Madrid in March has staged the malaise of memory. The city’s Teatro Real has presented The Passenger, an opera whose characters travel on a ship that carries the remembrance of the horror of the Holocaust; the Royal Academy has inaugurated an exhibit
The 1914 sleepwalking elites are warmongers in 2024: Europe rearms in haste guided by leaders with no biographical experience of conflict. Those born after 1945 have lived on a continent that judged war on its grounds inconceivable, even if the disma
There are two possible descriptions for the work of an architect; one description refers to the work as a practice and the other to the work as a building, or a series of buildings. In opposition to curators, historians or architectural critics’ comm
The work of Bolle Tham and Martin Videgård could well be described with a title of August Strindberg. He published Utopier i verkligheten in 1885, the year of birth of Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, masters of an architecture that had in their
Much has been written about architecture competitions, and while there is a certain consensus on their many disadvantages, it is still difficult to resist the opportunities for research they offer. As an architect, I include myself among the professi
The word ‘robot’ evokes certain 20th-century obsessions. For a start, it brings to mind the servile figures if those roboti through which Karel Capek lent weight to the myth, and which found their most amiable expression in the pair of androids of th
Sister magazines AV and Arquitectura Viva (born respectively in 1985 and 1988) were advertised for many years with an oil on panel painted around 1594 by an anonymous author belonging to the Second School of Fontainebleau, depicting Gabrielle d’Estré
At the mention of The Fountainhead, many will automatically think of the King Vidor movie; others, perhaps most people, will associate it with Gary Cooper; but neither the director nor the leading actor deserves as much recognition as the writer and
In the cold Berlin morning, the tractors on the avenue leading to Brandenburg Gate line up with the discipline of an invading army. Norman Mailer wrote The Armies of the Night moved by the 1967 March on the Pentagon, and today’s armies of dawn that h
Ten people have perished in a conflagration which in a matter of minutes wrapped the facades of the fourteen-story building in the eastern Spanish city of Valencia. A combination of combustible facade materials, air chambers between the building’s sk
The year of artificial intelligence and of the war in Gaza has also been the one that has let the voices of the Global South be heard more clearly. After a year of universal use of ChatGPT, AI rises on the horizon as an extraordinary technological ad
Kenneth Frampton has the handwriting of an architect: an elegant and regular calligraphy that shows the visual culture of a disciplined education. When awarded the Golden Lion at the 2018 Venice Biennale, the British historian and critic said of his
Trade unites, and its paths weave a web that holds the world together. Faced with shrinking globalization, with many countries preferring geographical or ideological proximity in their exchanges, to defend the links created by commercial traffic is t
The AV/Arquitectura Viva project celebrates four decades in 2024, and this anniversary has prompted a stocktaking of our career, using as guiding thread my last lecture at the Madrid School of Architecture, where I tried to explain to what extent vis
At the close of 2023, AV magazine enters its fortieth year, with the Spain Yearbook launched in 1994 having completed thirty volumes, and AV Proyectos turning the corner of twenty years. This triple anniversary encourages to refresh the editorial pro
Generative artificial intelligence prefigures digital life. If the great geopolitical event of 2023 is the war in Gaza, perhaps the most important gathering has been the one held at Bletchley Park, where 28 countries warned about the existential dang
At the end of the past century, a world without walls seemed feasible; in the first decades of this one, walls spread without control. Many are physical, fragmenting the territory with inaccessible precincts; others are judicial, segmenting the popul
Like Samson in his captivity, Israel is eyeless in Gaza. Captured and blinded, the Israeli hero regained his phenomenal strength to tear down the columns that held up the temple and make his enemies perish with him. The Biblical story inspired a poem
Vivimos en un mundo nuevo. La sustancia es la misma, pero el mundo es nuevo. Lo vemos de forma diferente. Nuestra forma de mirar ha cambiado. Sobre todo, ha cambiado el alcance de nuestra mirada. En este nuevo mundo todo está expuesto, todo está ilum
Es probable que en este preciso momento estemos recibiendo un wasap: podría ser un mensaje de texto que requiere respuesta, o el hilo de un chat grupal; también podría ser una imagen sugerente, incluso el croquis de un detalle de obra que urge resolv
Como disciplina y como profesión, la arquitectura está sumida en tres largas y profundas crisis que afectan a la imagen que la sociedad tiene de ella, y, como consecuencia, a los distintos papeles que hoy desempeñamos las arquitectas y a la relevanci
La palabra danesa para ‘diseño’ es ‘formgivning’. Literalmente significa ‘dar forma’: diseño no es sino dar forma a lo que todavía no la tiene. Dar forma al futuro. Porque cuando diseñamos un edificio o un espacio público damos forma a un rincón del
La arquitectura también está confundida. Llevamos demasiado tiempo haciendo trampas, saltándonos los límites y dejándonos llevar por dinámicas inconsistentes que están machacando el planeta. Hemos vivido una divertida e intensa ficción moderna que no
