Luxury automobiles are fetish items par excellence. The advertising, branding and merchandising of this kind of consumer good is designed…
Two Optimistic Architecture Yearbooks: a comparative analysis
One of the interesting things about architectural yearbooks is that they provide a snapshot, or to use a more appropriate…
Integrated Highrise
Barcelona is a city without very many tall buildings. Not only that: the few tall buildings that do exist are…
Everyday Camouflage in “The Visitor”
The story told by Tom McCarthy in his highly commendable film The Visitor, which deals, among other things, with the…
Designer Façadism
A new luxury apartment building for tourists has recently opened on Passeig de Gràcia, across from Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milà,…
Us and Theme
If Venice, the Wild West, or Asia can be themes for parks, casinos, or hotels, then why not contemporary architecture?…
Disseny Hype
“Disseny Hub” is a new cultural institution in Barcelona dedicated to design; or, to put it more correctly, to promoting…
Gaudí in Red Alert
“Gaudí en alerta roja” is the title of an online petition currently the source of much debate in Barcelona. Its…
Lighten-Up in the Mies Pavilion
The installation by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) at Barcelona’s Mies van der Rohe Pavilion is simple, subtle, and…
Welcome to the Hotel Barcelona
In case anyone hasn’t noticed, Barcelona is in the tail-end of a hotel construction boom. And Barcelona being “Barceloooooonaaaaaa” means,…
Soft Architecture
“There will be…a reaction against the rigid, rectilinear architecture expressed in such structures as the United Nations Secretariat building. Buildings…
Architecture Beyond Talk
“Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” is the title of this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by Aaron Betsky. The…
Water Tower and Bridge Pavilion
[originally published in Mark Magazine #16] Water TowerOne of the ironies of world expositions is that while they apparently act…
Punch and Play
Any voyage from an airport to a city centre proves that urban peripheries the world over relate more to each…
Exquisite Corpse
A large sculpture next to a mega monochrome painting – at first glance and from a distance, that’s what the…
Everyday Camouflage in the City
[Originally published in Lotus International # 126. Earlier versions published in proceedings of Second Savannah Symposium “Authenticity in Architecture” (2001) and in On…
Benidorm: The Pursuit of Pleasure by the Most Efficient Available Means
Benidorm is a city in southeastern Spain with an urban morphology that is highly unusual for Europe: it is a…
Daniel Libeskind, Utopianist
Cuando el arquitecto Daniel Libeskind dice “no pienso en el conjunto de la ciudad” porque “mi interés se centra en…
Less and More
[Originally published in HUNCH 6 / 7 109 Provisional Attempts to Address Six Simple and Hard Questions, in which 109…
The Virtue of Reality: “Puntos de luz”, the butterfly effect, and (web) site-specificity
[Originally published in http://www.puntosdeluz.net by Chema Alvargonzalez] The butterfly effect, first formulated by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1970s, “refers…
Criticalista 