Aroca not only taught students to tackle structures through skill in identifying and solving classic problems, but also to formulate a reflection of the kind that is less a practical instrument for drawing

Marta García Carbonero   With near-annual punctuality Fundación Fisac and its director, Diego Peris Sánchez, this time with Javier Navarro Gallego, release a new tome of the series through which they have since 2014 disseminated the legacy of the master from La Mancha. Follo

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The art market is a good example of the conspicuous consumption theorized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class, and two recent texts by outsiders document the extremes of ostentation, fraud, and opacity reached in our time. Orlando

Enrique Morillo   For anyone unfamiliar with Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein, this publication is useful. If it is true that architects think with eyes, one need not have crossed paths with these Swiss to see that their gaze is inquisitive and sharp. Marking 2

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The historian Pedro García Martín culminates his tetralogy on images at the same time that Annie Leibovitz’s portraits of the King and Queen of Spain are on display, and this happy autumnal coincidence triggers commentary on depictions of power. In S