Luis Fernández-Galiano   This month of January AV/Arquitectura Viva turns 35, and I myself 70, so I can say without hyperbole that I have devoted half a life to it. This magazine is not however where I have spent more time, because upon crossing the frontier of mandatory ret

When she died in 2016, the most optimistic foreboded a slow death for Zaha Hadid’s studio, and the doomsayers, immediate cessation. Neither one thing nor the other came to pass: the office now run by Patrik Schumacher has not only managed to complete

Zaha Hadid Architects   China   Designed by Zaha Hadid before she died on March 2016, Leeza SOHO contains the world’s tallest atrium (194,16 meters), which whirls around the building upward. Rising in the Chinese capital’s Fengtai business district, the tower contains 172,800 squar

Zaha Hadid Architects   China   In Daxing District, 46 kilometers south of Tiananmen Square, is the world's largest terminal in a single building, designed by Zaha Hadid, who died in 2016. Daxing International Airport was built to decongest the Chinese capital's airport at Chaoyang

Zaha Hadid Architects   China   Characterized by an organic language that unifies the project, this cultural complex harbors a contemporary art museum, a theater seating an audience of 1,800, and a multipurpose auditorium... [+]

Zaha Hadid Architects   Qatar   The coastal city of Al Wakrah, 20 kilometers south of Doha, has inaugurated the building designed by Zaha Hadid Architects – in collaboration with the engineering firm Aecom – which will be one of the venues of the FIFA World Cup of 2022. Among the n

Jacobo García-Germán   The recent awarding of the Spanish Association of Architecture Institutes (CSCAE) Gold Medal to Alberto Campo Baeza suggests that there has been much reflection on the currency of his oeuvre and trajectory. A trajectory and oeuvre obstinately faithfu

Patrick McCaughey   A wit in the publicity department of the Museum of Modern Art suggested that the new MoMA was like a favourite golf course to which, to your surprise, nine holes had been added. At a cost of $450 million, the distinguished New York architectural firm

Luis Fernández-Galiano   At the start of each decade, the book is predicted to die in the course of it. But this terminal patient is in good health, and since the definitive replacement of the roll by the codex in the 4th century, pages folded, sewn, and bound have been the

China has the geographic entity of a continent, the economic potential of a small planet, and the complexity of a macrocosmos with room aplenty for different geographies, tongues, and idiosyncracies. China is the politically unanimous country organiz

Vector architects   China   The hotel sits in the picturesque Li River valley of Yangshuo, surrounded by the region’s characteristic karst mountain scenery. In this unique context, the project intervenes on an old sugar mill built in the 1960s, which had been beautifully preser

LLLab   China   Near the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China, in Beigou Village, within the boundaries of the city of Beijing, is this hotel conceived as a small village by LLLab., a firm running offices in Shanghai, Stuttgart, and Porto, headed by Hanxiao L

Neri & Hu Design and Research Office   China   This twenty-room hotel rises in an environment dotted with small lakes and a handful of preexisting structures that have been transformed to adapt to new uses...

Andrea Frapolli   Italy   Located in a rugged landscape within the Alpine municipality of Lodrino, the house is the result of combining old elements – a dwelling dating back to the 15th century that was partly altered in the 1970s, and a small stable from the year 1900 that s

Koichi Takada   Qatar   The interior design of the National Museum of Qatar in Doha sought first of all to resonate with the image of a desert rose that the French architect Jean Nouvel had chosen to give the building, and secondly to ensure an intelligible reading of the i

COBE Architects   Denmark   With an area of 20,000 square meters, Karen Blixen Plads is one of Copenhagen’s largest squares. Located within a strategic enclave between the city university’s South Campus and the Royal Danish Library, the new public space arose from adopting a co

The recent United Nations Climate Change Conference will certainly not come down in history. Given the modest agreements arrived at with so much effort, along with the failure to involve the world’s main polluters, the summit held in Madrid is just a

Among architects Bjarke Ingels is perhaps the last adorer of the fold; he is the unexpected link connecting our globalized times to those deconstructivist obsessions that had a heyday in the 1990s, in the heat of the theses that the philosopher Gille

Almost thirty years ago MVRDV leaped to fame thanks, among other things, to its uninhibited way of crystallizing the diagrams of uses in constructions of a public nature. After all this time it seems that the formula still works, as we can see in the

The beauty of the twin high-rises at Madrid’s Plaza de Colón, a 1968 iconic work of the architect Antonio Lamela, lies less in their appearance than in the extraordinary hanging structure that the civil engineer Javier Manterola calculated, and which

If we were to pinpoint an emblem for Spain’s successful public healthcare system, one sure candidate would be La Paz Hospital in Madrid. At least that is the opinion of the institution’s authorities, who, faced with a dire need for more space, found

After the enormously successful architectural and corporate adventure that Apple was, the British firm Foster + Partners has won the bid to raise headquarters for another giant of our globalized world, Alibaba, a China-based leader in online retail a

Stretching a total of 1,776 kilometers, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal is one of the most impressive constructions on the planet and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014, hence the Chinese government’s interest in presenting the histor

In the context of its internationalization process the Norwegian firm Snøhetta recently won the competition for a theater building in Xingtai, one of China’s oldest but also fastest growing cities. The project is organized around a large reflective p

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The conservative British philosopher died on 12 January at the age of 75, succumbing to cancer. A public intellectual and prolific writer, he left behind – besides several novels and two operas – over fifty books on a diversity of themes, from huntin