At the end of the past century, a world without walls seemed feasible; in the first decades of this one, walls spread without control. Many are physical, fragmenting the territory with inaccessible precincts; others are judicial, segmenting the popul
Like Samson in his captivity, Israel is eyeless in Gaza. Captured and blinded, the Israeli hero regained his phenomenal strength to tear down the columns that held up the temple and make his enemies perish with him. The Biblical story inspired a poem
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.
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
Around 83% of global energy is generated by burning fossil fuels. So, the transition from our predominantly dirty production of energy to one which is clean is at the very heart of our combating global warming. There is also a moral dimension to the
Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, and Disorder gives a history of the 21st century where both the terms of her chair are interpreted from the prism of energy. As in her work of 2017, Oil and the Western Economi
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
The eruption of a volcano in the Canary Islands was the most dramatic image of a year of geopolitical mutations and pandemic recovery through vaccines.
The world has its eyes on the war waging in Eastern Europe, but the continent’s south has its own calamity: the tragedy of hunger, terrorism, and desolation.
Ukrainian Urbicide. Spurred by its journalistic spirit, Arquitectura Viva presents recent events and society's reactions to the war being waged on Ukraine through a semi-monographic issue that takes stock of its impact beyond the strictly architectur
Three decades ago the library of Sarajevo, disemboweled by shells, was the symbol of Balkanic urbicide, as documented in the 1993 article reproduced on page 24 of this Arquitectura Viva issue. Now it is a bridge outside Kyiv – blasted by the Ukrainia
Along with the 6,800 Russian professionals who signed a call for peace quickly censored by Putin’s government, architects, artists, and designers from everywhere join hands in expressing their disapproval of armed conflict and their solidarity with U
Authors Outraged
Ucrania es ahora el escenario de la interminable lucha entre las grandes potencias por afianzar el control en sus esferas de influencia.
A recent journey through the principal cities of the country was a stocktaking of Ukraine’s rich heritage, now under threat of Russian bombardments.
Arquitectura Viva came into being when the Berlin Wall still stood, and in the three long decades since, it has given testimony of the seismic upheavals that the geopolitical architecture of the planet has suffered. From the first project of the Jewi
The devastation of Ukrainian cities like Kharkov, also seen in the dramatic sieges of Kiev or Mariupol, brings to mind the Balkan urbicides or the later destructions of Grozny in Chechnya or Aleppo in Syria. The tanks of February
This issue has had three consecutive presentations, and none in the end, because this text barely explains a process. After the optimism of January, looking up in awe to imagine the James Webb telescope deploying in space, the gaze had to be brought
The paralysis of Ukraine on account of the war has an echo in Russia itself, thanks to the sanctions interrupting its urban and cultural boom.
The tragic development of the war, with the urban destruction, the flood of refugees, and the nuclear threats, brings up alternative pasts that may have prevented the drama.
The crisis of Ukraine reproduces the sleepwalking carnival of the political elites that did not manage to prevent the outbreak of the Great War. Barbara Tuchman published in 1962 a masterly account of the 31 days that led to tragedy in 1914, The Guns
The Ukrainian crisis has to be tackled with perspective. This is precisely what Daniel Yergin does in The New Map, subtitled ‘Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations’ because the confrontation between nations is explained from the angle of its ener
From snow to lava, in Spain this has been a year of extreme events. Nothing relates the Filomena storm with the eruption of Cumbre Vieja, but both scares happen when we try to recover from a historic pandemic that has halted the life of the planet. T
