To design a great house, California architect Harry Gesner believed, you needed to spend time at the property, not at the drawing board. While working on a home for one of his high-profile clients — a logging baron, a swimsuit magnate, a Hollywood le
1933-2021 The son of an Anglo-Italian father who returned to England during World War II, and a relative of architect and critic Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Richard Rogers died on 18 December in London at 88. Though born and raised in Florence, Rogers wou
1934-2021 If we had to choose one word to sum up the work of the German architect Jörg Schlaich, who died on 4 September at 86, that would be ‘lightness.’ Lightness as the result of optimizing resources and structural design; and lightness as an aest
1937-2021 Member of a Jewish family of Polish immigrants, Jaime Lerner was born in Curitiba in 1937 and trained as an architect at the Federal University of Paraná. As so many Brazilian architects of his generation, he was marked by the social situat
1954-2021 The influence of an architecture critic is measured by talent but also by their presence in the arenas where public opinion is formed. These are two qualities that Terence Riley, who died at 66, undoubtedly possessed. Riley studied and prac
1940-2021 That so many architects aren’t prophets in their own land doesn’t necessarily mean they shall succeed abroad. A few, however, do manage to make the saying true, and become not just prophets but symbols of the architecture of their places of
1920-2021 Pritzker laureate and one of the most unique architects of the 20th century, Gottfried Böhm passed away at the patriarchal age of 101 years in Cologne, where he developed most of his career. Following in the steps of his father Dominikus –
1928-2021 The Brazilian Paulo Mendes da Rocha, perhaps one of the last great masters of the second half of the 20th century, passed away in São Paulo on 29 May at 92. Born in Vitória, in the southeast of Brazil, Mendes da Rocha studied architecture a
1926-2021 Genaro Alas Rodríguez died in Cáceres at 94 years of age due to complications caused by Covid. The Madrid architect, originally from Asturias, studied at the ETSAM between the 1940s and 1950s decades, and belonged to the generation of Anton
1950-2021 Roberto Valle passed away on 30 June at 70. He was born in Orense but lived in Castille, where he completed most of his buildings. Trained at the architecture schools of Valladolid and Madrid, he graduated in 1976 and that same year he set
1948-2021 It is hard to find a structure with a greater impact on the perception of modernity in the place where it goes up than the Casar de Cáceres bus station. Its author, Justo García Rubio, was born in 1948, studied in Madrid as disciple of Fran
1938-2021 Born in Valladolid in 1938, Prada Poole finished Architecture in Madrid in 1965, a year that is not special but that is representative of a time marked by vitalism, psychodelia, technocratic ambition, and the political struggles of the Fren
1929-2021 Bohigas’s death at 95 means the disappearance of one of the most influential masters of the second half of the 20th century, but also of a whole way of understanding the profession, the power and the sphere that connects both: the city. Boh
1934-2021 The painter Carmen Laffón de la Escosura passed away in Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 7 November, at the age of 87. A referent of figuration in Spain, Laffón was born in Sevilla to a cultured and well-to-do family – her parents had met at the Re
1934-2021 The Cáceres-born architect Dionisio Hernández Gil, one of the leading advocates of heritage protection in Spain, died on 21 December. Born in 1934 to a family of lawyers, Hernández Gil broke the tradition by enrolling at the Madrid School o
1949-2021 After a long convalescence with a fatal ending due to coronavirus, on 27 February Richard Ingersoll passed away in Huebro, not far from Almería and the Mediterranean, which he loved so much. Ingersoll, historian, critic, and one of the most
1954-2021 The image of Spanish architecture during the fertile period that ended with the crisis of 2008 will always be associated with the photographs of Lluís Casals. Born in Barcelona in 1954, Casals was able to put his demanding retina at the ser
1942-2021 Like the great artists of the historic avant-gardes, whom he so much admired, Alberto Corazón thrived in multiple disciplines – painting, photography, sculpture, graphic design –, making compatible the highest intellectual ambition with a c
1938-2021 The Catalan architect and poet Joan Margarit died in Sant Just Desvern on 14 February 2021 at 82 years of age. Born in the town of Lleida where his parents – an architect and a teacher – took shelter during the Civil War, Margarit soon felt
The Spanish photographer, artist and poet Ouka Leele, one of the greatest and brightest talents of the Movida Madrileña cultural explosion that followed the end of the Francisco Franco dictatorship, has died at the age of 64. Born Bárbara Allende Gil
To the end of his days, Dan Graham’s all-embracing curiosity engaged him in diverse artistic practices, but never to the detriment of theoretical reflection.
To write these lines in remembrance of Christopher Alexander, who died on 17 March, we obtained his date of birth from Wikipedia, perhaps the field where his influence is most firmly imprinted on a daily basis. He came into the world in pre-Anschluss
Gyo Obata, FAIA, a world-renowned architect who cofounded HOK in 1955 with a vision for enhancing lives through building design, passed away on March 8, 2022. He was 99. Gyo was one of three principals who built HOK from a regional, St. Louis-based a
