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Criticalista

Rants and reflections on architecture, cities, and politics

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Experimenting in Public is not a Crime

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #33] Seville’s public squares come in all shapes and sizes. Some are large and officious, others small…

climate, ecological design, Jürgen Mayer H., Mark Magazine, public space, research, Seville, wood

Strike a Pose

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #32] What is it that makes these architectural images so seductive? To be sure, there…

Aires Mateus, Assisted living facility, Barcelona Pavilion, countryside, Lisbon, Mark Magazine, photography, Portugal, small town

Context is Still Everything

The building visible in the photo above is a soon-to-be-completed design museum by the veteran firm MBM (Martorell, Bohigas, MacKay).…

Barcelona, cantilever, context, infrastructure, MBM, strategy, urbanism

Experimental Bamboo

Bamboo is an ancient building material that fell largely out of favor in the twentieth century, only to be used…

Bali, bamboo, countryside, D.I.Y., ecological design

Blackwashing

You wouldn’t know it from looking at photographs such as these. You wouldn’t even know it if you were standing…

Barcelona, ecological design, LEED, Mark Magazine, office building, RCR

Pop Architecture

Ordinary, everyday objects — that’s what most popular nicknames for buildings refer to. A gherkin, a paperclip, a typewriter, a…

architecture, art, Claes Oldenburg, popular culture, semiotics

Power to the People

[originally published in Mark Magazine #29] The office of Andrés Jaque Arquitectos Still on the shy side of 40, Andrés…

activism, Andrés Jaque, ethics, housing, interactive, Madrid, Mark Magazine, politics, research, urbanism, urbanization

Interview with Peter Eisenman

[This is an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Peter Eisenman in Santiago de Compostela in May 2010. The…

architecture, Galicia, interview, KLAT magazine, Peter Eisenman, politics, Santiago de Compostela, theory, topographic architecture

Top-Down Tower

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #27] Social housing is among the most regulated–and least glamorous–areas of architecture. While all housing…

Barcelona, building envelope, housing, Mark Magazine, R+B Arquitectes, tower

City as Landscape

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #27]   Library Is the pleasure of architecture intellectual or sensual? Of the mind or…

cultural identity, fundamentalism, Galicia, landscape, Mark Magazine, Peter Eisenman, politics, Santiago de Compostela, strategy, topographic architecture

Triumph of the Shell

  [originally published in Mark Magazine #26]   In cinema, there is a common type of architectural scene: a building…

building envelope, film, Lleida, Mark Magazine, Mecanoo, politics, small town

Building as Research

  Truss space Two facades with different pillow systems: ETFE fog configuration and ETFE diaphragm configuration. The range of building…

Barcelona, building envelope, building industry, climate, Cloud 9, ecological design, Enric Ruíz Geli, Mark Magazine, research

Ugh Canada

An architect is, by definition, a designer of buildings, right? Well, the government of Canada, a nation whose credo is…

Canada, cultural identity, Expo 2010 Shanghai, installation, pavilion, politics, spectacle

Jurisprudence

Courts of justice are steeped in protocol and decorum, not merely because of tradition, but in order to establish and…

Art 4 D magazine, b720 Arquitectos, Barcelona, Brutalism, concrete, David Chipperfield, Justice

Holiday greetings

Vienna, 2009

fashion, popular culture

Optimization Takes Command

Angelo Roventa’s Elastic Dwelling applies a principle—and a mechanism—that is borrowed from a commercially available pre-manufactured industrial product: the high-density…

adhocism, Angelo Roventa, design, Elastic Dwelling, flexibility, housing, interactive, MAK Vienna, ST/A/R

Monument Ahead

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #22] Granada, the medieval seat of the Nasrid dynasty, whose rulers built the Alhambra, is…

Alberto Campo Baeza, concrete, cultural identity, Granada, Mark Magazine, monument, museum, strategy, suburbia

Team Play

As any sports fan can confirm, the architecture of elite sporting venues is the forefront of technologically inventive design these…

dominique perrault, flexibility, Madrid, Mark Magazine, piranesi, sport

Learning from CajaGranada

Alberto Campo Baeza, Granada, Learning from Las Vegas, monument

Morning Delivery

The maintenance of buildings is somewhat of a taboo subject in architectural discourse, which actually says a great deal about…

Barcelona Pavilion, building maintenance, Mies, pavilion, social class

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Criticalista collects Rafael Gomez-Moriana's writings on architecture and the built environment. All photographs by the author unless indicated otherwise.

©2014 Rafael Gomez-Moriana. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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