The Permanence of the Ephemeral. The crisis of 2008 forced the young Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke to explore less trodden paths: mostly temporary structures that enabled them to develop a subtlety which the London-based duo has maintained while con

Luis Fernández-Galiano   This country-continent is already the world’s most populated. While humanity hit the 8 billion mark, India surpassed China, showing a demographic strength that contrasts with the decline of the Middle Kingdom, which for the first time in 60 years has

The global recession caught many by surprise, as it did these two young architects who had practically just set up a practice of their own, forcing them to rechannel the experience they had acquired with Chipperfield and explore less trodden paths: m

Carmody Groarke   United Kingdom   The London firm of Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke designed this museum that harbors a boat collection on the shores of Windermere, England’s largest natural lake, in Cumbria County’s Lake District National Park. Outside the town of Windermere, the si

Carmody Groarke   United Kingdom   In 1902, in Helensburgh, 30 kilometers west of Glasgow and facing the River Clyde estuary, the Swedish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh built the Hill House as a residence fot the publisher Walter Blackie. As part of a process to preserve the buil

Carmody Groarke   Germany   A cylindrical pavilion clad in folded aluminum sheets gives ancillary service to the world’s only theater found on the premises of a fully operating daily market of fresh food produce. Facing the brutalist hangar designed by Hermkes that now includes

Carmody Groarke, TRANS Architectuure, RE-ST   Belgium   A rich museum devoted to design culture takes up an entire block in the Belgian city’s old quarter that will be rearranged and completed with a sculptural volume crowned with a lookout. Besides a new landmark, the extension aspires to be a benchmark

Carmody Groarke   United Kingdom   A masterplan seeks to give the second campus of the British Library a significant overhaul, enhancing its storage capacity as well as improving its overall environmental performance. The revamped brutalist building will include new public zones with

Oliver Wainwright   Andrés Jaque has on the outskirts of Madrid broken ground in school architecture and given tangible form to an innovative pedagogical method.

Rafael Moneo   The master from Navarre recalls his alliance with Pablo Palazuelo, for whom Moneo felt a rapport that made him want the painter taking part in his buildings.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Baudelaire’s critique of art and Goya’s art of critique throw light on the link between painting and writing. Although since Vasari’s Lives many have written on the art of their times, Denis Diderot is attributed with having created the genre of art

Eduardo Prieto   Perhaps the hardest thing in architecture, as in art, lies in that to put in something new, architects have first to gel as persons, build an intellectual biography. Forging an intellect involves both admiring and vilifying, and an example is Iñaki Á

Eduardo Prieto   The ego of architects makes them want their craft to be the world’s oldest (no offense meant to other occupations), to the point of claiming a lineage that goes back not only to Imhotep, the deified pyramid builder, but even to God, who after all, in

Enrique Morillo   “Why have there been no great women architects?” It seems a good time to rephrase the question with which in 1971 the American historian Linda Nochlin began one of the seminal texts of gender studies and feminist art criticism. The absence is just as

Alberto Ballesteros   “I am the only young person in Spain.” With his typical irony a sexagenarian Unamuno exhorted the nation’s youth to engage more with their times, not only politically but also intellectually. But the Basque philosopher was not oblivious to the efferv

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The publishing house Siruela, which placed the philologist Irene Vallejo on the bestseller lists with her marvelous Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (a work based on her dissertation, which also brought her Spain’s National Essay

Libraries are perhaps the most famous buildings in the West. They have probably also been the most useful. Certainly no one will question their worth as symbols of an entire culture, if not an entire civilization. For our civilization – or at least f

SUMA Arquitectura   Spain   The project is located in a dense urban node, and it is precisely the need to adapt to this context that leads to the decision to replicate the chamfer typical of Barcelona’s urban planning. The library appears as a sculptural volume set on a square

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos   Spain   The library is conceived as a gate of access to the Jardines de la Agricultura (Agriculture Gardens), which it joins and becomes part of. In order to adapt to the historic layout of the 18th century gardens and to respect the existing trees, the buil

Antonio Montes Gil   Spain   In the town of Molins de Rei, in Barcelona, the new El Molí Library – previous Biblioteca Pau Vila – is located in the old industrial warehouse of Ferrer y Mora, a textile factory built in 1858, also known as ‘fábrica del molí’ because of its locatio

1-1 Architects   Japan   The irregular perimeter of the plot, along with the proximity of the neighboring houses, is addressed with a narrow oblong just 1.8 meters wide and a careful positioning of windows and doors to the garden.

Pierre Yovanovitch   Switzerland   The young Victor Hugo who in 1832 was forbidden to stage Le roi s’amuse under the pretext of lèse-majesté could not have imagined that twenty years later, people would be singing his verses set to music on the streets of Venice, London, and even Hava

Padilla Nicás arquitectos   Spain   Through a project carried out by Francisco José Padilla and Juan Manuel Nicás on the initiative of Fundación Juegaterapia, the roof of Gregorio Marañón Hospital’s maternity and neonatal building – a 2003 work of the architect Rafael Moneo, in collabo

Chipperfield, Pritzker Prize

An unofficial compass needle for the discipline, the Pritzker Prize has in recent editions swerved towards more diverse and peripheral narratives, reminding us that architecture need not be radical to improve people’s lives, nor sensationalist to dra

Unlike the Oíza who ignored the complaints of occupants of his Ruedo housing development, Renée Gailhoustet, firm in her conviction that we should build not only adequate dwellings but true spaces for living life to the full, preached through example

Arenas Basabe Palacios   Austria   The Madrid firm Arenas Basabe Palacios, in association with the engineers of Buschina & Partner, was commissioned to build 11 blocks for a total of 82 apartments in Wildgarten, a new neighborhood in Vienna’s Meidling district. The succession of build

Amann Cánovas & Maruri - Temperaturas Extremas, AMM - Adelino Magalhaes   Luxembourg   - Two Madrid practices – the studio of Atxu Amann, Andrés Cánovas, and Nicolás Maruri on the one hand, and AMM-Adelino Magalhaes on the other – have in collaboration with João Nunes and Carlos Ribas of the Lisbon-based landscape architecture firm PRO

AGI Architects   Kuwait   In Salmiya, a city in Kuwait’s Hawalli Governorate, stands this 13-floor residential building. It contains 12 duplex apartments and a penthouse on the roof terrace. Working from offices in Madrid and Safat (Kuwait), AGI Architects – Joaquín Pérez-Goi

David Chipperfield Architects   Greece   David Chipperfield Architects Berlin has won the contest to revamp and enlarge the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, located in the capital's Exarcheia neighborhood, which possesses one of the world's major collections of prehistoric and anci

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Italy   Museum Egizio founded in 1824 is the world’s oldest museum for Ancient Egyptian culture, housed in Collegio dei Nobili in Turin. A complex consisting of exhibition galleries, the Academy of Sciences, and an open courtyard, the museum’s architecture h

Snøhetta   France   The Norwegian firm Snøhetta has been chosen to refurbish and enlarge the Natural History Museum of Lille in northern France, close to the Belgian border. The idea is to revitalize the 19th-century building through sustainable solutions while preservi

On the heels of the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Gallery in London, the Thyssen Museum in Madrid welcomes a selection of works by a painter who made the traditional sitting with a model – in famously protracted sessions – the cornerstone o

The writer Elena Poniatowska did not need to take licenses when she fictionalized the life of Leonora Carrington, a woman whose artistic trajectory cannot be separated from her eventful biography. The Celtic legends she read as a child in her family’

In tune with the sixth Madrid Design Festival, the exhibition 'Pablo Palazuelo: The Line as a Dream of Architecture' is on view through 7 May at Museo ICO. Curated by Teresa Raventós-Viñas and Gonzalo Sotelo-Calvillo, it offers a walk through twelve

Francisco Mangado   Architecture is a profession that oozes optimism, but nowadays we have to reflect on what could be called a ‘crisis of architecture.’ Crises need to be not worrying but rewarding, as they are ultimately synonymous to reflection and adaptation to new