Lars Lerup was perhaps the most provocative urban thinker of his time. With an unconventional blend of inquisitive observation and wild speculation—aided by a dual gift for clarity and hyperbole—his prolific graphic and written output shaped the way
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
Architect Frank O. Gehry, who brought an alluringly new kind of shape-making to his profession even as he fundamentally changed the reputation and civic landscape of his adopted hometown of Los Angeles in such projects as the shimmering Walt Disney C
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
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
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
Robert A.M. Stern dies at 86 The New Yorker was a professor and the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and one of the leading figures of the postmodern movement. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a habitual collaborator of Disney, for which he desi
Following his death at the age of ninety-six, I hereby fulfill my obligation to evoke for others Antonio Vázquez de Castro the architect, while trying to overcome the loss of the friend I collaborated with in several projects and with whom I would ha
Lars Lerup has died at the age of 85. Born in 1940 in Växjö (Sweden), after completing his engineering studies in his native country in 1960, he moved to the United States, where he obtained a degree in architecture in 1968 from the University of Cal
The architect Henri Ciriani has passed away at the age of 88. Born in Peru, he built his professional career in Paris, where he settled in the 1960s. In 1968, he and Michel Corajoud set up the Atelier d’urbanisme et d’architecture (AUA), and in 1976
The British architect Terry Farrell has died at 87 years of age. He is the author of some of London’s most iconic postmodern buildings, including the MI6 and TV-am headquarters and Charing Cross Station. At the start of his career, Farrell worked in
As the tireless worker she was, death visited Dulce Xerach during a professional trip to Madrid. Despite this painfully premature departure, she has left a deep mark on the politics, culture, and architecture of her homeland. A Law graduate, she was
Contain, channel, conquer: the relationship of cities with water is usually mediated by rigid infrastructures. However, the Chinese landscape architect and professor Kongjian Yu – who died tragically on 23 September in an airplane crash in the wetlan
Nicholas Grimshaw has died at the age of 85. A pioneer of high-tech architecture, the British architect built the Waterloo International Terminal in London and the iconic Eden Project of Cornwall (a botanical garden with ETFE 'biomes'). In Spain he r
The same Cuenca where he was born, which awakened his early aesthetic inclinations and saw his most important projects go up, also saw him take his last breath on 7 September. Gustavo Torner was headed to be a forest engineer but soon gave up drawing
The architect and critic François Chaslin passed away on 7 August in Lanildut, a small commune on the coast of the French deparment of Finistère, where he lived in a house he had renovated himself, far from the Parisian maelstrom where the bulk of hi
The architect and professor Javier Alau Massa died on 10 August after a long illness, leaving behind a trajectory that ties in with this magazine’s and mine. Friends since the Madrid School of Architecture and summers spent in the military service, i
“Like scenes at a crossroads, between stairs and places, between tensions and demands, between limits and borders.” That is how Barcelona-born Manuel Gausa thought of architecture, and with this conviction he set out to shake up the profession with m
A professor at the Madrid School of Architecture and an aficionado of music, poetry, photography, and nature, the Madrid architect ran a practice with Luis González Sterling and Joaquín Aramburu Maqua. Javier was a colleague of ours in Arquitectura V
François Chaslin has died at the age of 76. A regular contributor to Arquitectura Viva and media outlets such as Le Monde, Libération, or El País, the French architect, critic, and professor was editor-in-chief of L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, respon
The masters Siza and Souto de Moura often mention SAAL as a decisive experience in their trajectories. Behind the Serviço Ambulatório de Apoio Local stood the recently deceased Nuno Portas, an urbanist who in the wake of the Carnation Revolution serv
José Manuel López Peláez has died at 80 years of age. Chair of Design at the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM), he was awarded Spain’s National Architecture Prize in 1971. He had a practice with Javier Frechilla, with whom he built works like the
The civil engineer Javier Rui-Wamba, founder of Esteyco and creator of its foundation, died in Barcelona on 10 July. In the course of a third of a century, Fundación Esteyco has shown how engineering can also be a branch of humanism. Architects, prou
