You know green walls have become trendy when a designer fashion label puts one up that’s made of plastic. Kinda…
Construction as Spectacle: Mercat dels Encants
The construction of the new Mercat dels Encants / Fira de Bellcaire (Barcelona’s flea market), by b720 Arquitectos, is not only spectacular…
Get Smart
A façade design in which photovoltaic panels end up casting shadows upon other photovoltaic panels does not seem to me…
Pseudo-Choice
Potato chips, or crisps, come in a fantastic panoply of artificial flavors. BBQ, Ketchup, or “regular” are standards the world…
Invisible Architecture
Why is it that, in places where nothing is needed, there is often nevertheless a nagging architectural compulsion to add something…
Happy Trails in 2013
Garden and Gaffe
Leon Battista Alberti famously wrote: “The city is like some large house and the house in turn like some small…
Strange Bedfellows
The image at left shows the construction of the “Instant City” during the congress of the International Council of Societies…
Going Slowly: Cadaval and Solà-Morales
[Originally published in Mark Magazine #39] “Young architects” is a culturally loaded term, often conjuring notions of rebellion, utopian idealism,…
Ill-Fitting: The Balenciaga Museum
Fashion, Architecture, Politics: Image is Everything The inauguration of a cultural institution is normally a cause for widespread celebration; even…
Gaudí’s hanging chain models: parametric design avant la lettre?
It is known that Gaudí preferred modelling architecture over drawing it; especially models made of chains hung from a ceiling, or strings…
Villa Nurbs: a Sad Spectacle
It is June 2012, and after a decade of construction Villa Nurbs is still incomplete. In fact, construction has now seemingly come…
A Reminder to Urban Planners
Given the choice, most children would rather play in a terrain vague than a playground. They would rather make mud…
Not So Different
“Spain is Different” was a tourism campaign slogan coined in the mid-1960s by dictator Francisco Franco’s Ministry of Information and Tourism (!),…
Architectural Art
Art galleries and museums seem to be showing with greater frequency artworks about architecture, many of them by artists who…
Architourism
Tourism is the only ‘industry’ in Spain that is not downsizing in the current (well, actually it’s been five years…
Paragraphs on Architectural Criticism
Architectural criticism is what distinguishes architecture from building, inasmuch as those two terms are distinguishable. Buildings exist perfectly well without…
Pool Typology
We’ve all seen that famous aerial photograph of an American Southwest suburb in which each and every house has a…
Quietly Brilliant: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos
[Originally published in Mark Magazine #35] Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano are truly architects’ architects. They may not be a…
Park, Shop, and Pray
Churches are architecture whereas supermarkets and parking garages are not. At least, that’s what we’ve been taught by Nikolaus Pevsner. What, then,…
Collective Intelligence or Collective Stupidity?
The above image is circulating on the internet representing all sorts of cities on all sorts of continents, showing us…
Calatravaland
El País reported recently that the government of the Autonomous Region of Valencia, when it was presided by Francisco Camps (the…
The Cantilever Race
The skyscraper race is over. It’s been won hands down by an absurdly high building in Dubai which doesn’t look…
Quaderns #262: A Gut Reaction
[Originally published in Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme online] Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme #262 is provocatively titled “Parainfrastructures”, an invented word that…
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…
Strike a Pose
[Originally published in Mark Magazine #32] What is it that makes these architectural images so seductive? To be sure, there…
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).…
Experimental Bamboo
Bamboo is an ancient building material that fell largely out of favor in the twentieth century, only to be used…
Blackwash
You wouldn’t know it from looking at photographs such as these. You wouldn’t even know it if you were standing…
Pop Architecture
Ordinary, everyday objects — that’s what most popular nicknames for buildings refer to. A gherkin, a paperclip, a typewriter, a…
Power to the People
[originally published in Mark Magazine #29] The office of Andrés Jaque Arquitectos Still on the shy side of 40, Andrés…
Interview with Peter Eisenman
[This is an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Peter Eisenman in Santiago de Compostela in May 2010. The…
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…
City as Landscape
[Originally published in Mark Magazine #27] Library Is the pleasure of architecture intellectual or sensual? Of the mind or…
Triumph of the Shell
[originally published in Mark Magazine #26] In cinema, there is a common type of architectural scene: a building…
Building as Research
Truss space Two facades with different pillow systems: ETFE fog configuration and ETFE diaphragm configuration. The range of building…
Ugh Canada
An architect is, by definition, a designer of buildings, right? Well, the government of Canada, a nation whose credo is…
Jurisprudence
Courts of justice are steeped in protocol and decorum, not merely because of tradition, but in order to establish and…
Holiday greetings
Vienna, 2009
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…
Monument Ahead
[Originally published in Mark Magazine #22] Granada, the medieval seat of the Nasrid dynasty, whose rulers built the Alhambra, is…
Team Play
As any sports fan can confirm, the architecture of elite sporting venues is the forefront of technologically inventive design these…
Learning from CajaGranada
Morning Delivery
The maintenance of buildings is somewhat of a taboo subject in architectural discourse, which actually says a great deal about…
BMW Welter
Luxury automobiles are fetish items par excellence. The advertising, branding and merchandising of this kind of consumer good is designed…
W: what is it good for?
A building has been going up–or did it come from outer space?–on Barcelona’s Sant Sebastià Beach that is popularly refered…
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…
From White Cube to Big Box: Three Exurban Themes in the Work of Kim Adams
“Non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified…by totaling all the air, rail and motorway…
Rocket Architecture
[Originally published in Canadian Architect, February 2001] The ensemble of structures illustrated here could easily be mistaken for recent work by…
Kitbashing, Street Remakes, and Bisexual Architecture: A Conversation with Kim Adams
Rafael Gómez-Moriana: Kim, you gave a talk in 1988 at the Christiane Chassay Gallery in Montreal in which you showed…
Winnipeg: One Great Situation-Normal (1)
[Originally published in Winnipeg Art Gallery exhibition publication Sit(e)ings: Trajectories for a Future] “Incredible…one can actually order ‘a cup of coffee’…
Go With the Flow
The World Waterpark at West Edmonton Mall is a vast steel and glass-vaulted tropical microclimate in the middle of that…
The Valparaiso School and the Construct(ion) of Regional Identity
[Originally published in Hispanic Studies vol. 23] The School of Architecture at the Catholic University of Valparaiso is an important…
Under Water
[Originally published in Canadian Architect March 1999] The swimming pool is an icon of modernism, a veritable symbol of the health and…
Relationship of Convenience: The Polarization of Theory and Practice in Architecture
[Originally published in Proceedings of The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture West Central 1997 Regional Conference, Faculty of Architecture,…
Straightforward
“Architecture, whether it is a work of art or not, must be utilitarian or else fail completely.Art is not utilitarian.”…
Criticalista 