In the blink of an eye, the attention of a world on edge has shifted from Venezuela to Greenland. On 3 January, in a military operation, the United States captured dictator Nicolás Maduro in his stronghold in Caracas, opening a period of uncertainty
Two films that premiered in December are fusions of silence and sentiment. Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, winner of the Golden Lion of Venice, explores family ties almost wordlessly in three architectural scenes; and Joachim Trier’s Sen
A few projects do not describe a generation. Besides, the selection of buildings presented ahead is neither clear nor consistent; at best, we could say it is inclusive, an alibi of our time. Yet, these assorted productions share an even context: a co
In his dismissive response to Polonius, Hamlet questions the value of words. The Fundación del Español Urgente, on the other hand, believes that words define a time and, following the trend that began in Germany in the early 1970s, seeks to crystalli
From November to March, the Prado Museum is using its two floors of temporary galleries to host monographic exhibitions on Antonio Raphael Mengs (1728–1779) and Juan Muñoz (1953–2001). The painter conventionally labelled Neoclassical is presented in
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
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The term 'style' has become outdated for contemporary practice, because it implies an approach that is already obsolete. But this doesn’t mean that internal coherence is unnecessary: every architectural practice must be consistent, because it forms p
In 1943, during the debate on the reconstruction of the House of Commons, bombed by the Nazis, Winston Churchill said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” emphasizing how the rectangular and adversarial shape of the English Parliament
Two days after hosting the planet’s biggest marathon, New York elected a 34-year-old Muslim socialist as mayor. On that same day, 4 November, the country that is the cultural center of the Islamic world inaugurated the Grand Egyptian Museum, a contro
Turning sixty, and after more than twenty-five years working together at the studio they founded in 1998, Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores can make a retrospective assessment that will inevitably be introspective. Both born in 1965, she in Barcelona and
Work has begun on President Donald Trump's long-awaited ballroom at the White House, with the demolition of part of the East Wing façade. The project, designed by McCrery Architects and executed by Clark Construction with engineering by AECOM, involv
American cinema examines the state of the nation through two fables that combine farce with grand guignol. Both produced in 2025 and premiered in Spain in September, One Battle After Another is the tenth film of Paul Thomas Anderson (Los Angeles, 197
The World Tourism Organization’s announcement of the number of tourists that in 2024 traveled across an international border, 1.4 billion (the planet has just above 8 billion), takes us back to the pre-pandemic triumphalism of a sector in continuous
Architecture is a choral art, but weaves around individual trajectories. The 20th century saw modern architecture emerge as a product of technical changes, social transformations, and aesthetic mutations: steel and glass, elevators, or air conditioni
Pyrocene proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. It renames and redefines the Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire. It comes with a narrative
Shocked by the urbicides in Ukraine and Gaza, and helpless in the whirlwind of conflicts that is changing the world, perhaps it is time to take a step back and celebrate the civilizing capacity of architecture by turning attention to its origins. The
A new territory of expression is emerging in the work of Anne Holtrop. Its impetus flows from the refusal to subordinate the inherent physical variation of matter. Because buildings need to perform in predictable and reliable ways, variation is const
Summer has not been a sleepy pause, but an accelerated time in the transformation of the world. After the United States’ attack on Iran in the last week of June, July saw Ursula von der Leyen at a Scottish golf course meekly accepting the tariffs imp
The torrid temperatures of August came with flames and ashes: devastating wildfires that also inflamed impotent spirits and the intimate desolation of losing two friends essential to our history. These material flames and those emotional ashes are mi
I first visited the country in 1978, invited by the Chinese Communist Party. It was a moment of transition, Mao having died two years before and with Deng Xiaoping in the process of consolidating his power. In a snowy Beijing we walked through the Fo
2020 marked a symbolic milestone in the Anthropocene era: for the first time, the anthropogenic mass – that is, the whole set of the solid materials manufactured or modified by humans – exceeded the overall biomass of the planet, which includes all l
China’s transformation in the 21st century can be felt on a visit there, as chronicled in ‘Six Watercolors’ (AV Proyectos 130), but is also documented through its cinema, which since the dazzling appearance of Zhang Yimou with Red Sorghum (1987) has
