Like other architects of his generation, Zhang Ke found the key to channeling China’s contemporary aspirations in the mission of protecting ancestral heritage: a balance which – as the four works featured in Arquitectura Viva show – he has managed to

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The two superpowers are already digital autocracies. The Chinese authoritarian model, which avoids the electoral cycles of liberal democracies, and which builds safe cities by multiplying facial recognition cameras, offers the countries of the Global

The sunny face that Olympic China presented to the world in the first decade of the 2000s had a cloudy reverse, and nothing illustrates the country’s contradictions better than the hutong, those alleys of the old part of Beijing, many of which have b

ZAO / Zhang Ke Architecture Office   China   In one of the traditional neighborhoods that surround the Forbidden City, a residential complex has undergone renovation in accordance with a cautious strategy to curb gentrification. As in another siheyuan in the same alley, only about two-thirds of

ZAO / Zhang Ke Architecture Office   China   A bookstore has opened amid the remains of a short-lived university founded during World War II by academics who had fled Beijing and Tianjin during the Japanese occupation. In a loop that encloses a courtyard with straight lines, a volume extends al

ZAO / Zhang Ke Architecture Office   China   A sculptural pavilion that continues the rugged terrain of the surrounding area endeavors to become part of the network of public facilities that enlivens a coastal resort. Open on all sides, the undulating ground floor is sheltered by a framework su

ZAO / Zhang Ke Architecture Office   China   Nestled in a rugged landscape, this museum dedicated to the painters Xiao Feng and Song Ren is located at the foot of the Daci Mountain, in the Xihu district of Hangzhou. Built with concrete colored with black ink and processed on site, the building

Vicente Monroy   A frequent error among bad artistic directors: when trying to recreate a past period – say the 1960s – they fill the film sets with architectural elements and objects of the particular moment: curving furniture, psychedelic lamps, vinyls, portable ra

Marta Pazos   I came to know of Bob Wilson quite late. I was in a very underground theater world, and it was my life partner then, at the time working in the National Theater of Porto, who in 2005 showed me what the Texan had done in Portugal. Wilson’s austere wor

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Vicente Moreno García-Mansilla has completed an exceptional feat, the interpretation of Paleolithic symbols in cave art as maps of the territory or plans of the caverns they are found in. In a knowledge adventure I have been privileged to follow, fir

Iñaki Bergera   Architectural photography, especially of the kind that contextualizes architecture in the complexity and heterodoxy of its urban and territorial dimensions, wanted its own internal competition and external recognition. This is the idea that the Portu

Eduardo Mangada   This book perfectly presents the situation of the coastal district of El Cabanyal in Valencia, in both its physical and social dimensions. A hinge between the city, Cap i Casal, and the sea, this urban slice attached to El Grau was saved from develop

Alberto Campo Baeza   ‘Desiderata’ refers to the things we need or want. How can one possibly write on a guide to modern and contemporary architecture in Burgos without mentioning its cathedral? When there, I head for one of the world’s most beautiful buildings. Old? Mode

Luis Fernández-Galiano   At the age of 96, Frank Owen Gehry died at home in Santa Monica on Friday 5 December. The most popular American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, who marked a turning point in the art of building with his Guggenheim Bilbao, has been eulogized in th

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Holding a vodka martini and playing the gracious host in his loft on Chapel Street during his eighteen years as dean of the Yale School of Architecture: this is the best possible portrait of the architect who on 27 November died in his Manhattan home

El influyente profesor de la Escuela de Madrid repasó su trayecto profesional y vital, desde su infancia gaditana hasta sus casas esenciales y sus edificios de geometría exigente y luz exacta. Hijo de un cirujano militar y una maestra, Alberto Campo

Now that in the United States there are those who have posed the ‘need’ to make civic architecture beautiful again through a ‘purely American’ style, the powers-that-be ought to do the exercise of figuring out where lies the essence of a nation that

Grafton Architects, Modus Studio   United States   The Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation, which recently opened in Fayetteville (Arkansas), is a facility for timber-construction research and training. Part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design of the Universi

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   United States   This student centre has recently been inaugurated at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Designed by Danish firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) in collaboration with New York-based Rockwell Group, which was responsible for the interior design, the compl

Studio Gang   United States   The use here of recycled and locally sourced materials, optimal-form factors, and renewable energy systems incites students to contribute to building a more sustainable future. The open-plan ground level features a double-height atrium from which a n

Arquipélago, Mariana Caires   Brazil   The inspiration of a famous bossa nova by Tom Jobim, the undulating profile of the Mantiqueira Range spreads out in front of a house built on a steep hillside at an altitude of over 1,500 meters, where a solitary tree grew rooted to a rock formation.

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   Spain   When Clotilde García del Castillo decided to open up what had been her home to preserve the memory of her husband, little could she have imagined that a century later it would be crowded with people eager to see where Joaquín Sorolla had lived and wo

Balkrishna Doshi, Studio Sangath    Germany   The Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein (Germany) has inaugurated Doshi Retreat, a space thought up by the Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, winner of the 2018 Pritzker Prize, who died in 2023. The project was carried out in collaboration with his grandda

The New Valley of Cuelgamuros

Pereda Pérez Arquitectos, Lignum   Spain   Pereda Pérez and Lignum’s proposal to reinterpret the Valley of Cuelgamuros is situated within a context fraught with symbolic dispute. Conceived by the Franco regime as a monumental burial place for its founder and a space to legitimize the National

What makes Benidorm so different, so appealing? For Martin Parr, who died on 6 December, this middle-class paradise was an inexhaustible source of subjects, equally everyday and kitsch, that he immortalized with saturated tones and a good dose of iro

Farshid Moussavi   United States   Houston has inaugurated the first Ismaili Center in the United States and the seventh in the world. The complex is part of the international network of institutions promoted by Karim al-Hussaini, Aga Khan IV (1936–2025), creator of a prestigious trie

Diller Scofidio + Renfro   Qatar   Located in Education City in Doha, Al-Mujadilah is a religious, educational, and social center for Muslim women. Conceived by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, who presides the Qatar Foundation (QF), and designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Little is known about Charles Clifford until he appears, around 1850, running a photography studio close to the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, but in the decade or so between then and his demise in 1863, this Welshman became a master of the new techniques

Leaving aside the debate on whether some of his best-known photographs were faked, there is no question that the Hungarian-American Robert Capa had an exceedingly keen eye for capturing the rawest, but also most human, aspect of every instant. Always

In 1973, Fundación Juan March awarded Cristina García Rodero an artistic creation scholarship, which she used to purchase her first 35 mm Pentax and spend a year traveling across the country to record customs, festivals, ceremonies, rites, traditions

Ever since the legendary dispute that arose between Zeuxis and Parrhasius in ancient Greece, art history has seen notable rivalries unfold which, fortunately, have served as incentives for adversaries to pursue excellence and create authentic masterw

They were born three decades apart but in places separated only by a hundred kilometers in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna plain; and although they never came to know each other in life, there palpitates in the oeuvres of Michelangelo Antonioni and Luigi Ghir

Santiago Muñoz Machado   Seeing nature as subject to rights is something that falls within the ideological order of environmentalist thought currently shared by an overwhelming majority of citizens, and stems, by extension, primarily from the debate on animal rights that has