José Joaquín Parra Bañón   Re-edit is a positive word. It means that a book has found its place in the world, that it’s been well received and there’s room for them in libraries. That this one, first published in 2018, has been revised, expanded, and printed anew, albeit with

Eduardo Prieto   It seems a tall order to classify José Joaquín Parra Bañón, a rare bird who delights in classifications. In his taxonomic endeavor, JJPB takes from the Warburg of black velvet panels, the Godard of compulsive montages, and the Benjamin of thinking im

Jorge Sainz   “Paradise is a promise as well as a memory.” That’s the closing line of this beautiful book, erudite but also full of charm and humor, in the finest English tradition of knowledge dissemination. Joseph Rykwert (1926-2024) was born in Warsaw but is on

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Norman Foster Foundation has published two new books, demonstrating its strong commitment to both memory and the future: the sixth of the Sketchbooks continues the series – begun back in 2020 – on drawings selected from the architect’s notebooks;

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

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

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

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

Anna Bach   Between 1985 and 2002, British architects Alison and Peter Smithson transformed the Hexenhaus from a modest vernacular cottage into one of the most remarkable houses of the late twentieth century. Through more than twenty small additions, subtraction

Rafael Moneo   In my hands, the books by Luis Fernández-Galiano – ‘A Tremor in the System’ and ‘Territories of Risk’ – which bring together texts published from 2007 to 2020 and follow on from the previously published volumes ‘The Age of Spectacle’ and ‘Time of Unc

The book Aftersun is a small sample of Pol Viladoms obsession with abandoned architectures and with construction and urban planning models linked to tourism development. Viladoms is an architect and a renowned architectural photographer, who has take

Enrique Morillo   The change in certain methods, freed of the modern obligation to be novel and based on reworking what came before, has rekindled the fever for archives; a hyperthermia that rests on developing information-management systems to handle so much entrench

Alberto Ballesteros   In 1963, Pasolini went to Palestine in search of locations for Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, in vain. The Holy Land was not what he had expected, nothing like the pictures that fueled his imagination: landscapes forming the backgrounds of biblical scene

Ginés Garrido   This book proposes a blurring of the limits between architecture, landscape, and urban planning in a bid for flexibility between different scales, spaces, and categories, between public and private, living and mineral, human and non-human. It prompts

Terrance Goode   The argument of Lawrence C. Davis can be summed up as a belief that socio-cultural density is achievable in suburban, even exurban cities through incremental, targeted changes in zoning, and through correspondingly precise modifications to existing a

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Two academics distinguished with the National History Prize have published in 2025 essential books to get to know each other better. The jurist Santiago Muñoz Machado, who received it in 2018 for Hablamos la misma lengua, a political history of Spani

Enrique Morillo   Now that the financial crisis that halted urban hypertrophy is in the past, the building appetite seems renewed, and the motto of building more as a solution to all problems echoes again. We live in an increasingly manufactured world and in cities go

Alberto Ballesteros   No one – or almost no one – doubts that the construction industry must reinvent itself to address the well over 30% of global carbon emissions it accounts for. That is why practically any new building now boasts better insulation, solar panels, domot

Miguel Fernández-Galiano   Through Edmund Sumner’s lens and Jonathan Bell’s edition, this book gathers 26 houses that, organized in four typological chapters, offer a fragmented portrait of the Mexican residential architecture of the last ten years. The projects, most built by

Fernando Pérez Oyarzún   The term ‘centralized composition’ brings memories of reading Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism as a student. How ideas travel is astonishing: in this case, architectural theories of the Renaissance were retrieved in the amb

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The Yale emeritus professor of Statistics Edward Tufte has in forty years published five admirable volumes on visual explanations. Written, designed, edited, and published by himself, this pentalogy has earned him the monikers ‘Galileo of graphics’ (

Ignacio G. Galán   A decade into the 20th century, as the Kingdom of Italy’s belated modernization challenged established traditions and various artistic movements sought to align the culture of the country with international modernist trends, art critic Ugo Ojetti und

Ross Anderson   One of the few surviving photographs of Adolphe Appia shows the ageing scenographer seated at his drawing board, captured in a moment of repose. Wearing a striped nautical pull marin and a canvas jacket, he gazes past lightly patterned curtains towar