Against market fevers, housing in Barcelona has in recent years found the protection of public policies whose effectivity is partly due to the know-how of its architects. Marta Peris and José Toral have contributed to this promising panorama through

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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 Barcelona everyone looks up to because of its exemplary talent for city-making is also the benchmark for housing. Against market fevers, what is considered a basic need has in the Catalonian capital found the protection of public policies whose e

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   The project consists of 85 social housingunits on a plot previously occupied by the emblematic Cinema Pisa in the city of Cornellà de Llobregat. It is a five-story freestanding building with a wood structure, resting on a ground level with a concrete

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   Born out of the Cheap Housing Law of 1929, the Bon Pastor neighborhood went up with 784 one-level homes. Impelled by the Barcelona City Hall's IMHAB (Institut Municipal de l'Habitatge i Rehabilitació), the Bon Pastor Redevelopment Plan involves demol

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   The Barcelona practice of Marta Peris and José Manuel Toral was commissioned by the Balearic Housing Institute (IBAVI) to build this residential complex in Ibiza. It is designed to get the best in terms of sunlight and sea views as well as to harness

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   The artisanal bricks baked with biomass provide inertia to the inner void – which acts as a collector or a solar chimney, depending on the season – and are bonded to form lattices airing the dwellings. The ten-meter bay results in a flexible floor pl

Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   Connected by an open gallery, two volumes are composed in terraced formation to adapt to the plot’s slope, leaving opposite corners free for patios protected by low walls that give access into the complex. The loadbearing walls that structure the uni

Kosme de Barañano   The myth of the artist Richard Serra begins in his narrative the day that, at the age of four, he was present at the launching of a vessel at the shipyard where his father was employed. With succinct, abrupt eloquence the sculptor would time and agai

Carlos Jiménez   Two years ago, while planning a Rice Design Alliance tour of New Mexico’s Santa Fe and Abiquiú, I contacted the Albuquerque architect Antoine Predock to see if he would meet with our group during our visit. Predock graciously agreed to meet at the en

Luis Lope de Toledo   In the vast canvas of history, the paintbrush of recognition occasionally chooses to highlight lesser-known artists, who are pulled out of the shadows of anonymity and given the transcendence awaiting them. This past 5 March, the jury of the Pritzke

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Outdoor museums of vernacular architecture, initiated in Scandinavia in the late 1800s, proliferated in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Ballenberg Open-Air Museum in Switzerland was inaugurated in 1978. Rolf Fehlbaum took over his family’s fur

Alejandro Bernabeu   At his induction into the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in January, Miguel Aguiló gave a discourse titled ‘Caring for Earth, Recreating the World,’ in which he tackled heritage, the landscape, and the planet. Three spheres of civil engineering that expl

Jorge Torres   The fact that Le Corbusier, peintre à Cap-Martin (Éditions du Patrimoine, 2015) has now been published in English is a further step in the reexamination of Le Corbusier that we have been seeing for some time now, and specifically situates his artisti

The relationship between cars and buildings is manifested in at least three ways. The first, metaphorical, is part of architecture’s broader link with machines, and holds that buildings should draw from the same principles of rational efficiency whic

MONO Architekten    Germany   This ensemble of constructions with perforated facades made of sedimentary layers of red-tinted rammed earth is situated in the city of Neuenburg am Rhein, close to the German, French, and Swiss borders. Connecting the urban center to the green zones

Christian Kerez   Bahrain   Compensating for the lack of parking spots in the former capital is a network of open, flexible constuctions which serve at the same time to give the urban fabric a new character altogether.

Schneider Lengauer Pühringer   Austria   Though it is only a 19th-century addition, the tower of the castle of Hagenberg – with four bulbous pinnacles at the corners of its roof – gives the Austrian village its characteristic image, and the iconic profile of this vertical structure has even

GTRF. Tortelli Frassoni   Italy   A Renaissance prince in the full sense, Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy was besides a capable statesman a true lover and patron of the arts. It was his treasure of classical sculpture that would form the core of the archaeology museum founded in the 18th

Branco del Rio   Portugal   The Coimbra practice of João Branco and Paula del Rio was commissioned to reconfigure the tourist office and Praça Cónego Manuel Fernandes Nogueira, the only flat open space in Piódão, creating a unified image of them. The schist houses of this villa

The housing problem

When in a famous essay Friedrich Engels denounced the living conditions of workers in Victorian England, the construction of dwellings became one of the principal themes of socialism, and eventually it found its way into the list of fundamental right

When he drowned in the sea at Cap-Martin in August 1965, Le Corbusier left unrealized his project for the Saint-Pierre Church at Firminy, a late masterpiece of his that we can visit today thanks to José Oubrerie. The then young collaborator in the st

José Ignacio Linazasoro   Roberto Ercilla was an energetic defender of good architecture in a world where the profession is undervalued. His works –oozing elegance, refinement, and precision – have done much to build the orderly and highly livable city that is modern Vitoria,

Professor Lesley Lokko, acclaimed Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator, author and curator, will receive this year’s Royal Gold Medal 2024, one of the world’s highest honours for architecture. Given in recognition of a lifetime’s work and presented

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has awarded its Gold Medal of 2024 to David Lake and Ted Flato – who in 1984 founded Lake Flato Architects in San Antonio (Texas) – in recognition of their commitment to controversial environmental and socio

Polish-French architect Iwona Buczkowska has been awarded the Jane Drew Prize for Architecture 2024, an award recognising an architectural designer who, through their work and commitment to design excellence, has raised the profile of women in archit

Luis Fernández-Galiano has been distinguished with the Award for Values of Spanish Architecture, one of a series of accolades which the association Foro España Cívica gives to individuals with proven excellence in their respective areas of knowledge

Luis Fernández-Galiano   MMM did lots of things, but will be remembered as the engineer who executed the big urban projects that Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón launched as president of the Community of Madrid from 1995 to 2003 and as mayor of the city from 2003 to 2011. Of strong Ar