Making Bullshit Mountains out of Buildings

“If architecture is landscape, buildings are mountains.” -Vicente Guallart, chief architect of the city of Barcelona and general director of Urban…

Provocative Architecture?

In “Little Frank and his Carp”, a 2001 video of a performance by artist Andrea Fraser, architecture, replete with its…

Spanish architecture is respected the world over, if the number of exhibitions, publications, Gaudí fans, and archi-tourists who visit this…

Today, I ran into a small protest: a squadron (herd? platoon? pack?) of young architects protesting dismal working conditions. Other…

The Canadian port city of Vancouver has entered centre stage of the global debate about future directions for cities in the sustainability…

I spotted this fantastic water tower the other day while walking around Poble Nou, Barcelona’s industrial graveyard. Claes Oldenburg and…

You know green walls have become trendy when a designer fashion label puts one up that’s made of plastic. Kinda…

The construction of the new Mercat dels Encants / Fira de Bellcaire (Barcelona’s flea market), by b720 Arquitectos, is not only spectacular…

A façade design in which photovoltaic panels end up casting shadows upon other photovoltaic panels does not seem to me…

Potato chips, or crisps, come in a fantastic panoply of artificial flavors. BBQ, Ketchup, or “regular” are standards the world…

Why is it that, in places where nothing is needed, there is often nevertheless a nagging architectural compulsion to add something…

Leon Battista Alberti famously wrote: “The city is like some large house and the house in turn like some small…

The image at left shows the construction of the “Instant City” during the congress of the International Council of Societies…

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #39] “Young architects” is a culturally loaded term, often conjuring notions of rebellion, utopian idealism,…

Fashion, Architecture, Politics: Image is Everything The inauguration of a cultural institution is normally a cause for widespread celebration; even…

It is known that Gaudí preferred modelling architecture over drawing it; especially models made of chains hung from a ceiling, or strings…

It is June 2012, and after a decade of construction Villa Nurbs is still incomplete. In fact, construction has now seemingly come…

Given the choice, most children would rather play in a terrain vague than a playground. They would rather make mud…

“Spain is Different” was a tourism campaign slogan coined in the mid-1960s by dictator Francisco Franco’s Ministry of Information and Tourism (!),…