The AV/Arquitectura Viva project celebrates in 2024 its fortieth year, and the magazine has wanted to mark the occasion with a special issue that reproduces the last lesson Luis Fernández-Galiano gave at the Madrid School of Architecture before his r

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The AV/Arquitectura Viva project celebrates four decades in 2024, and this anniversary has prompted a stocktaking of our career, using as guiding thread my last lecture at the Madrid School of Architecture, where I tried to explain to what extent vis

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Color choice is not innocent. Every tone and nuance of the chromatic range has a symbolic weight that overlaps with its aesthetic dimension, making it impossible to regard the decision to use one instead of another as an exclusively visual matter. Ar

Martín Peláez   Spain   Ainhoa Martín and Francisco Peláez have carried out a full renovation for a home-cum-studio in a 1917 building located in the Madrid neighborhood of Palos de Moguer. Their Madrid-based practice, Martín Peláez, explains that the name of the project re

AMOO   Spain   The renovation of a flat tries to get the most out of a limited space by organizing it around an irregular core, in effect alleviating the rigidity of the apartment’s scheme of loadbearing walls…

Beatriz Alés Atelier   Spain   Originally intended for use by a large family, a dwelling in Tercio y Terol – an old neighborhood of private homes – has eliminated its partitions to form larger, more freely flowing spaces.

Studio Animal   Spain   In order to obtain a large, unobstructed main space, the more private rooms of an apartment in the Niño Jesús neighborhood are placed together in a compact block of chromatic contrasts…

Hanghar   Spain   A large flat was partitioned to form two separate but perfectly symmetrical residential units in which undifferentiated spaces are connected by a series of equidistant openings.

Adrià Escolano, David Steegmann   Spain   Having to subdivide to accommodate two families, a residence in La Floresta has been transformed in a way that maintains the original arrangement but assigns different uses to the rooms…

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM-UPM) has the tradition of having its veteran teachers give a final lecture prior to retirement, but Luis Fernández-Galiano, who retired as chair professor of architectural design during the pandemic, could not

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The theorist of classicism Rob Krier passed away in Berlin on 20 November at 85 years of age. Like his younger brother Léon Krier, he defended his traditionalist convictions through drawing, and both added a great deal of graphic eloquence to buildin

Kenneth Frampton   Anthony Vidler, the architectural historian and critic who was professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, was the author of books including Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism and Th

Peter Eisenman   The British historian, theorist, and critic imparted his  brilliant teachings as a professor in universities in the United States for over half a century …

Ricardo Aroca   One night more than fifteen years ago (we were both still active), I had a bad dream: I had to write an obituary for Andrés Perea and was pressed for time. The stress eventually woke me up and I was much relieved. Arriving at School, the first person

Andrés Jaque   The death of Andrés Perea has made orphans of a good number of Spanish architects: those who found in his ethical and intellectual position, in his work, in the pedagogical methods he promoted, and in his defense of plural access to the profession th

Kurt W. Forster   The photographer of Sicilian origins had a sharp eye for capturing the most human and the most emotional dimensions of the places he visited …

Luis Fernández-Galiano   In 17th-century Holland, the microscope and the camera obscura for evermore changed the way we behold. The historian Laura J. Snyder describes this phenomenal mutation in how we perceive things through two figures who coincided in time: Antoni van Le

Eduardo Prieto   A species in extinction, a fragile koala still existing even though the ecosystems it thrived in no longer do, architecture criticism has for a while now been facing the question of how to die. Some part of it will take leave of us discreetly, bequea

Enrique Morillo   In the 1970s, John (Berger) overtook John (the Evangelist) and put the gaze before the Word. A half-century later, we are living a time of absolute visual supremacy, and many already perceive fury and fatigue in our sight. But amid all the whining, t

Alberto Ballesteros   “The book’s better than the film” is an axiom that embroils us in debates. The matter goes way back to the dawn of humanity: word vs. image. Mary Beard is among those who believe that what we see is as important as what we read, though she put into a

Pedro Henrique    Portugal   In Esmoriz, a city within the Região de Aveiro, stands this contemporary reinterpretation of the palheiro, the fisherman's house that has marked the Portuguese coastline since the early 19th century. To promote the idea of preserving this vernacular

Arquitectura-G   Netherlands   Leaving aside the by now mythical incident of employees in the area running into Tilted Arc, claiming the installation was an eyesore that blocked their way to work, and succeeding in getting it removed, it is unanimously considered a powerful experi

COBE Architects   Denmark   In the heart of the densely urbanized historic center of the Danish capital is this island with vegetation distributed in six gardens and a greenhouse representing different parts of the world. Located next to The Royal Danish Opera, in what used to

Three Anniversaries

Celebrating engineering is quite tantamount to celebrating architecture, given that before modernity drew a line between the two disciplines, they were really one same thing. So it is that Arquitectura Viva, using anniversaries, pays tribute to three

The French studio led by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal has been distinguished with the Soane Medal of this year. The annual award is given by Sir John Soane’s Museum in London in acknowledgement of professionals who “encourage a better unders

Herzog & de Meuron   Israel   The new library is located west of the historic part of town, between the Museum and the parliament of Israel, adapting its shape to the triangular plot and its height to the scale of the surrounding buildings.

MVRDV   Albania   Built in 1988 as a museum dedicated to the communist dictator Enver Hoxha, the Pyramid of Tirana has been converted by the Rotterdam firm MVRDV into a cultural center. Located in the heart of the Albanian capital, it has reopened with the original co

In the large-scale handbook of restoration that Berlin is, amid everything that in the period following World War II was reconstructed exactly like before and everything that on the other hand was demolished to make room for modern structures, a buil

MAD Architects   China   The renovation to be carrried out by the Ma Yansong’s firm focuses on the Wanmicang warehouse on the south side of the Shanghai Zhangjiang Cement Factory, which was built in 1971 and ceased operations in 2013. Through the juxtaposing of old and new s

Francisco Mangado   Spain   The Government of Extremadura has announced that a scheme titled ‘Music and the Earth,’ submitted by the architecture firm Mangado y Asociados, has won the ideas competition for the construction, in the historical quarter of Cáceres, of a museum to h

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Generative artificial intelligence prefigures digital life. If the great geopolitical event of 2023 is the war in Gaza, perhaps the most important gathering has been the one held at Bletchley Park, where 28 countries warned about the existential dang