Leopold Banchini Sana Nabaha   Morocco   Two parallel walls of rammed earth form a linear succession that forms a rural house in Al Haouz, Morocco. Redefining the traditional house-courtyard typology, Dar El Farina breaks up its sequenced domestic spaces by means of pivot doors. The sun shi

Nua arquitectures   Spain   Located at the highest point of an agricultural property given over to the growing of olive and almond trees, near the Monastery of Santes Creus in Tarragona province’s comarca of Alt Camp, a small stone shelter is part of an ensemble of isolated roo

gurea   Spain   This dwelling in Navajeda – a Cantabrian village belonging to the municipality of Entrambasaguas, in the comarca of Trasmieta – is a work of Darío Cobo Calvo (gurea | arquitectura cooperativa). The simple compact volume’s facade is wrapped with panel

CollectiveProject   India   Located in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, a warm dry region, this project involved renovating and enlarging a rural school built for the children of the workers of the Penna cement factory. Forming a multipurpose shaded area accessible

i29 Namo Architecture   Netherlands   The design of Buitenverblijf Nest, a holiday home in Arnhem, draws from aviaries and birdhouses to make it blend into the forest landscape of Hoge Veluwe national park, formerly occupied by army barracks. It is one of eleven shelters camouflaged amid

Ecoproyecta   Spain   Like firewood and pasture, snow and ice have since time immemorial been economic resources of humankind, whether for the conservation of food and medicines or for the luxury of making sherbets and ice-creams. Pliny the Elder mentioned an active trade

Daroca Arquitectos   Spain   In Arahal, a municipality in the province of Seville that takes its name from the Arabic term Ar-rahal, meaning a place along a path where one stops to rest, stands this 1920s house which José Luis Daroca Bruño and Jaime Daroca Guerrero have refurbis

Diana Kellogg Architects   India   Within the GYAAN Center, designed by the New York architect Diana Kellogg, stands this school built with local sandstone that welcomes more than 400 girls from families living below the poverty line, in a region where female literacy barely reaches 3

JEJU.studio   Tanzania   The Polish firm Jeju Studio, led by Iwo Borkowicz and Adam Siemaskiewicz, was commissioned by the Wayair Foundation to build a preschool and primary school in the refugee settlement of Ulyankulu, in western Tanzania. The inhabitants of Ulyankulu fled

Clementine Blakemore Architects   United Kingdom   Located in Dorchester, the county town of Dorset, England, the Wraxall Yard complex, an old farm has been turned into inclusive holiday accommodations and a community space. The London practice led by Clementine Blakemore was commissioned to refurbis

Giuseppe Gurrieri Studio   Italy   The practice of the Sicilian architect Giuseppe Gurrieri has restored two rural constructions immersed in the Itria Valley, in Italy’s Puglia region, to turn them into part of a house. These historical structures with dry-stone walls have cone-shaped

kurosawa kawaraten   Japan   On a small budget the Japanese firm kurosawa kawaraten has transformed a house in Ichihara, in Chiba Prefecture, into an office. The traditional timber construction has been given new life. Non-structural partitions that fragmented the interior space

Del Río Arquitectos Asociados (DRAA)   Chile   Nicolás del Río and Felipe Camus designed this animal park on the north bank of Lake Rupanco, in Chile’s Osorno Province. The project involved arranging the routes, organizing the pens, and raising a series of facilities in a common language: prefabr

Daaz Office   Iran   A project of the NGO Iran-e-Man, this educational center for children is also a gathering and learning place for people of the Iranian village of Seyed-Bar. The budget was limited but the villagers took part both physically and financially in realizi

Alegría Colón Mur Alejandro Dean    Spain   Complying with local building tradition, the project renovates a medical practice in Azanuy, a municipality of under 200 people in the comarca of La Litera, in the Aragonese province of Huesca. The clinic is above a warehouse and a garage, both of wh

Palera arquitectos    Spain   The project is located in Overa, in the north of Almería, in a rural environment with strong roots in agriculture. Over the years, the urban fabric of the town has blurred the agricultural footprint of the territory. Despite this, ancient eras can st

g+f arquitectos    Spain   In a town of the Castilian plain, the Madrid practice of Jorge Gallego Sánchez-Torija and María Antonia Fernández Nieto have transformed an agricultural and livestock construction of the early 20th century into a dwelling. The intervention preserves

Rainer Köberl Daniela Kröss   Austria   Located on the slope of a wooded mountain in the narrow Pitztal Valley of the Alps, near the Tyrol, this vertical museum is devoted to a native species of mountain goats that became extinct but was successfully reintroduced into the region in the 195

Óscar Miguel Ares   Spain   In the comarca of Montes Torozos, amid wheat fields and by the river Bajoz, Castomonte in the province of Valladolid features a stretch of the Camino de Santiago pilgrim route that comes from Madrid, and has a census count of 309. Using its wind-powe

Sebastián Arquitectos   Spain   Winner of the 2021 Hispania Nostra Award in the Intervention on Territory or Landscape section, the operations carried out in the core of the locality of Ruesta have made it possible to retrace a stretch of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route tha

MAAV   Spain   The firm MAAV, headed by Guillermo Avanzini Alcibar (Bilbao, 1989) and Adrián Martínez Muñoz (Seville, 1989) has refurbished an abandoned farming-equipment storehouse in Ojacastro and turned it into a dwelling. With just 40 square meters of space wit

Magén Arquitectos   Spain   Illueca is a town located in the western part of Zaragoza, and is the administrative center of Aranda, one of the least populated areas of Aragón. To prevent depopulation and provide leisure activities, the town council called a competition to build

Arturo Franco   Spain   "A traction house within a compression house.” So goes the description of an old farmhouse in a small village within the municipality of Mazaricos, in A Coruña, at the foot of Mount Pindo, referred to as the ‘Celtic Olympus.’ The anthropomorphic s

Sergio del Molino   The coronavirus is said to be emptying cities. Myriad news items and articles took this exodus for granted. There is no province that has no record of a town to which two or three families have relocated, fleeing the city, and some places have seen a

El País   The Sevillian Humberto Ybarra started out with photography in the 1990s. Since 2009 he has concentrated on this pastime, making it his passion. He has done portraits, still lifes, conceptual images, and especially landscapes. In 2018 the photographer

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   After 20 years of frantic city-building, rustic China is in a death spiral. Now architects are helping to reverse the exodus – with inspirational tofu factories, rice wine distilleries and lotus tea plants. In the remote Chinese village of Caizhai, a

In his sarcastic evocation of Spain, Mario Praz described it as an anti-romantic “pentagonal peninsula,” in a geometrical metaphor that could be completed in this way: “Pentagonal peninsula whose center and sides are full, but which is otherwise bare

Ignacio Nieto de la Cal   The astonishing ease with which an imported microscopic virus is bringing our current wellbeing and the global economy down on their knees is making us rethink our way of living and reconsider our priorities. It is starting to look less like just a s

Rem Koolhaas   While today the countryside is largely off (our) radar, an ignored realm, considering its condition and future was a priority as recently as the last century – the Soviet Union, the New Deal, Nazi Germany, Mao, and the EU were experimenting with vast

Vladimir Belogolovsky   We used to be fascinated with the future and newness, we are now scared of it and comforted by nostalgia. Before, we were obsessed with crafting beautiful objects and buildings, today we are much more concerned with raising issues and creating social

Luis Fernández-Galiano   We need emptiness as we need silence. The tiring ‘empty Spain’ controversy draws our attention to the depopulation of vast territories, but does not explain the advantages of having geographical spaces not colonized by sprawl. Some activists prefer t

Tiempo   Rem Koolhaas   The modern world is preoccupied with cities. More than half of mankind is now urban, which has been the pretext for an almost exclusive focus on the city. They are seen as the engines of economy, of emancipation, of the ultimate ‘lifestyle’. Since De

Li Xiangning   Zhang Xiaochun   Xitou Village, hidden in the green hills and clear waters of Baoxi Town, Longquan City (Zhejiang Province), is one of the birthplaces of the Celadon ceramic culture. Inconvenient transportation somewhat shields it from the influence of rapid urbaniza

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The exhibition at the Architekturmuseum in Munich on the work of Francis Kéré, ‘Radically Simple’ serves to remember his long relationship with Spain.

Sergio del Molino   It may be a good idea to map out the country I call empty Spain. The first thing one notices is that it is a sealess country. Roughly it constitutes what is geographically the peninsular tableland plus the depression of the Ebro. By European standard

En Granada, una tierra de orografía abrupta y severa, de pueblos casi inaccesibles y dispersos, se ha llevado a cabo recientemente el proyecto de edificación rural protegida por la gestión y los créditos oficiales más ambicioso de los últimos tiempos

José Tono Martínez   Madrid  2023  
CentroCentro   - 350 Pages