On view through May and June of this year at Sala Amadís in Madrid, ‘Ecosistermas.zip’ scans Spain’s young architectural scene through the work of 300 practices led by professionals under 35 years of age. Joining the exhibition’s four curators in giv

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Lack of global governance is blocking the adoption of measures that would curb the effects of the planet’s already advanced process of climate change. 

Four young curators examine the work processes of a whole generation of architects less than 35 years old to define the professional ecosystem in which they operate.

Jorge Mañas Álvarez attended the Bergen School of Architecture and earned his master’s degree in Design from ETSAM. Besides curating, he engages in architecture on several fronts, from practice and writing to research and teaching. Pedro Torres Garcí

Atienza Maure   Spain   Destroyed in a fire that only spared its stone walls, a large house in the Castilian region has been refurbished through the insertion of a structure that replicates and completes the original. Between new arches of white concrete, skylights seek to

AZAB, BEAR   Spain   A farmhouse located on the outskirts of Bilbao has undergone a thorough transformation job to accommodate independent dwellings for two generations of one same family. While the ground story follows an open scheme with large, floor-to-ceiling windows

Bonell+Dòriga   Spain   A modest flat in the Gràcia district was stripped of original partitions, and furniture pieces were custom-designed to give the space more breadth and new spatial interactions. Apart from the bedrooms, the spaces spill into one another in a continuum

Burr Studio   Spain   In an old industrial shed between two rear courtyards, a house is organized around a band that contains utilitarian spaces while separating the private from the more public areas. Attached to the wall of white concrete blocks are different functions

Cierto Estudio   Spain   The renovation of a house built in the 1980s is reduced to isolated interventions that play with surfaces and textures to give the place personality without sapping its essence. Maintaining the original layout as it is, the revamp makes use of contra

Common Accounts   Canada   A small lakeside cabin in northern Ontario is conceived as a hedonistic setting for a three-way sentimental relationship to be lived to the full and in close connection with the outdoors. The enclosure’s stainless steel sheets and military stamp sugg

Hanghar   Spain   The ground floor of a rural house – in a building once used for sheltering cattle – is transformed with minimal actions into a leisurely space flowing in continuity with a recovered front garden. A sinuous concrete platform is elevated over the groun

Horma Estudio   Spain   A coastal house organizes an extensive program through a meticulous composition of spaces, geometries, and materials that together seek to adapt to the diverse needs of the occupants. The external contrast between the whitewash and the red-tiled clad

Iñigo Beguiristain, Lecumberri & Cidoncha   Spain   The urban disorder that surrounds the house compels it to radically turn inward and organize itself in a classic sequence of spaces around a large quadrangular courtyard. Behind the opaque facade, auxiliary spaces are pushed to the four corners so th

Sarquella + Torres Arquitectes   Thailand   A modular structure that draws inspiration from traditional constructions in the Thai countryside harbors a preschool which the community at large participated in raising. Crowned with solar chimneys to guarantee natural ventilation and ensure a high

Norman Foster   The extensive exhibition curated by Norman Foster at Bilbao’s Guggenheim celebrates the influence wielded by the automobile on modern culture.

Fulvio Irace   Una publicación reciente se suma a una ya extensa bibliografía que reivindica la fértil pero hasta ahora algo relegada obra de Carlo Mollino.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Swedish historian Johan Norberg devotes a chapter of his new book to ‘open minds,’ and this is precisely what Steven Pinker, whom he so admires, advocates in his own latest work, a vibrant defense of rational thinking which the eminent Canadian p

Eduardo Prieto   Normality is of ill repute, in architecture too, perhaps for two reasons: romantic tradition, which transformed artistic into creative activity, and the artist into a demigod going less by the laws of tradition than by its own; and consumerist societ

Eduardo Prieto   Faced with the highly personal, exquisite, or rare, it’s best to take the position medieval theologians took when defining the divine: to describe not what it is, but what it is not. This book is not an essay; it follows no line of discourse but fork

Enrique Morillo   Ignasi Aballí’s project for the Venice Art Biennale seeks to correct two errors: one having to do with space, the other with time. The first is in the Spanish Pavilion, which he rotates ten degrees to align it with the Belgian and Dutch Pavilions. Th

Alberto Ballesteros   Peter Zumthor makes little noise. The Swiss architect has for over a half-century produced his serious, transcendental work barely leaving the Grison Alps, making anyone wanting to see him pilgrim to his remote refuge, with the result that he is vene

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Miguel Mesa del Castillo   Spain   Molina de Segura (Murcia) is a formerly-rural county where vast stretches of land have been exploited to create suburbs. The result is a flattening of the land’s topographies and the destruction of its ramblas (territorial system of ravines) and loca

MAIO   Italy   The intervention carried out in the Spanish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale plays upon an error, and the result is an installation of minimalist roots, on a 1:1 scale. The error is that the pavilion was built slightly out of line with respect to

DnA_Design and Architecture   China   The fact that what we call ‘nature’ or looks like ‘nature’ is often a human-made construction is demonstrated by sceneries like this one in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, a carpet of hills that conceals more than 3,000 quarries exploited in the co

Foster in Bilbao

Just like Mr. Pump in Hergé’s cartoons, Norman Foster has a true passion for automobiles, a devotion which in his architecture has made him pursue beauty and high technology in equal shares. Making the world an accomplice in his vision, the British a

The winners of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award for 2022 have been announced in Brussels. Town House at Kingston Univertsity in London – by Dublin-based Grafton Architects, led by Yvonne Farrell and She

With six sites in different countries of the European Union, the Joint Research Center is the organism that provides the European Commission with scientific support for the conception of its plans and policies. The Seville branch opened in 1994 as a

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   Spain   With a design titled ‘Camino de olas’ (Wave Walk) the Danish firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) has won the international competition to build an innovation hub for the Basque Culinary Center (BCC) in the Gros neighborhood of San Sebastián. The other fou

In the course of a journey that pulled them out of her home in Cascais, designed by Souto de Moura, and included a stop at Tate Britain in London, paintings by Paula Rego now arrive at the Picasso Museum of Málaga to present an overwhelming imaginati

With an old loom she purchased from one of the many textile mills that were dying out in the Barcelona of the 1970s, the artist Teresa Lanceta learned to weave and immersed herself in a world of warps and woofs that since then has for her been a sort

With large windows overlooking the Bay of Santander, the Botín Centre is the ideal place in which to hold Ellen Gallagher’s first exhibition in Spain: a dialogue with the Atlantic Ocean by means of compositions presenting multiple layers of materials

Norman Foster   In October 2020, as UN Patron for Cities, I launched the Forum of Mayors in Geneva. Nineteen months later, the world’s population has increased by 151 million. Most have ended up in cities. Why? Because cities offer more opportunities, wealth, libera