Architectural papers fifth issue concentrates around the new conditions for architectural practice and around the new epistemologies that may inform it in the next future. That is, in the period after the financial bubble has collapsed and living and working conditions have significantly changed. Essays, studies and interviews, along with a selection of indicative projects, tackle the actual issues of growth and shrinking, economy and ideology, craftsmanship and social space in the city, materiality and sustainability in architecture. In a logical sequence, they depict the current reality of architecture.
In architecture, designing and constructing mean implementing a way of thinking with a view to action in an active relation with the changing conditions of the contemporary world. From our position in academia, in terms of our pedagogical practice (the place where Architectural Papers are produced),...
Read moreDubai has, in our recent past, been a paradigm of both possibility and delirium. Eulogized by the ever-present messiahs of modernity, whose jaded voices once again announced their tired proclamations of a supposed creative apocalypse; reviled by moralistic social leftist critics, constructive events...
Read more1. The Spanish Financial Bubble in the Context of the Liberal Market
In Spain, 2006 was a milestone as regards the number of houses constructed: 760,000; more than the 650,000 started that year in France and the United Kingdom, whose combined populations almost triple that of Spain. Between 2001...
… and then not let people climb on top of this mountain?” I was asked this question by one student during the seminar trip to Galicia in March 2009. More precisely, during our visit to the Cidade da Cultura; the pharaonic-sized project that has been under construction since 2001, upon Peter...
Read morePurely manual, machine- aided, or performed entirely by the machine, mechanical work is a spatial experience. This basic truth from the high school’s mechanics applies in architectural and urban space too. From the beginning of history, working conditions have been shaping human settlements, in...
Read more95º Restaurant was conceived as a structure of the kind that is widespread in Russia – a temporary waterfront building with an unclear purpose – either a shed, or a boardwalk, or a wharf, or all three combined. These buildings are often neglected and deserted: as soon as they are not used any...
Read moreFragments of a letter
Imagine a square of 9,00 meters long in very particular landscape, two of the sides are bordered irregularly by a small creek, of 60cm wide, of crystalline waters and small falls, and crossing diagonally, a smaller stream creating a little island, disappearing...
Ecology and Urbanism
I prefer not to use the word ecological, but instead, I rather speak about sustainable urban design. Ecology is just one of the aspects of sustainability, besides economical and social aspects. Our research contributes to the sustainable design of existing and future...
Situated In the river Var valley, tangent to Nice and close to strong existing communications hubs, the city is conceived as central rather than peripheral or suburban, accommodating new spaces for the knowledge economy, services, and year-round and seasonal housing.
In the Var valley context,...