Luis Fernández-Galiano   The landscape of Ground Zero is the zero degree of thought. On the site of the Twin Towers there are no ruins, just rubble and scrap: 11 September also destroyed the certainties of architecture leaving behind a scenario of unconnected fragments. This

Joan Ockman   Architects, with rare exceptions, are not philosophers. But more than other producers of culture they seem to be “natural” Pragmatists. This was one of the thoughts that struckme at a conference entitled ‘Things in the Making: Contemporary Architectu

Werner Sewing   There had been signs that heralded a change of paradigm from post-structuralism to pragmatism, but the debate reached its peak during two congresses held in New York, within the milieu of Peter Eisenman and conceived, above all, by John Rajchman and

Cornel West, Rem Koolhaas   This conversation took place in the last session of the conference ‘Things in the Making: Contemporary Architecture and the Pragmatist Imagination’, held at the MoMA of New York in November 2000, and is published here for the first time. John Rajchma

Peter Eisenman, Sanford Kwinter   This debate, held in the spring of 2001, took place at the Rice University School of Architecture, in Houston, and was published by Constructs, the magazine of the Harvard Design School in its autumn issue of the same year. Sanford Kwinter. At the en

Kurt W. Forster   Over the course of the second century of its existence, photography made a relatively rapid transit from scientific experimentation to major art form. In the beginning, photography’s unstable chemistry and the difficulty of fixing its images in emuls

Kevin Moore   Landscape photography is an established genre of artistic representation. Photographers from Gustave Le Gray to Carleton Watkins to Ansel Adams have approached landscape in their own way, reflecting the cultural sympathies of their age, yet acknowled

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Netherlands   Not long after Julian Barnes had created a replica of his own country in an island on the canal of La Mancha for the novel England, England, OMA – spearheading a multidisciplinary group – presented a survey on certain parallels with the universe that

Felix Claus, Frits Palmboom, Frits van Dongen, Jaap van der Bout, Ton Schaap   Netherlands   The great urban projects have in Holland the strong scent of utopia. Beset by an incessant need of floor, its cities have developed all kinds of strategies to grow, transforming these utopias in something realistic. After having extended at the expen

Dominique Perrault Architecture   France   As part of the built-up landscape of Grand Caen, the iron and steel plant of Unimetal was a dense jumble of sheds and railway tracks that took up a surface similar to that which in Paris comprises the Louvre Museum and the Tuleries Garden, meanwhile

Peter Latz   Germany   The declining industrial activity of the Ruhr basin has left large contaminated areas in disuse, that the Emscher Park initiative has set out to recover. In the city of Duisburg, the terrains once occupied by the Thyssen factory have been transformed

Tadao Ando   Japan   On 17 January 1995, an earthquake struck Osaka Bay taking 6,000 lives, with Awaji Island as epicenter. Yumebutai, a project for the island whose construction was slated to begin at that time, had to be remodelled after the disaster, so that it would

Groupe Signes, Patel Taylor   United Kingdom   The eastern end of the Docklands – now a desolate landscape of factories, brick houses and slightly more recent commercial businesses – will be unrecognizable in one hundred years time. Within the foreseen transformation process, a park recently open

Bernard Lassus   France   In their forceful encounter with the territory, the large highways divide geographies and cut through the land merely to connect two points by the shortest path, and the injured landscape of slopes and levelings left behind hinders the travelers’ per

Zaha Hadid Architects   France   To reduce the pollution and traffic jams that Strasbourg endures, its authorities have launched a plan to encourage people to park their vehicles on the periphery and continue their trip into the city using only public transportation. Apart from the

Martha Schwartz   Japan   At the end of the nineties decade, the Prefecture of Gifu ordered the construction of 420 dwellings, within a singular public initiative both because it trusted the design of the project to four architects and because of the social character of the i

NO.MAD   Spain   The profile of chimneys and blast furnaces, refineries, steel plants and shipyards that flanked the estuary of Bilbao has gradually given way to a clean landscape scattered with architectural landmarks that bear witness to the modernization of the re

Kollhoff & Timmermann   Germany   In the berliner quarter of Charlottenburg, Italy has sneeked into the heart of Prussia. Unlike the tradition that from the 18th century flooded northern Germany of Schmückplätze, or squares adorned with landscaped centers, the Walter Benjamin Platz o

Herzog & de Meuron   Germany   The center of Munich breathes that unreal immaculate air provided by full employment gives and the absence of mendicity – that has been driven out of the city by force –; the block next to the Theatine Strasse belonging to the Hypobank, is a built sy