Arquitectura Chile 15   Spain   With the health crisis that broke out last spring, the government of the Community of Madrid, through its regional health service, took several measures to try to curb the pandemic and provide urgent attention to the ill. The IFEMA field hospital mad

Luis Fernández-Galiano   If the images of cars dragged by the flood waters along a street in the municipality of Sedaví are the best picture of the violence of nature in its catastrophic reply to the artificial environment, that of volunteers crowded together along a footbri

During the afternoon of 29 October, torrential downpours brought on by a ‘DANA’ –isolated depression at high levels, what it used to be known as ‘cold drop’ – triggered catastrophic flash floods in different parts of Spain, with an especially severe

Just days before the presidential elections in the United States, the most contentious of recent decades and also the most existential for the world at large, the major organs of the international media hardly had space on their front pages for other

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The DANA of Valencia has violently struck the territory and the consciences. On one hand, it reminds us of our failure in the moderation of climate change, which is making meteorological catastrophes more frequent and intense; on the other, it faces

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, a novel that would become paradigmatic of the Lost Generation. In it, a group of characters travel from Paris to Madrid with an obligatory stopover at the Sanfermines in Pamplona, described in de

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The 1914 sleepwalking elites are warmongers in 2024: Europe rearms in haste guided by leaders with no biographical experience of conflict. Those born after 1945 have lived on a continent that judged war on its grounds inconceivable, even if the disma

The housing problem

When in a famous essay Friedrich Engels denounced the living conditions of workers in Victorian England, the construction of dwellings became one of the principal themes of socialism, and eventually it found its way into the list of fundamental right

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In the cold Berlin morning, the tractors on the avenue leading to Brandenburg Gate line up with the discipline of an invading army. Norman Mailer wrote The Armies of the Night moved by the 1967 March on the Pentagon, and today’s armies of dawn that h

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The year of artificial intelligence and of the war in Gaza has also been the one that has let the voices of the Global South be heard more clearly. After a year of universal use of ChatGPT, AI rises on the horizon as an extraordinary technological ad

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   After the worst part of the pandemic, the Ukraine war shook the world tracing an ominous geopolitical scenario, which only science advances seem to alleviate.  

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The landscape is a product of human action. We do not know what the future of the environment shaped by climate emergency will be like, but we do know that those landscapes will be defined by deliberate choices. Haiti’s deforestation contrasts with t

Francisco Mangado   Architecture is a profession that oozes optimism, but nowadays we have to reflect on what could be called a ‘crisis of architecture.’ Crises need to be not worrying but rewarding, as they are ultimately synonymous to reflection and adaptation to new

The Guardian   Jon Henley   Turkish authorities have issued more than 100 arrest warrants over collapsed buildings, amid warnings that the death toll from the earthquake that struck parts of Turkey and Syria could double from the current tally of 33,000. State media reported th

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In a new epiphany of unease, a crowd chose a symbolic building as a frame for its protest. On 6 January 2021, Trump supporters stormed into the United States Capitol to try to overturn the election of Biden; and on 8 January 2023, Bolsonaro followers

Luis Fernández-Galiano   While we discuss the price of electricity, the ghost of famine hovers over the world. It is energy we are talking about in both cases, but while exosomatic energy depends on social organization, endosomatic energy has biological boundaries. Alfred Lo

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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   From virus to vaccine, 2020 has been a year on pause. From the detection of the first cases of covid-19 in Wuhan to the announcement of the efficacy of vaccines, we have lived a period of virtual life, locked up in domesticity and our contact with ot

Manuel Arias-Maldonado   What does the Covid-19 pandemic tell us? In what way does it affect our perception of reality and how we relate with it? What lessons can be learned from this extraordinary episode? I will simply extract two teachings of the pandemic, and by distill

Ignacio Nieto de la Cal   The astonishing ease with which an imported microscopic virus is bringing our current wellbeing and the global economy down on their knees is making us rethink our way of living and reconsider our priorities. It is starting to look less like just a s

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The year 2021 begins with three black swans, sounding like drum beats after the Christmas truce: the assault on the United States Capitol by a mob devoted to still-President Trump, the historic snowstorm that has paralyzed Spain, and the sudden spike