Founded in 1870, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is one of the largest art museums in the United States, visited by more than one million people every year. However, in common with many such institutions, over time the scale of this audience placed a
The stretch of Mediterranean coastline around St Jean Cap Ferrat, east of Nice, boasts some of the 20th century’s most celebrated houses – by architects including Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray and Oscar Niemeyer – the best of them fusing Modernist princi
This design for a studio for the English artist Antony Gormley is located amid the industrial buildings, warehouses and rail yards just north of London’s King’s Cross station. Attempting to create light and open spaces for the diverse and specific wa
The very earliest sketches for the museum at Henley-on-Thames were inspired by local river boathouses and the traditional wooden barns of Oxfordshire – a simple and clear architectural idea that could easily be understood in context to its immediate
This project is a multipurpose complex devoted to music that further enriches the city’s vast cultural heritage. Made up of three ‘music boxes’ of different capacities (2,800, 1,200 and 700 seats) and features, which seem to hover over the surroundin
Altering the regal image of the Monastery of El Escorial with a large-scale project demands a throrough study of the landscape and the history of the place. If inserting a theater in any given urban center always requires an effort, in this particula
Above all, for the director of the Selfridges department stores, enthusiast of radical architecture, the new building of Birmingham had to be an icon for his emporium and for the British city. The resulting volume, brimming over with mass and form an
In the heart of London’s financial centre, on the site of the former Baltic Exchange, the Swiss Re building at 30 St Mary Axe, rising 180 metres high, overlooks London’s profile. Its distinctive shape and circular plan on ground floor allow to open u
True masters of architecture tend to make each new work of theirs a surprise, but only some of them manage to maintain this effect throughout their careers. Le Corbusier, for instance, put his followers off track at Marseilles, and still totally diso
Rice, Harvard, and finally Cornell. Stirling’s work in the United States is like a replay of his beginnings in England: university buildings in some of the country’s most prestigious campuses. At Cornell, the brief was for a centre for scenic arts wi
After almost ten years of not building in England, James Stirling finally managed to leave his mark on the British capital, and in no less than one of its most prestigious institutions: the Tate Gallery. Like many others in the city, this museum had
Berlin has throughout the 20th century been a great laboratory for architectural experimentation. If the Thirties had the Siedlungen and the Fifties the Hansaviertel, the decade of the Eighties was witness to the spectacular feat of the International
Though unanimously acclaimed by critics all over the world, Stirling’s buildings of the Sixties met with a great deal of reticence on the part of their users, whose attacks succeeded in making him a cursed architect in his own country. Projects as in
En 1872, el año que Frederick L. Olmsted y Calvert Vaux disolvieron su sociedad —quince después de haberla formado para ganar el concurso para diseñar Central Park—, Yellowstone fue declarado primer Parque Nacional norteamericano. William Holmes, esp
Otorgado anualmente por la revista The Architects’ Journal y el RIBA al edificio más significativo en el desarrollo de la arquitectura británica en el año, el premio Stirling ha recaído en esta edición en el Centro Maggie’s de Londres, de Rogers Stir
Just as the annals of twentieth-century architecture began drawing to their close, a thrilling and largely unexpected denouement was provided by Frank Gehry. The completion of his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of 1991-1997 in the Basque country’s largest
From euforia to despondency: rarely has the collective state of mind experienced such an extraordinary mutation in a single year. What began as an annus mirabilis for a nation that confidently readied itself for the fifth centenary of the discovery o
Fifteen years after completing Reliance Controls, Norman Foster returned to Swindon with another industrial commission, but this time executed in a bold expressionist language which offers a strong contrast with the confident restraint of the earlier
Built in 1971-1975 as headquarters for an insurance company that had decided to move out of London, the futuristic, sinuous, dark glass skin of Willis Faber & Dumas fitted with astonishing ease into the medieval core of Ipswich, a small town in t
We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments
En la encrucijada de tres países, un fabricante de sillas colecciona arquitecturas: Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando y Alvaro Siza son sus últimas adquisiciones.
La construcción no vuelve: volvemos a ella. Estaba ahí todo el tiempo, pero el carrusel vertiginoso de las modas arquitectónicas la había arrastrado al fondo del escenario. Al regresar bajo los focos, reconocemos con dificultad al personaje: esta nue
