Hotel Empanada

This advertisement for a Barcelona snack bar franchise contains an image of a local landmark building by the late Ricardo … More

Canadà Park: Barcelona’s Maple Leaf Themed Suburb

As an architect who is blessed with having double citizenship –Spanish as well as Canadian– I was quite amused, while … More

Gaudí’s Essential Hut

El Xalet de Catllaràs is a mountain refuge by Antoni Gaudí completed in 1905 for workers of the Asland cement … More

Small City Architecture: Walden 7 as a Social Network

[Originally published in RocaGallery.com. Versión en castellano sigue a continuación] “The city is like a great house, and the house … More

Vacation Ruin

Ruins are as depressing as they are beautiful. Building abandonment is never a happy occurrence, but when it precedes building inhabitation, it’s … More

Monomateriality

Material purity is highly valued in contemporary architecture. The ideal that buildings should be materially consistent inside and out seems … More

Experitecture

Empirical experimentation has always been intrinsic to architecture. Attempting to build something that has never been built before in terms of form, height, … More

The Barcelona Pavilion as Cozy Christmas Home

Here’s yet another advertisement that features the Barcelona Pavilion. This one isn’t a print ad for a famous German brand … More

Building on top

Sometimes, the best option is one on top of the other. It might be because available space is too constricted, because an opportunity is … More

Contemporary Ruins II

Further to my last post, here is another Spanish contemporary ruin by a Pritzker laureate: Toyo Ito’s spa near Torrevieja. … More

Contemporary Ruins

As is well-known, Spain’s recent building boom-turned-bust has left behind a legacy of halted construction projects that are now in … More

Everyday Camouflage in the Countryside

The building above looks like a military installation of some sort, right? After all, it’s got a camouflage pattern on … More

Farewell Zaha

Zaha Hadid left us yesterday. She won’t be forgotten for a long time, as she was an architect who actually changed architecture. … More

Revisiting Casa Bloc

The architecture of housing differs fundamentally from the architecture of other building types in that it is never a purely qualitative … More

Still Nurbing Along

Enric Ruiz Geli’s Villa Nurbs is still incomplete after 13 years. The good news is, however, that it does not appear to … More

How to Find Work as an Architect

The perennial problem for the 99% of architects who are not stars is: how and where do you find work? There are many ways … More

The First BIAM: 20 Years After

I recently attended a reunion to celebrate 20 years since graduating from the Berlage Institute Amsterdam. This first ever BIAM, or ‘Berlage … More

Beauty

‘Beauty’ is one of the rarest words used by professionals when talking about architecture, yet it is one of the most used by … More

The School in the Forest

Els Xiprers –The Cypresses in Catalan– is the name of a Barcelona primary school situated in a very special setting: a forested … More

Selfie Scene

With the invention of the ‘selfie’, the traditional comic foreground or carnival cutout is rendered obsolete, along with the profession of carnival portrait photographer. … More