Eduardo Prieto   The medieval sages never saw elephants, but read Pliny’s descriptions and drew them, to then include them in picture books they called bestiaries. A bestiary of sorts, made not of animals but of unbuilt buildings, is this volume put together with the

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In their latest books, both Vishaan Chakrabarti and Albert Pope propose new models for the city. But whereas the Calcutta-born New Yorker defends a pragmatic utopia that inserts ecological architectures into the existing urb, the Rice professor advoc

250+250 Issues

Luis Fernández-Galiano   From Antiquity to the avant-gardes, the imagined or dreamed cities of the West have drawn from biblical narratives, as explained in a seminar held at the Prado Museum.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The dream of Utopia gets enmeshed with the shadow of the Apocalypse. Arriving at this point of our journey, reaching issue 250, we wish to throw the light of useful utopias on a landscape dimmed by economic decline, epidemic threats, and the devastat

The drawings of Peter Cook (Southend-on-Sea, 1936) still today bear testimony to those vibrant years of energetic optimism and technological arcadias represented in the iconic collages of Archigram. For Cook, paper is the best tool to express his che

Eduardo Prieto   Hassan Fathy is Egypt’s most famous architect, barring Imhotep, but is still rather unknown in Spain, where his projects are treated with the paternalism that critics tend to apply on anything exotic, or the exaggerated admiration of those professing

1923-2020 The Hungarian-born French architect and urban planner Yona Friedman – perhaps the last of the great utopian masters of the 20th century – passed away in Paris on 21 February 2020 at the age of 96. After World War II, when being Jewish almos

Luis Fernández-Galiano gave a series of lectures over different years for the Friends of the Prado Museum Foundation: ‘Jerusalén y Babilonia en el siglo XX’ ‘Del Gabinete al Campus: las transformaciones de la sede del Museo del Prado’ ‘El clasicismo

Mark Wigley   A smaller number of unbuilt projects haunt architectural discourse as provocations. They are like ghosts that never fully leave the conversation – fading from view sometimes only to be rediscovered by another generation of architects, and rediscovere

Eduardo Prieto   Rome, 35 ad. An epidemic strikes a city recently decked with marble monuments. A city, moreover, that has since time immemorial boasted the Cloaca Maxima, which Augustus had ordered cleaned, enlarged, tended to by a maintenance corps, and placed unde

Carlos Verdaguer   “Every system that does not grant freedom of decision-making to those who must suffer the risks derived from a badly made decision, is an immoral system. Yet this is exactly the process being followed by architects and urban planners: they make the d

Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia founded Superstudio in Florence in 1966. Gian Piero Frassinelli, the brothers Roberto and Alessandro Magris, and Alessandro Poli would later join the architecture, art, and design collective. Just as o

Eva Birkenstock   El trabajo de Yona Friedman y Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz formó parte de las propuestas utópicas que renovaron el debate moderno; una exposición en el KUB Arena de Bregenz presenta su obra y actualiza su singular legado. 

Jaume Vidal Oliveras   En Barcelona han coincidido dos muestras que pivotan alrededor de un mismo argumento, la utopía. Por un lado, en la Fundación Joan Miró se ha presentado ‘La belleza del fracaso, el fracaso de la belleza’, con Harald Szeemann como comisario; y por otr

Luis Fernández-Galiano   At first sight, the situationist New Babylon and the spontaneous cities of Archigram belong to opposite universes: the archipelago of fragments into which the phsychogeography of Guy Debord transforms Paris, or the tortuous branches of Constant’s uto

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The most radical utopias of the second half of the 20th century have ended up converging with the theme city. In a world colonized by technical reason and mass entertainment, the popular demand for leisure and fantasy has crystallized in childish cop

Mark Wigley   1960. 20 de diciembre. 20:15 horas. Amsterdam. Una sala repleta en el Museo Stedelijk espera al artista de 40 años Constant Nieuwenhuys. Detrás del público se han situado un proyector de diapositivas y un magnetófono. Constant entra, se queda junto a

Joseph Rykwert   Desde que Jeremy Bentham acuñó el término ‘cacotopía’ en su Parliamentary Reform in the Form of a Catechism (1817) para calificar «un antónimo de Utopía... entendida como la sede imaginaria del peor gobierno que jamás pueda descubrirse y describirse»

Juan Antonio Ramírez   En un ‘emblema moral’ de Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco publicado en 1610 vemos la imagen de un sol igualitario brillando en el centro ante dos ciudades esquemáticas, contrapuestas a ambos lados de la viñeta: Jerusalén y Babilonia. El símbolo del bi

Fernando Quesada   Ensayos y proyectos en torno a la Arcadia tecnificada