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
Approaching Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano’s work we are drawn to the pentagonal temptation of charting the perimeter of their design strategy with five paragraphs in a vocalic sequence. The first one focuses on their artistic autobiography, be
Martin Wolf and Kohei Saito are antithetical figures: the veteran economics commentator of the Financial Times and the young philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo tackle the state of the world from opposite stances but coincide in detecting
The bathroom deserves a revision. We routinely recall inventors like Elisha Otis or Willis Carrier because the elevator or air conditioning transformed architecture, and ritually remember women who, like Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, created the modern
The death of the politician and media tycoon refreshes memories of the real-estate ventures of his beginnings, dealings which sealed his power.
The Republic of Turkey celebrates its centenary on 29 October 2023. Founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and led for the past two decades by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country in February suffered earthquakes that left
Fortress-Europe lodges migrants at sea. The Bibby Stockholm, a residential barge built in 1976 to be used as alternative accommodation, has become a symbol of the migratory crisis upon docking at a British port, coinciding with the approval by the go
Architects are dimensional beings, attentive always to the size of things. Students used to be advised to carry a measuring tape to check the height of a step, the width of a door or the depth of a frame, and several generations were trained in desig
The Greek writer Vassilis Vassilikos, author of the political novel Z (on which the Costa-Gavras film of the same title was based), tells of how a few days after the coup d’état he saw that the newspaper Le Monde had published a piece in which sevent
August was more cruel than April. The suffocating heat and the fires burned up media covers, but the heart of architecture froze at the news of the death of Jean-Louis Cohen and Peter Buchanan, a Frenchman and a Briton who contributed to the discipli
Architecture longs for the exact pleasure of the garden. Photographer José Manuel Ballester – who was already on the cover of ‘Utopías útiles’ with his stripped-down version of The Garden of Earthly Delights – is showing De arboris perennis at the Bo
We are all children of Humboldt, but Sandra Barclay and Jean-Pierre Crousse have made special merits to be worthy of that title. The great German naturalist and geographer crossed the Atlantic to explore Spanish America between 1799 and 1804, and upo
From their European beginnings until their return to Peru, the long career of Barclay & Crousse is marked by a critical analysis of the territory.
In response to the unique geography of Peru, the work of Barclay & Crousse is based on the analysis of the links between landscape, climate, and architecture.
The close dialogue with the landscape gives the works of Barclay & Crousse a particular and profound sense of belonging to the place where they rest.
A hundred years after it was published, Vers une architecture remains a source book for anyone wanting to know how the surge of modern architecture happened in the early 20th century. It is most certainly the most circulated, criticized, and interpre
For many, this title is an oxymoron. It seems that associating modernity and beauty is as provocative as writing frozen fire or the sound of silence. To use André Bretón’s famous line, “[modern] beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all,” intro
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.
Two British architects who have foundations in Spain were feted in the month of May: Norman Foster inaugurated the largest retrospective ever done on his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and David Chipperfield was awarded the Pritzker Prize at t
The desert kingdom builds on the sand. Like other petrostates, Saudi Arabia diversifies its economy to prepare a future without oil; like most of them, it tackles this transformation from the dirigisme of an autocratic regime; and unlike practically
The renewal of capitalism and democracy must be animated by a simple, but powerful, idea: that of citizenship. We cannot just think as consumers, workers, business owners, savers, or investors. We must think as citizens. Citizenship must have three a
The landscape is a product of human action. We do not know what the future of the environment shaped by climate emergency will be like, but we do know that those landscapes will be defined by deliberate choices. Haiti’s deforestation contrasts with t
