The architect Henri Ciriani has passed away at the age of 88. Born in Peru, he built his professional career in Paris, where he settled in the 1960s. In 1968, he and Michel Corajoud set up the Atelier d’urbanisme et d’architecture (AUA), and in 1976
The British architect Terry Farrell has died at 87 years of age. He is the author of some of London’s most iconic postmodern buildings, including the MI6 and TV-am headquarters and Charing Cross Station. At the start of his career, Farrell worked in
The Tenerife-born lawyer and writer Dulce Xerach, former deputy minister of culture of the Government of the Canary Islands, died unexpectedly in Madrid. Married to the architect Fernando Menis, her political and professional endeavors were always li
At 62 years of age, the Chinese architect was killed in a plane crash in Brazil, where he had traveled to be present at the International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo. Yu was a pioneer in developing the concept of ‘sponge cities,’ nature-based
Nicholas Grimshaw has died at the age of 85. A pioneer of high-tech architecture, the British architect built the Waterloo International Terminal in London and the iconic Eden Project of Cornwall (a botanical garden with ETFE 'biomes'). In Spain he r
The same Cuenca where he was born, which awakened his early aesthetic inclinations and saw his most important projects go up, also saw him take his last breath on 7 September. Gustavo Torner was headed to be a forest engineer but soon gave up drawing
The architect and critic François Chaslin passed away on 7 August in Lanildut, a small commune on the coast of the French deparment of Finistère, where he lived in a house he had renovated himself, far from the Parisian maelstrom where the bulk of hi
The architect and professor Javier Alau Massa died on 10 August after a long illness, leaving behind a trajectory that ties in with this magazine’s and mine. Friends since the Madrid School of Architecture and summers spent in the military service, i
“Like scenes at a crossroads, between stairs and places, between tensions and demands, between limits and borders.” That is how Barcelona-born Manuel Gausa thought of architecture, and with this conviction he set out to shake up the profession with m
A professor at the Madrid School of Architecture and an aficionado of music, poetry, photography, and nature, the Madrid architect ran a practice with Luis González Sterling and Joaquín Aramburu Maqua. Javier was a colleague of ours in Arquitectura V
François Chaslin has died at the age of 76. A regular contributor to Arquitectura Viva and media outlets such as Le Monde, Libération, or El País, the French architect, critic, and professor was editor-in-chief of L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, respon
The masters Siza and Souto de Moura often mention SAAL as a decisive experience in their trajectories. Behind the Serviço Ambulatório de Apoio Local stood the recently deceased Nuno Portas, an urbanist who in the wake of the Carnation Revolution serv
José Manuel López Peláez has died at 80 years of age. Chair of Design at the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM), he was awarded Spain’s National Architecture Prize in 1971. He had a practice with Javier Frechilla, with whom he built works like the
The civil engineer Javier Rui-Wamba, founder of Esteyco and creator of its foundation, died in Barcelona on 10 July. In the course of a third of a century, Fundación Esteyco has shown how engineering can also be a branch of humanism. Architects, prou
The Luxembourg-born architect, writer, and draftsman Léon Krier, one of the key drivers of the postmodern movement, passed away on 17 June in Palma de Mallorca, where he had been living since 2013 with his partner Irene P. Stillman, in a house near t
An architect, urban planner, theorist, and critic, León Krier was a key figure of New Urbanism for his staunch defense of traditional architecture and the preindustrial city. Born in Luxembourg in 1946, he studied in Stuttgart and worked in the offi
There were many reservations about his use of a black-and-white aesthetic for shoots on environmental and humanitarian crises. Sebastião Salgado, however, did not conceive of photography as ornament, but as document; a medium through which to clearly
In all the facets of his life, Miguel de Oriol sought the skies – framing it in his buildings, scrutinizing it in his passion for birds, and pursuing heaven with his deep faith. As an architect, he produced a copious oeuvre in forms and types, where
The German architecture curator, writer, and editor Kristin Feireiss has passed away at 82 years of age. She studied art history and philosophy at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 1980, she and Helga Retzer founded the Aedes Archite
David M. Childs has died at the age of 83. A partner at SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) since 1971, the American architect designed One World Trade Center, the 541.3-meter (1,776-foot) tower that rose on the spot where the twin towers destroyed
The architect Rafael Olalquiaga Soriano has passed away at 85 years of age. Born in Bilbao in 1939, Olalquiaga began his professional career in 1963, when he graduated from Madrid’s School of Architecture, and in 1967 he earned his doctorate in the s
Ricardo Scofidio has died at 89 years of age in Manhattan. In 1981 he and his wife, Elizabeth Diller, opened Diller Scofidio, which Charles Renfro joined as a partner in 2004. Works that the firm DS-R has built in New York City include the High Line,
In the cold Madrid winter we lost Helga de Alvear, whose life revolved around love and generosity, words not much appreciated in these materialistic times. From her first collection of stones that she would pick up in the River Nahe as a child in Ger
