Enrique Morillo   “We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.” As Goethe’s poem notes, with the popularization of the Grand Tour in the 18th century, il bel paese became the quintessential destination and few could help succumbing to the search for the ideal of beauty in its

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

Luis Lope de Toledo   What happens when an architect sets out to design without a preliminary scheme, and speaks with the builder only via WhatsApp? Manuel Ocaña transforms what could have been a minor anecdote – turning a pigsty into a family room – into a deep, non-comp

Alejandra Galache   On the wooded hills of Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, stands a distinctive house. Dominique Boudet, editor-in-chief of Le Moniteur, tasked OMA in 1984 to build a home with conditions stipulated by his wife, Lydie Dall’Ava, who wanted bespoke spaces for

Miguel Sotos   Compiling families of carpentry joints has always been an arduous, practically unmanageable task. In a huge effort, Sascha Bauer and Daniel Pauli have not only collected a myriad, but also built a cross-cultural bridge by investigating their typologi

Pablo Canga   The production of renewable sources has transformed territories, and now also the buildscapes of cities. Advances in solar capture technologies, their reduced costs, and the inclusion of photovoltaic panels in technical codes have made them prolifera

Lluís Alexandre Casanovas   Here is a compilation of conversations that took place at O Instituto, an independent space in Porto for sharing experiences of colonial processes, founded by Paulo Moreira. At first it looks like an introduction to decolonial theory and practice, pr

Carlos Verdaguer   Discussions on neoliberalism nowadays pose two problems. The first comes from the vagueness of the term, turned as it is into a non-concept, devoid of content; a mantra which has embodied everything malign about the capitalism. On the other hand, at

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The ancient world nurtures us with histories and myths, and two recent books offer this spiritual food in easily digestible bites. David Hernández de la Fuente, professor of Greek philology at Madrid’s Complutense, whose Pequeña historia mítica de Es

Enrique Morillo   A rare bird in the contemporary architectural scene is OFFICE. Few architects have managed to combine practice and theory with acumen, but for Kersten Geers and David Van Severen – as for their admired Rossi and Venturi – they are inseparable, and th

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

Ángela García de Paredes   Women Architects at Work, de Mary Anne Hunting y Kevin D. Murphy, relata en una cuidada edición cómo en la Escuela de Arquitectura y Paisajismo de Cambridge en Massachusetts, entre los años 1916 y 1942, un considerable número de mujeres estudió Arqui

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Three Spanish academics defend reason, freedom, and science with ambitious works in several volumes, and a German philosopher culminates a trilogy on 20th-century thought glimpsing the dawn of a new Enlightenment. The philologist Darío Villanueva has

Abel Fernández Villegas   It has taken barely forty-five years for there to be a Spanish edition of Genius loci. Paesaggio ambiente architettura, a book by the Norwegian critic and historian Christian Norberg-Schulz which first came in Italian in 1979. In the interim it has b

Enrique Morillo   In an era of incessant confrontation – when misinformation, conflict and and polarization reign – public opinion barely even agrees on the challenges to address. But recent times have seen the spread of a certain unanimity on housing. We are stunned

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

Francisco Mangado   The publisher Arquitectura Viva recently released a volume on Eduardo Souto de Moura, with a preface penned by Luis Fernández-Galiano and an introductory article by Kenneth Frampton. It is an exhaustive revision, counting as many as 340 pages, that g

Cuca Flores   From Zuazo, Palacios, or Gutiérrez Soto to Higueras, Peña Ganchegui, or Moneo, many of contemporary Spanish architecture’s greatest figures have come from Madrid’s School of Architecture. Much of our urban landscape bears the mark of ETSAM, which has

Iñaki Ábalos   Centered on the ups and downs of three great architects (Wright, Loos, Le Corbusier), Fernando Carrascal’s thesis-turned-book could at first prompt a certain aversion. But soon you enter a familiar world of attempts and failures, both professional an

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Many may have discovered the figure of Antonin Carême (1783-1833), “le chef des rois, le roi des chefs,” through the Apple TV+ series. But this chef whose specialty was making pastries inspired by architectures he found in tomes of the royal library

Sergio Martín Blas   Architecture, like reading, is a matter of time. After more than forty years of work in the preservation and restoration of one of the most fascinating buildings in the history of architecture, Ruiz Cabrero publishes a compilation and revision of the

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The philosopher Byung-Chul Han felt a strong need to be close to the earth, so for three years he worked in a garden which he called Bi-Won, Korean for ‘secret garden.’ For her part the architect Teresa Clara Martínez, after a year of exploring Zen g

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