Aragón Today. The designation of Zaragoza as venue for the Expo 2008, with a program that centers around water and sustainable development, has placed the Aragonese region on the news front line. A chronological itinerary from the beginnings of the past century until today shows the evolution of its architecture, which is divided here into two consecutive periods: the first 75 years, characterized by eclecticism and lack of identity, with a few noteworthy exceptions, have given way in the last three decades to a collection of austere buildings designed by architects who are not inclined towards media display.

José Laborda Yneva
The Search for Identity
Between 1900 and 1975
Adela García-Herrera
The Last Three Decades
Projects of Democracy
Joan Roig
Zaragoza 2008
Spaces of a Different Species

From Huesca to Teruel. In the Pyrenees of Huesca, a stone and concrete country house and a ski resort blend with the landscape; meanwhile, in the city center, the Fundación Beulas mimicks the undulating profile of the surrounding mountains. Zaragoza is the stage for the recovery of the banks of the river Gállego, a hotel clad in steel sheet, a glazed prism of offices for a popular toy manufacturing brand, the headquarters of a local newspaper, a light-filled classroom for a university campus, the much awaited AVE train station transformed into a microcity and a fire station built over the remains of a convent, aside from the new courts of Calatayud. Finally, in the unknown Teruel, an intervention on its walls has unveiled a renewed plaza del Óvalo.

Cánovas & Sanmartín
Pemán & Franco
Rafael Moneo
Alday, Jover & Sancho
Jesús Marco
Clúa Longás
Colmenares Vilata
Basilio Tobías
Ferrater & Valero
José Javier Gallardo
Ignacio Mendaro
David Chipperfield & b720

More Homes for Art. The transformation of the MoMA in New York, carried out by Yoshio Taniguchi, and the inauguration of the MUSAC in León, designed by Mansilla &Tuñón, extend the panorama of contemporary art.

Martin Filler
Great MoMA
Javier San Martín
Suddenly, the Last Museum

Designer Firefighters. Ibos & Vitart design a metallic fire station for the French city of Nanterre; Daniele Marques builds a concrete piece to house administration offices and a fire station in the young Swiss town of Münsterlingen; and Sauerbruch & Hutton attach a glazed volume containing a fire station and police department premises to a nineteenth century building in Berlin.

Ibos & Vitart
Fire Station, Nanterre
Daniele Marques
Fire Station, Münsterlingen
Sauerbruch & Hutton
Fire Station, Berlin

Luis Fernández-Galiano 
Aragón Exists

The motto coined for Teruel holds for the region. With the resignation of landlocked countries, Aragón has become used to neglect, and seldom claims the attention it deserves. However, neither the stratified density of its history nor its strategic peninsular location allow disdain. Between Huesca’s Pyrenees and Teruel’s mountain ranges, the valley watered by the Ebro river offers more than Romanesque chapels and Mudejar towers, Gothic palaces and Baroque churches: it contains a large city and an empty territory halfway between Madrid and Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia. With 20 million in a range of 300 kilometers, Zaragoza is the meeting point of these two axes, the one that connects the two largest Spanish cities and the one joining the Bay of Biscay with the Mediterranean; but as important as this capital are the uninhabited voids that the growing suburbanization of the European landscape prompt to consider a valuable resource.

Zaragoza, with the long awaited arrival of the high speed train and its selection as venue for the 2008 Expo, is the city of the moment: both the AVE linking it with Madrid – and soon with Barcelona – and the large investment in infrastructure demanded by the Expo, shall significantly boost the growth of a town whose prosperity has not always been on a par with cultural excellence, and that has aroused in many of its citizens – like the singer and politician José Antonio Labordeta – contradictory feelings of love and hate. The fifth city of Spain, which in 1908 celebrated the first centenary of the Napoleonic siege with a Hispanic-French Exhibition, shall pay tribute to the second opening up to the river to promote sustainable development under the logo ZH2O, and the occasion must serve to bring together the vegetable glories of local cuisine and the migrant talent that the North wind and the lack of horizons often sweep to other lands.

There is no use in shedding hypocritical tears for the Martial of Rome, the Goya of Madrid or the Buñuel of Mexico: genius is unlikely to be locked in native grounds. But our first issue devoted to a region without a school of architecture allows to remember this absence, and to stress up to what extent this impoverishes Aragonese architecture, deprived of an intellectual stimulus that cannot be left to associations or magazines alone. The best modern work of Aragón was built by an engineer, something that corporate self-absorption reluctantly admits: beyond the Rincón de Goya canonized by Mercadal and the routine of historians, the Casa del Barco built by Gómez-Cordobés in Teruel in 1934 – with its handrails screwed to the concrete of the aftercastle over the boat belly of the retaining wall – extracts better structural and landscape lessons from the Mudejar towers than vernacular localism or formalist internationalism. This Aragón also exists.