Luis Fernández-Galiano   The planet heats up, the economy freezes, and a tremor of uncertainty shakes our lives. A rosary of crises has woven a net of pessimism that holds the signs of recovery in its mesh. After the market panic of 2008, the year 2009 has experienced a boom

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The crisis of criticism has been washed out by the crisis of the world. In the first essay of Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight – whose title has been borrowed for this text – the literary theorist argues that “all true criticism occurs in the mode

Francisco Mangado   Spain   Ávila is a dense and intense city. Its layout, centered and delimited by the smoothly crafted city walls, confirms this perception. There is, however, another mineral and topographic density that exists in the magnificent landscape of granite rocks t

Mecanoo, LABB   Spain   At the edge of the city, on the shores of the Segre River and close to the AVE station, the La Llotja Theater and Congress Center has as its backdrop the Seu Vella, the historical cathedral of Lérida, located at a hilltop. The project, which won the

BAAS Arquitectura   Spain   A production engine of Barcelona, Poble Nou consisted of on the whole unremarkable industrial precincts. The exceptions marked out for preservation give a wrong idea of how the place was. Buildings were mostly precarious, of no other interest than th

OAB   Spain   A place of transition between the built city and the natural space of the sea and the beach, the new waterfront of Poniente Beach is not conceived as a frontier or edge, but as an intermediate space that makes this transition permeable. Structured as

b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos, Toyo Ito   Spain   The competition for the extension of the Fira of Barcelona was held in 2002. The brief described an ambitious project that included the design of four pavilions, two access buildings linked by a central spine, an auditorium, part of of the urban plan

Cloud 9   Spain   Conceived as an industrial warehouse of the digital era, the MediaTIC goes up as an icon that reconciles the industrial past of the 22@ district of Barcelona and its technological future. Drawing inspiration from the electronic world, and built with

Rafael de La Hoz   Spain   The project springs from the decision to build two towers instead of one, as the client requested, because with the height limit of 100 meters and a floor plan area of 1,000 square meters, when reducing the floor plan by half the slenderness ratio im

Irisarri + Piñera   Spain   The project presented to the competition held in 2005 foresaw the construction of a space able to undergo changes depending on its use, a space adaptable to different activities and needs. Once completed, the building has proven a flexibility that pe

Josep Llinàs   Spain   The project is the result of a long process that began in 2002, the year in which the call for ideas was held. The winning proposal was that of Josep Llinás, but since then its completion has been delayed several times due to changes in urban plans –

Picado - De Blas Arquitectos   Spain   With a double program that includes a police station and the Civil Defense premises, the building should be, due to its social role, a representative rather than impositive volume, and is set forth since the competition as a pavilion with a horizonta

Grupo Aranea   Spain   Located in Rafal, a municipality of 4,000 inhabitants south of the province of Alicante, some 50 kilometers from the capital, the high school goes up in a plot of less than 7,000 square meters, almost half of the standard established by the community

Luis Machuca   Spain   The extension of the Teatinos Campus is being done little by little, with the idea of gathering all the facilities of the University of Málaga in this area by the River Guadalhorce, outside the city. The first phase of the campus extension includes t

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   Spain   The project consists of the addition of several different interventions: an urban complex of pieces of different scale and program that must significantly transform a dense and central area of Madrid. The winning proposal in the competition is gener

Sancho-Madridejos   Spain   Located on the road that joins Ciudad Real and Picón – a small municipality of 675 inhabitants that is 13 kilometers northwest of the city –, the plot where the winery rises, in the northern part of the site, has a seven meter drop between the top an

amid.cero9   Spain   The digital printing company Diagonal 80 demanded for its new headquarters a hybrid building that combines large-size industrial spaces with interior areas of controlled light and environmental conditions to preserve the equipment and chromatic quali

Enrique Krahe   Spain   The public space as active environment needs to be reinvented all the time: planning this process from premises that place heritage before landscape is compatible with others that make entertainment or environmental aspects prevail. In this way, the

Francisco Ibáñez   Spain   The Arab baths of the city of Baza, in the province of Granada, are one of the most valuable examples of Almohad architecture in the Peninsula. The restoration of the monument is based on four aspects:?the scale of the object, on its own and in relat

Tabuenca & Leache   Spain   The building, the construction of which began in 1548 per commission of the Constable of the Kingdom of Navarre, belonged to the House of Alba and was the episcopal residence for a time. The owner who bought it at the end of the 19th century undertoo

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   Created in 1984 by the Catalan artist to promote the study and knowledge of modern and contemporary art, the Antoni Tàpies Foundation is housed, since June 1990, in the old headquarters of the publishing house Montaner y Simón, built by Lluís Domènec

Juan Domingo Santos   Spain   Because of the scarce means available, this project in a town of Granada consists in recycling and reusing elements from the environment. The slaughterhouse sheds become a museum, and the water courses have been kept with a system of interconnected l

Juan Manuel Vargas, Víctor López Cotelo   Spain   Along the edge of the historic quarter, the intervention has as its objective to articulate two parts of the city of very different value: the Park of Santo Domingo de Bonaval and a series of decaying expansion areas of the sixties. The project wraps

MGM Arquitectos   Spain   With strong Mediterranean winds which blow 200 days a year at an average speed of 80 km/h, Monte Hacho, the main orographic feature of the city of Ceuta – along the African shore of the Strait of Gibraltar – forms part of that ‘wild landscape’ that c

estudio_entresitio   Spain   The project is the result of a restricted competition, convened by the EMVS in the year 2003, in which all the teams had to offer the best solution possible, as long as the parameters of buildable area and number of housing units were kept, and beari

Andrés Cánovas, Atxu Amann, Amann Cánovas & Maruri - Temperaturas Extremas, Nicolás Maruri, Miguel de Guzmán   Spain   The project won a competition called by the Town?Hall in 2003 for the construction of 82 social housing units of one, two, three and four bedrooms in the urban expansion areas of the neighborhood of Carabanchel. The building is a perimeter block with

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Darwin’s validity extends to architecture. In 2009, the coinciding of the second centenary of the birth of the naturalist with the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species triggered a proliferation of commemorative acts focusi

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Stunned by the colossal scale and technical audacity of so many of his buildings, we often forget to which extent the work of Norman Foster speaks of social utopia and aesthetic adventure. From his earliest projects, such as the one carried out for

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Fewer bricks, more computers”. Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero chose the bullring of Vista Alegre to pronounce the motto of the new economic model he is championing. With the collapse of the real estate sector, the first part is a given;

Luis Fernández-Galiano   I cannot feign familiarity with the digital revolution. I belong to a generation that used Fortran language in the sixties, when to run a simple program it was necessary to reserve time on the computer, which was back then a huge machine that took up

Álvaro Siza  The premier architectural award of the Isles, granted by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), has gone to the Portuguese Álvaro Siza. His work, as the jury commended, is always attentive to the possibilities of the pla

Zaha Hadid Born in Baghdad and graduate from the Architectural Association of London – where she established her own office in 1979 –, Zaha Hadid did not see her visionary designs materialized beyond paper until 1994, when she began her internationa

Peter Zumthor  After the French Nouvel, the Swiss Peter Zumthor was the 2009 laureate of the prestigious distinction granted annually by the Hyatt Foundation. The jury’s citation highlighted the timeless character of an oeuvre marked by the rele

Glenn Murcutt The American Institute of Architects selected Glenn Murcutt to receive its Gold Medal for “the depth of his work and the breadth of his influence, which echoes well beyond Australia”, where all his works are located. Murcutt’s projects

Steven Holl The first edition of the Frontiers of Knowledge and Culture awards, presented by the Fundación BBVA with the collaboration of the CSIC, has chosen the American architect Steven Holl as winner in the Arts category. The jury, formed by fiv

Norman Foster  Since 1981, the Prince of Asturias Foundation presents its awards to prominent figures in the fields of the arts, letters, research or sports. In its 29th edition, the award in the Arts category has gone to the British architect Norman

Biological Station in Garducho  “A solitary and unique building located in the middle of nothing, which performs in this way as a symbolic piece”. This is how Arcadi Pla, jury president of the FAD Awards, referred to the Biological Station in Ga

Maggie’s Center in London  Surrounded by the harsh context of the Charing Cross Hospital complex in Hammersmith, London, the new Maggie’s Center for cancer patients – a work by the studio of Richard Rogers – has been bestowed the 2009 Stirling P

Norwegian National Opera & Ballet  With a biennial character and granted by the Mies van der?Rohe Foundation of Barcelona and the European Union, the main purpose of the Mies Award is to acknowledge the quality of architectural production i

Carlos Ferrater  Awarded in prior editions to Santiago Calatrava, Oriol Bohigas, Matilde Ucelay or Miguel Fisac, the National Architecture Award granted by the Ministry of Housing in recognition of life achievement has been presented to the Cata

Spanish Pavilion Expo Zaragoza 2008  The prize awarded every two years by the CSCAE?(Consejo Superior de los Colegios de Arquitectos de España) has been bestowed on the Spanish Pavilion for Expo 2008, designed by the Navarrese architect Francisc

Canal Theaters  The Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism has given the?Canal Theaters, by Juan Navarro Baldeweg, the award in Architecture, citing how the work “combines architectural and urban excellence, cultural content and poetic of

(1937-2009) The German occupation first, and the Soviet one second, marked the childhood and youth of the Czech Jan Kaplicky, architect exiled in London as a consequence of the dramatic events occurred in in the Prague Spring, in 1968. In the British

(1938-2009) The architect Charles Gwathmey made a name for himself when he joined, with little more than thirty years of age, the group of young professionals gathered in the exhibition ‘Five Architects’ organized by New York’s MoMA in 1969, which w

(1926-2009)  Many years before the word ‘sustainability’ became a fetish of contemporary architecture, the American Malcolm?Wells – who never received an architectural diploma, in spite of having taken engineering courses and having been a trainee a

(1913-2009)  Editor during thirty years of the influential London-based magazine Architectural Design (AD), Monica Pidgeon was a key figure in the dissemination of modern architecture after World War II, publishing the work of architects like Le

(1910-2009)  Considered, with Ezra Stoller, one of the fathers of modern architectural photography, the New Yorker Julius Shulman died in Los Angeles at 98 years of age. Author of the most famous images of modern Californian architecture, Shulma

(1924-2009)  The Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn earned public recognition at the Venice Biennial of 1962 thanks to his design for the Nordic Pavilion: a structure of reinforced concrete that blurs the limits between the interior and the exterior, an

(1924-2009)  One of the most prominent Canadian architects of the second half of the 20th century, Arthur Erickson lived and died in Vancouver, the city where he completed some of his most representative buildings, and to which he felt deeply co

(1953-2009)  Strongly influenced by the teachings of Henri Ciriani, his professor at the Paris Tolbiac School of Architecture, the Parisian architect Michel Kagan unreservedly embraced the Corbusian language of his master: a vocabulary inherited from

(1940-2009)  Born in the frontier region of Alsace, the architect Claude Vasconi was an excellent Germanist, as assistant in the German city of Stuttgart to Rolf Gutbrod and?Frei Otto. His first works, carried out with his partner Georges Pencre

(1924-2009)  The influence of Josep Maria Jujol, disciple of Gaudí, but especially that of José Antonio Coderch, one of the main driving forces behind the Modern Movement in Catalonia, were essential in the training process of this architect, wh

(1948-2009)  Habitual contributor to cultural magazines and journals – in 1985 he wrote his first article for the then newly born AV?Monographs, as Luis Fernández-Galiano recalled in a recent text published in Arquitectura Viva 126 – , the art

(1926-2009)  Graduate of the Madrid School of Architecture in 1959, the career of the architect Luis Peña Ganchegui is above all linked to the Basque Country, the backdrop for most of his production. The intricate topography of this region is, i