Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Russia   Built between 1904 and 1908 in Bálchug (Bolotny óstrov), a river island in the heart of Moscow, GES-2 was a power station. The old plant is now a space conceived as an experience of going from visual to performing arts, via a welcoming civic space. T

gruppa2020   Russia   Logs, also serving as wood to light the fire, are situated on the steel bars, constantly transforming the appearance of this pavilion for the Signal outdoor music festival. The studio participated in the whole process from its design to its construct

SANAA   Russia   The Garage, Moscow’s most important contemporary art center, has unveiled the Japanese firm SANAA’s scheme to expand its facilities: the reconstruction of the Hexagon, a ruined 1920s construction beside the museum in Gorky Park. The Garage, which ope

AB Chvoya Karavan   Russia   The abundant vegetation and overlapping layers of meadows, bridges, and paths configure a variety of natural spaces that provide a gradual transition from the city, maximizing the site’s contemporary potential and bringing together the history and th

Herzog & de Meuron JV Vogt   Russia   Several historic maps were overlapped to reveal the gradual changes of the site’s identity and geometry. The new park retraces the former shoreline of the Neva River, reorganizes urban flows, integrates into the city, and connects green public spaces

West 8 Studio 44    Russia   The proposal for the park shows a ‘romantic garden’ with a topography of undulating hills that offer visitors beautiful views across the water and the city beyond. A series of grottos underneath bring a rich diversity of atmospheres to the site. To a

Mecanoo   Russia   The Delft-based firm Mecanoo, headed by Francine Houben, has won the competition of masterplans for an educational campus on the shores of Lake Senezh, in the Russian town of Solnechnogorsk. Lecture halls, auditoriums, a library, and apartments are l

Diller Scofidio + Renfro   Russia   Beside the Moskva River and a minute’s walk from the Kremlin and Red Square, the Zaryadye was an over 50,000-square-meter urban void between Moscow’s tourist zone and the Kitay-Gorod business district. This area, inhabited in the past, has a troubled

Raúl Gutiérrez Salgado   Russia   Instead of offering three specific floor plan types, the project proposes a flexible system in which the prototypes share a unique catalogue of apartments and can be interconnected to obtain almost infinite urban configurations... [+]

Pedro Pitarch   Russia   The proposal inserts in the blocks a series of ‘social capsules’ containing specific public programs. This hybridization blurs the boundaries between domestic and public programs, leading to an enhanced type of architecture and living... [+]

Sidereal   Russia   The development of the different types of buildings is generated from a single structural module, which also defines the uses, of 3.6m x 3.6m. This 12.96m² room is repeated giving rise to apartments of varied sizes. The brief proposes using local woo

51N4E OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Russia   On a former airfield, the new NCCA claims its place within its urban context, right by a shopping center and a park, creating a shared space with a giant screen – black at day but brightly lit at night –, where artists and spectators are active parti

Herzog & de Meuron   Russia   Skolkovo is the Russian government initiative for a new urban community at the 3rd ring of Moscow, 17 km west from the Kremlin. Built ex nihilo, the aim of Skolkovo is to create a globally reputed center for innovative technology. The original master

Herzog & de Meuron   Russia   The project to revitalize the factory buildings follows a double strategy of renovation and extension. The protected structures are recovered and assigned new uses, and the rest is cleared to create a new green area, an urban park by the river... [+]

Zaha Hadid Architects   Russia    The firm Zaha Hadid Architects has turned out the winner in the international competition to build the new Sverdlovsk Philharmonic Concert Hall in Yekaterinburg, the Russian city considered the capital of the Urals. Drawing inspiration from the phys

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Russia   Located in Moscow, the GES-2 is a magnificent historical power station built between 1904 and 1908. The project consists in the reconversion of this building in a space conceived as a very articulated experience going from visual arts to performing a

Herzog & de Meuron   Russia   Skolkovo is the Russian government initiative for a new urban community at the 3rd ring of Moscow, 17 km west from the Kremlin. Built ex nihilo, the aim of Skolkovo is to create a globally reputed center for innovative technology. The original master

Fernando Menis   Russia   The creation of the Zim district in the historical Russian city of Samara, close to the Volga, makes for greater vitality and connectivity within an iconic urban environment. The project envisions a self-reliant contemporary center with a new design

Erick Van Egeraat   Russia   Laid out around a central atrium, the inner volume of the building is clad with a skin of rhomboidal plates of painted zinc whose joints allow for dilations caused by temperature changes.

Ecosistema urbano   Russia   The proposal has a triple objective: to eliminate the pollution in the reservoir through specific solutions; improving the quality of water via natural systems and mobile elements; and reconnecting the city – 500 kilometers south of Moscow – with the

Steven Holl   Russia   The historical polychromy of the city’s buildings inspires the large ceramic-lined openings in the white facades. The residential development consists of four ‘Spatial Ribbons’ that are all 15 meters deep and zigzag to define the public space... [+]

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Russia   El Museo Garage en Moscú da cuenta del interés de Koolhaas por el patrimonio, y sugiere un modo desacomplejado de trabajar con las ruinas de la arquitectura moderna.

Alvar Aalto   Russia   Funded by a Finnish entity and executed by a local team, the scientific restoration of this modern masterwork has made it possible to bring back the original design and materials of Alvar Aalto.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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.  

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The world changed on 24 February 2022, but the start of the war in Ukraine was produced by the tensions in the tectonic plate of Eurasia. There is no way to understand the conflict without knowing the history of Russia, nor without penetrating the he

Eduardo Prieto   It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, the place and years of a utopia so radical it aspired not so much to end the old system of the czars as to upend human nature itself. The new world o

Norman Foster   Around 83% of global energy is generated by burning fossil fuels. So, the transition from our predominantly dirty production of energy to one which is clean is at the very heart of our combating global warming. There is also a moral dimension to the

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, and Disorder gives a history of the 21st century where both the terms of her chair are interpreted from the prism of energy. As in her work of 2017, Oil and the Western Economi

Luis Fernández-Galiano   While we discuss the price of electricity, the ghost of famine hovers over the world. It is energy we are talking about in both cases, but while exosomatic energy depends on social organization, endosomatic energy has biological boundaries. Alfred Lo

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Lack of global governance is blocking the adoption of measures that would curb the effects of the planet’s already advanced process of climate change. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The world has its eyes on the war waging in Eastern Europe, but the continent’s south has its own calamity: the tragedy of hunger, terrorism, and desolation.

Ukrainian Urbicide. Spurred by its journalistic spirit, Arquitectura Viva presents recent events and society's reactions to the war being waged on Ukraine through a semi-monographic issue that takes stock of its impact beyond the strictly architectur

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Three decades ago the library of Sarajevo, disemboweled by shells, was the symbol of Balkanic urbicide, as documented in the 1993 article reproduced on page 24 of this Arquitectura Viva issue. Now it is a bridge outside Kyiv – blasted by the Ukrainia

Along with the 6,800 Russian professionals who signed a call for peace quickly censored by Putin’s government, architects, artists, and designers from everywhere join hands in expressing their disapproval of armed conflict and their solidarity with U

Authors Outraged

Slavoj Žižek   Ucrania es ahora el escenario de la interminable lucha entre las grandes potencias por afianzar el control en sus esferas de influencia.

Jean-Louis Cohen   A recent journey through the principal cities of the country was a stocktaking of Ukraine’s rich heritage, now under threat of Russian bombardments.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The devastation of Ukrainian cities like Kharkov, also seen in the dramatic sieges of Kiev or Mariupol, brings to mind the Balkan urbicides or the later destructions of Grozny in Chechnya or Aleppo in Syria. The tanks of February

Luis Fernández-Galiano   This issue has had three consecutive presentations, and none in the end, because this text barely explains a process. After the optimism of January, looking up in awe to imagine the James Webb telescope deploying in space, the gaze had to be brought

Vladimir Belogolovsky   The paralysis of Ukraine on account of the war has an echo in Russia itself, thanks to the sanctions interrupting its urban and cultural boom.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The tragic development of the war, with the urban destruction, the flood of refugees, and the nuclear threats, brings up alternative pasts that may have prevented the drama.

The target of the air strike carried out on 1 March was a telecommunications tower outside Kyiv. At least five people died and another five were injured. Ruslan Kavatsiuk of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center informed The New York Times that the

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The crisis of Ukraine reproduces the sleepwalking carnival of the political elites that did not manage to prevent the outbreak of the Great War. Barbara Tuchman published in 1962 a masterly account of the 31 days that led to tragedy in 1914, The Guns

The artist Gregory Orekhov has just completed his latest work, Nowhere, in Moscow’s Malecvich Park. A red carpet made of polypropylene stretches 250 meters across a forest. The geometric abstraction keeps the preexisting reality intact. “Here, perspe

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Ukrainian crisis has to be tackled with perspective. This is precisely what Daniel Yergin does in The New Map, subtitled ‘Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations’ because the confrontation between nations is explained from the angle of its ener

Eduardo Prieto   “One must be absolutely modern.” Since the time Rimbaud wrote this intimidating phrase in 1873, we have been turning it around in our heads. Also in architecture, which was quick to equip itself with the instrument it needs to make good judgments on

Giuliano da Empoli   París  2022  
Gallimard   - 288 Pages 

Orlando Figes   Londres  2022  
Bloomsbury   - 368 Pages 

Helen Thompson   Hard Times in the 21st Century

Daniel Yergin   Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

Jean-Louis Cohen   Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture

Owen Hatherley   Londres  2015  
Penguin    - 624 Pages 

Yuri Slezkine   A Saga of Russian Revolution

Oliva Mar Rubio   La experiencia de la totalidad

Dmitry S. Khmelnitsky   Architectural Fantasies in Russian Constructivism

Philipp Meuser   Architektur and Design der Gegenwart