

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
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
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
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,
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
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
The ego of architects makes them want their craft to be the world’s oldest (no offense meant to other occupations), to the point of claiming a lineage that goes back not only to Imhotep, the deified pyramid builder, but even to God, who after all, in
Perhaps the hardest thing in architecture, as in art, lies in that to put in something new, architects have first to gel as persons, build an intellectual biography. Forging an intellect involves both admiring and vilifying, and an example is Iñaki Á
The battle of ‘modernity’ was waged not only in the field of forms and techniques, but also in that of ideals. It has been necessary to acknowledge that modernity was ‘ideological’ for it to be assessed with detachment, and that the modern ideology h
When dealing out its gifts, fortune tends to be arbitrary, even irascible, especially when dealt out by critics, who are tainted by subjectivity, or by historians, who are obsessed with taxonomy. Subjectivity and taxonomy are to blame for the fact th
Bruno Latour was one of the last specimens of a once thriving species now on the brink of extinction: the intellectual. To be precise, he was a typical example of a no less prestigious and no less threatened subclass thereof: the French intellectual.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, the place and years of a utopia so radical it aspired not so much to end the old system of the czars as to upend human nature itself. The new world o
Bruno Latour was one of the last specimens of a species on the brink of extinction: the intellectual. To be precise, a specimen of a class of that species: the French intellectual. And to pursue the taxonomy further, a specimen of a more slanted, con
On the vade mecum that Vitrivius wrote around 30 BC, De Architectura libri decem, mighty rivers of ink have flowed in the writing of a good part of Western architectural theory; rivers of ink to annotate, translate, and emend a text we consider found
The eyes of architects are greedy: they read, trap, and manipulate forms, and that’s a good thing. But in their fascination with the visual, architects and those who teach them to discriminate between what is and what is not ‘architectural’ have side
Faced with the highly personal, exquisite, or rare, it’s best to take the position medieval theologians took when defining the divine: to describe not what it is, but what it is not. This book is not an essay; it follows no line of discourse but fork
Normality is of ill repute, in architecture too, perhaps for two reasons: romantic tradition, which transformed artistic into creative activity, and the artist into a demigod going less by the laws of tradition than by its own; and consumerist societ
Perhaps no human construction is more complex than the city, so there are as many ways to think of it as there are of planning, building, or living it. Some wanted to see it as a problem of creating rhetorical and political order, a matter of symboli
With his prolific writings, Reyner Banham was a formidable teacher who knew how to pass on his passion for technology to an entire generation.
The most radical modernity aspired not so much to revamp architecture as to destroy it. The project was at first undertaken by futurists obsessed with turning buildings into atmospheres of air and energy. Having failed, this utopia of dissolution rem
Mastership too comes in tones. Although our late-romantic upbringing makes us prefer major masters, minor masters are more interesting when it is times, not so much persons, that we wish to comprehend. Lacking ego, minor masters are better at strikin
Some architects build from nothing, raising objects on a tabula rasa; others prefer to transform what already exists, in such a way that it is seen differently. Julio Cano Lasso is definitely in the second group. The sensitivity for human and natural
Hassan Fathy is Egypt’s most famous architect, barring Imhotep, but is still rather unknown in Spain, where his projects are treated with the paternalism that critics tend to apply on anything exotic, or the exaggerated admiration of those professing
Salvador Guerrero Eduardo Prieto
Madrid 2020
Ediciones Asimétricas - 180 Pages
Eduardo Prieto
Madrid 2019
Cátedra - 444 Pages
Eduardo Prieto Sobre el inconsciente del arte y la arquitectura
Eduardo Prieto Arquitectura, máquinas y cultura moderna
Eduardo Prieto Redes, no-lugares, naturaleza