The AV/Arquitectura Viva project turns 40 in 2025, and this is a good time to look back on our DNA. What was initially called Monografías de Arquitectura y Vivienda was a quarterly magazine edited by a public housing company, and of the four issues p
Under the impact of climate change and the acid rain of political polarization, architecture needs resistant redoubts in which to take shelter to prepare for the disorder that is coming. This selection of Spanish buildings documents a series of preci
Valencia’s ‘dana’ and Trump’s triumph set the coordinates of the year in Spain and the world. Just a week apart, the catastrophic flash floods of Tuesday 29 October and the landslide presidential election of Tuesday 5 November marked an inflection po
The cathedral, “the soul of France” finally resurrected following a meticulous five-year, €700m restoration. “The area around Notre Dame has changed so much throughout history,” says Bas Smets, the Belgian landscape architect who won an open competit
Figuration and abstraction have been opposite poles of a debate which in the field of architecture has often been confused with the tension between tradition and modernity. In fact, the postmodern movement of the 1980s reclaimed the figurative, espec
The relationship between cities and their rivers has been tense and conflictive since time inmemorial. Rivers – access to fresh water to drink or to irrigate the fields with – are the primary raison d’être of human settlements. But while an essential
I am delighted my book from 1984, updated in 2002, is appearing in Spain in 2024. The questions I first raised in the United States forty years ago remain urgent ones. Cities planned around the old idea that “a woman’s place is in the home” have beco
Blinded by the war flashes in Ukraine and the Middle East, we fail to see the agony of Sudan. The outcome of the conflict in Ukraine is very important for Europeans, and uncertain due to cracks in the support of the country in the East of the contine
Basel, for many, is pharmaceutical industry and finance; for others, museums and the art market; and for not a few, the city of Herzog & de Meuron, the gold standard of architecture, and it is good to retrace the journey that has led them to wield su
This fifth monograph on Herzog & de Meuron can only be presented with a zoom into the small to try out a synthesis, and with a flashback to the remote to look for an origin. The small are two stools: the X-Hocker developed for a house in Switzerland
If the images of cars dragged by the flood waters along a street in the municipality of Sedaví are the best picture of the violence of nature in its catastrophic reply to the artificial environment, that of volunteers crowded together along a footbri
Valencia, which suffered from catastrophic inundations in 1957 and 1982, has cores of its population in zones susceptible to flooding. These aerial photographs show its state before and after the DANA of 2024, with the deviated bed of the Turia River
The new occupation of industrial ruins places us before gigantic structures, of very generous dimensions, where it seems anything can fit, anything can be, and in a total silence. Large volumes of air and amounts of natural light come in through skyl
The DANA of Valencia has violently struck the territory and the consciences. On one hand, it reminds us of our failure in the moderation of climate change, which is making meteorological catastrophes more frequent and intense; on the other, it faces
Although art critic Luis Gil Fillol was not a lover of the United States, in an article written in 1926 he attested to the 'indelible' impression that New York leaves on seeing it for the first time. That same year, to the painter José Moreno Villa i
Allow me to introduce myself, not as I am known but as what, when all is said and done, I am, we are. I am the offspring of a star, a beneficiary of the Sun, a brother of the Moon, a neighbor of Venus and Mars, and above all an improbable offshoot of
We need more dwellings, and we need better cities. Housing is the field where the main contemporary challenges converge, from youth precarity or mass tourism to uncontrolled immigration or climate change, problems all of them that – beyond requiring
Except for the great monumental works in the history of Western architecture, in which stone was used to create large, vaulted structures, the most commonly chosen material to cover space was solid wood. Several features supported its use in the cons
the life of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) has been fodder for countless publications and famous films, from Abel Gance’s work of 1927 (with a runningtime of five hours and a half) to Ridley Scott’s of 2023 (four hours), yet little has been written a
Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, a novel that would become paradigmatic of the Lost Generation. In it, a group of characters travel from Paris to Madrid with an obligatory stopover at the Sanfermines in Pamplona, described in de
With the attempt to assassinate him, Trump steps up from history to myth. More than thirty years ago we gave him space in these pages, in line with the publication of The Art of the Deal, part memoir and part property developer’s manual, and his arri
Spain has won the Euro 2024 and England hasn’t, and we are thrilled. Mariano Rajoy, stoic philosopher, was right: in football and in life, it does no good to be a killjoy. His precursor, Seneca, spoke of the absurdity of protracted pessimism, whateve
Marco Bellocchio released China Is Near in 1967, a satire of bourgeois decadence which mixed Catholic morals, electoral opportunism, and Maoist revolutionary dreams. The ironic proximity of China referred to its ideological influence on the young rad
