Stefano Boeri Architetti   Italy   The accidental fall of a young boy into an abyss of Rome’s Esquiline Hill in the 15th century revealed that cavities until then believed to be natural were partly buried vestiges of the Domus Aurea, Nero’s lavish villa, which his successors had hidde

Carquero arquitectura   Spain   The Cádiz firm Carquero arquitectura – led by Carlos Quevedo Rojas and Carlos Peinado Maduelo – consolidated and restored the space around the Sant Francesc y Pardala towers of the castle located in the capital of the comarca Los Puertos de Morella.

AGI Architects   Spain   Based in Madrid and Kuwait, the firm headed by Joaquín Pérez-Goicoechea and Nasser B. Abulhasan AGi Architects won a public competition organized by the Spanish Ministry of Transport, Mobility, and Urban Agenda to find designers for projects in eight

Carme Pinós   Spain   Located at the foot of the Serra de Tramuntana, close to the town of Pollença, in the southernmost tip of Mallorca, Son Brull is a five-star hotel located in an old Jesuit monastery from the 18th century, and which was carefully restored in 2003 by i

Luis Vidal   Chile   With a built-up area of 5,500 square meters, the Matta Sur complex comprises two volumes. First is the former Metropolitan Lyceum of Santiago – built in 1891 and structurally gravely damaged by the 2010 earthquake – has been consolidated and renovate

Sergio Sebastián   Spain   Winner of the 2021 Hispania Nostra Award in the Intervention on Territory or Landscape section, the operations carried out in the core of the locality of Ruesta have made it possible to retrace a stretch of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route tha

Tatiana Bilbao   Spain   The complex borrows the density and scale from the old city, and the idea of filling the interstitial space of the old cloister upon discovering, in the historic description, that the layout of the Jesuit school-church (17th-18th centuries) is based

Dominique Perrault   France   The planning frenzy that Baron Haussman breathed into the Paris of 1850 led to an ambitious succession of urbanistic operations of an imperial grandeur that continued even after the establishment of the Third Republic twenty years later. It was in th

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   France   The competition-winning project set out to renovate and transform the Caserne de Reuilly, a former infantry quarter located in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. Dating from the 19th century, during World War II the Caserne de Reuilly served as a mobi

Atelier-r   Czech Republic   The Czech studio Atelier-r, headed by Miroslav Pospíšil, has refurbished Helfštýn Castle. It is located in Týn nad Bečvou, a municipality in the Olomouc Region of the eastern part of the Czech Republic. Helfštýn dates back to the 14th century and t

Carles Enrich   Spain   Since its blasting during the First Carlist War, Jorba Castle has been little more than a hodgepodge of ruins high over a small town of the Catalonian comarca of Anoia. But the earth moving carried out in the course of what was to be a simple adjustm

The Art Newspaper   Vincent Noce   The Musée du quai Branly—Jacques Chirac in Paris is staging a farewell ceremony for the 26 objects about to be returned to Benin. An exhibition of the statues, thrones and ceremonial hatchets opens for five days only.  The restitution of the African

The Economist   One dam can flood hundreds of ancient sites. The fighters of Islamic State turned sledgehammers and drills on ancient temples after conquering north-western Iraq and north-eastern Syria in 2014. They raided the tombs of Assyrian kings in Nineveh, ble

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The geopolitical disaster of Afghanistan is also a cultural tragedy. After Kabul fell on 15 August, the images of Afghans clinging to airplanes in motion or packed tight together in cargo holds drew the world’s attention to the humanitarian crisis, b

El País   Miguel Ezquiaga Fernández   Many sites in Spain have been recognized by UNESCO for their outstanding universal value, but up until now, not one of them was located in the Spanish capital. Madrid’s famous Retiro Park and Paseo del Prado boulevard have been added to UNESCO’s Worl

The Guardian   Josh Halliday   Liverpool has been stripped of its coveted world heritage status after Unesco blamed years of development for an “irreversible loss” to the historic value of its Victorian docks. The UN’s heritage body concluded at a meeting in China on Wednesday tha

Winners were announced for the 5th European Award for Architectural Heritage Intervention, a biennial competition organized by COAC (Catalonia Institute of Architects) and AADIPA (Association of Architects for Defense and Intervention in Architectura

The Art Newspaper   William Summerfield   Archaeologists fear the structural changes aimed to improve access to the Unesco site will “dramatically” change its form. Plans for a major renovation project to the western entrance of the Acropolis have met with strong opposition from archaeologis

Finland is updating its tentative list in line with the World Heritage Agreement. In summer 2018, an open, online questionnaire survey was conducted for new nominations to be world heritage sites, which were considered in 2019 by a workgroup set up b

The News & Observer   Richard Stradling   The dismantling of The Elion-Hitchings Building, near where Cornwallis Road meets the Durham Freeway, has been underway internally for several months. But now the demolition has reached the point where workers are pulling the building apart and hauli

The youngest generations of architects have demonstrated that Catalan architecture can well pursue courses deviating from the cosmopolitanism of disseny and Barcelona. It is true that the teaching and practice of the profession in Catalonia has to a

The Guardian   Rowan Moore   From Aleppo to Palmyra, many of the country’s architectural treasures have been reduced to rubble, but restoration has begun...