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

Eduardo Prieto   Lumpen people wander the streets of the Quartiere Tuscolano; bicycles wheel from the borgate to the new working-class districts; a helicopter flies over the empty grounds of the Aqua Claudia transporting a Christ statue to St. Peter’s… Such scenes fr

Enrique Morillo   “Our cities are ill.” From Mesopotamian settlements to the medieval city, and especially after the Industrial Revolution, urban cores have altered to accommodate demographic growth and adapt to social advances. But with the exacerbated neoliberal mod

Pablo Canga   Spain takes an ugly turn. The systemic corruption and intellectual anemia of the Franco dictatorship sowed the seed of a story of ambition and abandon that was only reinforced, when the regime ended, by a mediocre political class, and which has led t

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Xenophon came to be highly popular among students of classical Greece because the simplicity of his language was perfect for translation exercises, perhaps in the same way that Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic wars helped many of us learn t

Eduardo Prieto   Crises in publishing, paper supply, reading, humanism, economics, architecture... have jeopardized books, magazines, newspapers, and the usual modes of passing on knowledge. It is no mirage: there is much less reading done now than before, and readin

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

Lorenzo Ciccarelli   The more famous a building is, the more it is wrapped in myths and clichés, and the more we gain from those who take pains to delve into its history. The Centre Pompidou (1971-1977) is one of the iconic constructions of the 20th century. It helped re

Luis Fernández-Galiano   New readings inject sap into revered trunks. The British Academy and the Getty Research Institute have revisited two classics of art history, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, no doubt the masterwork of Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), and T

Jorge Torres   A hundred years after it was published, Vers une architecture remains a source book for anyone wanting to know how the surge of modern architecture happened in the early 20th century. It is most certainly the most circulated, criticized, and interpre

Eduardo Prieto   Fire, nests, dens, trees, primitive huts, machines, babels: architecture has always inspired metaphorical genealogies – discredited for the most part but maintaining their evocative powers, so the ‘origin’ notion remains valid, even fruitful, as the

Enrique Morillo   That images are faster than words is a hard-to-refute fact. But it is just as true that, since the classical ekphrasis, visual representations have appeared together with written comments, turning words into usual companions that stress or alter thei

Iñaki Bergera   The enthusiasm of Angelo Maggi, a historian of architectural photography, led the heirs of George Everard Kidder Smith (1913-1997) to move his archive from New York to the Università Iuav di Venezia. A fruit of this donation is this first monograph e

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Spain’s 20th century was convulsed. The Penguin History of Modern Spain, which goes from 1898 to the pandemic of 2020-2022, indeed describes an epoch that was troubled, but really not unlike that of other European countries. In what will be a referen

Eduardo Prieto   An architect has to have a strong sense of self – a creative ego made of tastes and phobias – to be of any worth, but this personality often ends up in blatant hostility and rivalry with others in the profession. Not the case of Moneo. His selfhood,

Eduardo Prieto   It is hard to think of a contemporary architect who has stirred up so much consensus among colleagues and within the culture world, and even in that world inhabited by the fauna – exotic to many – of the ‘general public.’ The consensus around Siza an

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

Alejandro Bernabeu   Chicago’s cool. So begins ACS’s tenth book on cities, though it’s not that simple. The myth of Chicago is not only due to its place and history. Its hydraulics, buildings, and bridges are important, but not enough to cover the city’s significance. Ne

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford, and his works have a dimension commensurate with his planetary themes. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) was a bestseller which spread the world’s history onto zones like the C

Eduardo Prieto   The movie Mary Poppins portrays the British suffragists as amusing characters, but does remind us that the fight to emancipate women was an English movement. The scene of the Victorian mother marching with her sister-suffragettes to the cry of “Woman

Paulo Martins Barata   In the wake of a retrospective of the Lisbon architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça at Casa da Arquitectura in Matosinhos, the catalog gathers not only the documentation of the ten key buildings presented, but also the proceedings of the debates and c

Pablo Canga   Four decades, 784 pages, 600 photos, 85 projects, a coffee-table format measuring 41.2x29.8 cm and weighing 5.75 kg. Such is the monumental scale and ambition of a monograph that expounds on the trajectory of an icon of contemporary architecture. Big

Luis Fernández-Galiano   When reviewing the latest work of the historian, professor, and academician José Manuel Sánchez Ron – which follows Como al león por sus garras and El poder de la ciencia – so great is the challenge of tackling its size that I only dare to apply the