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

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

Eduardo Prieto   Children take two years to learn to read, and many take a lifetime to have a voice. Especially a writer, who uses such abstract mediums as words, sometimes to inform us, other times to move us, but always to draw us into a special ‘I-me’ from which g

Luis Fernández-Galiano   These two very large books document monumental buildings. The Complete Works of Herzog & de Meuron, by Gerhard Mack, released its fifth volume (presenting projects completed between 2002 and 2004) two years after the publication of the sixth (which I

Eduardo Prieto   The medieval sages never saw elephants, but read Pliny’s descriptions and drew them, to then include them in picture books they called bestiaries. A bestiary of sorts, made not of animals but of unbuilt buildings, is this volume put together with the

Iñaki Bergera   Architecture is a spatial and material reality bound to its perceptual nature, created from the architect’s scopic and analytical baggage, documented and disseminated through an imagery filtered by the photographer’s eye. The architect decants realit

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In their latest books, both Vishaan Chakrabarti and Albert Pope propose new models for the city. But whereas the Calcutta-born New Yorker defends a pragmatic utopia that inserts ecological architectures into the existing urb, the Rice professor advoc

Luis Fernández-Galiano   On the mythical path of Goethe, Peter Sloterdijk tries out a theory of color. We have dealt with the German thinker time and again in Arquitectura Viva since 2003, examining his texts on ‘atmoterrorism,’ human domestication, and the rejection of mode

Eduardo Prieto   From hand to eye, from eye to hand, and either way to architecture. This is the route proposed by Duccio Malagamba in a highly personal but also celebratory book that passes not only through hands and eyes, but also through two time periods: before a

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

Justo Isasi   My first design course at the Madrid School must have been Rafael Echaide’s last year as department deputy head. In the lack of architecture books, I had only managed to get hold of Pevsner’s Outline of European Architecture and Giedion’s Space, Time

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Distanced from any kind of essentialism, both the Greek scholar David Hernández de la Fuente and the journalist Pedro García Cuartango explore Spain’s mythical roots from the lenses of history and the territory. Although both pay homage to the pionee

Luis Fernández-Galiano   As Pier Paolo Tamburelli says in his introduction, the monumental Entwurff of Fischer von Erlach is not architectural history, but historical architecture. The Italian professor and architect, whose books On Bramante and his Grundkurs at TU Wien were

Enrique Morillo   What makes a house a home? The walls that shape it? The people who live in it? Maybe the objects that adorn it? Answering these seemingly obvious questions has been the obsession or dream of many. So, beyond its purpose as a shelter, ideas on the hou

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

Eduardo Prieto   One way in which those fragments of cosmic dust we call humans have left traces of their time in the world has been by asking questions about the world: why we are here, what this all is, how it works. The first question has resulted in a trunk of kn

Luis Fernández-Galiano   First published in French, Le labyrinthe des égarés: L’Occident et ses adversaires (2023) and La défaite de l’Occident (2024) appear simultaneously in Spanish and present opposite versions of the decline of the West. Although both the Lebanese-born F

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Every generation rewrites history. And ours, under the intellectual and emotional impact of the decline of the West, builds narratives of a shared past with more shadows than lights. Josephine Quinn, archaeologist and Professor of Ancient History at

Carlos Sambricio   Unlike texts penned from the plane of erudition, this book is testimony of wisdom acquired over decades of practical experience. Urban legend has it that in the late 1960s, Terán tried to publish maps and plans he had been collecting for years, but t

Jorge Torres   In February 1951, Le Corbusier went on his first trip to India. The Government of Punjab – the state that emerged in the northwest after the split of the British Raj – had tasked him with the urban planning of the new regional capital, Chandigarh. As

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Arnold Toynbee famously said that “history is not just one damned thing after another,” and Peter Turchin has set out to try out the British historian’s intuition through a colossal data base from which to deduce patterns of development of social org

Oliver Wainwright   Did you know that, if things had gone differently, the Pompidou Centre could have been an egg? In the 1969 competition for the Paris art centre – ultimately won by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, with their inside-out symphony of pipework – a radical

Eduardo Prieto   Nowadays drawing tends to be thought of as an artistic discipline of its own accord, but for a long time it was little more than a tool in the service of art, and it was in technology and science that drawings were considered useful and of value. The