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
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
Las bicicletas y las casas son para el verano. Los números de casas se publican coincidiendo con la buena estación, porque solo el clima benévolo es compatible con el disfrute cabal de la vivienda unifamiliar. La promesa de felicidad incorporada en l
The convulsive world of the last decade has been marked by environmental awareness. Felipe VI has had to face serious domestic crises in an unstable international environment, but nothing has been as significant during his first ten years as head of
Our continent has gone to the polls at a critical time, and architecture cannot be indifferent to the great dilemmas of the moment, for its own future is essentially tied to climate change, to the protagonism of existing constructions, and to demogra
The resumption of professional practice after the 2008 crisis revealed new sensibilities in European architecture, among them an attitude towards design that related to what traditionally had been considered mannerist: ambiguities, tensions, dislocat
Edith Farnsworth returns home. Mies van der Rohe’s mythical house, which the National Trust for Historic Preservation acquired in 2003, celebrates its twenty years of being open to the public with a tribute to the nephrologist who commissioned the pr
We would like to see this monographic issue as a summary of our trajectory as a practice up to the present time, and this text as an introduction to what is to come. Our journey began some seventeen years ago, when we finished our studies with the ec
Heirs of the Barcelona tradition, the work of Arquitectura-G stands out for its formal synthesis, material precision, and compositional clarity. 1. Two Apartments and a Chair The Apartment in El Born (2010), the first work we discovered of Arquitectu
I do not quite understand the varied and vibrant work of Arquitectura-G, but that matters little, because we have loves in common. To start, Bernard Rudofsky, an Austrian New Yorker who taught us how to see the architecture without architects of vern
The anthropologist Marvin Harris stressed in his book Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (1999) how much postmodernity had done to make science and reason – associated with the pressure and oppression of totalitarian regimes – give way to emotio
