The ancient city of Pingyao stands on the East bank of the middle reaches of the Fenhe river, which runs across the south of the Taiyuan Basin of Xanshi province. According to the Records on Pingyao County completed in 1882 the old city was established during Western Zhou Dynasty (827-782 BC),...
Read moreZurich – Scheuchzerstrasse, 1916-1919
“I was never told that one does something for practical reasons. Nothing was done that might be “useful.” All the things I wanted to grasp were equally valid. I moved along a hundred roads at once without having to hear that any was more...
Crossing the Bergell valley, the memory of the Giacomettis is present through the way they have described the villages and the landscape: Giovanni Giacometti's landscape visions of the valley, the houses and gardens of Stampa painted by Augusto and the landscape reflected by Alberto from the window...
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...
By definition, void and matter are complementary terms; the void is generated by the subtraction of matter and it is perceived in relationship to its opposite, a concrete or physical boundary. In the work of Jorge Oteiza the relationship between void and matter is reversed. His sculptural research...
Read moreThe first concerns of the architecture project when addressing the future construction site are, necessarily, spatial, tectonic and topological; always resting on it, but in some cases fitting into it, and in yet others sinking right into it to root it there. Occasionally, this in-depth colonization...
Read more… 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 moreWhat makes us human is the liberty to invent things that do not exist in nature. Undermining that fact, J. M. W. Turner in his paintings deliberately depicted not the direct impressions he observed, but filled the canvas with his imaginative power. Vaguely defining the main outlines of a scenery on...
Read more 1 Idea and Matter
Our mission is to teach students to design—that is, to imagine, in physical terms, a new reality, and then to know how to make it possible, construct it.
My interest is more methodological—that is, abstract or conceptual—than stylistic or formal, and it...
Consciousness and Resistance
I strongly believe that The Arab Spring was definitely a positive way forward, but it lacked a 100-year overdue. It should have been supported by a serious evaluation of movements of change and transformation that took place in Europe since the Enlightenment,...
Doha, the capital of Qatar, keeps positioning and re-inventing itself on the map of international architecture and urbanism with different...
Read more1. Thinking from scratch helps to break new ground/question standards.
2. Historical foundations are good references. There is no future without a past.
3. It is helpful to integrate and evolve the existing.
4. Efficiency works against creativity.
5. The shortest path is...
Overlooking a smoothly curved hillside partially covered by forests, a rocky figure emerges from the earth. At a distance one can distinguish a rough shape growing out of its top. Stones of irregular formats have been layered to a soil-coloured cylindrical shape. From some angles the figure melts...
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 moreTHE BARRIADAS OF LIMA AND PREVI
The growth of the neighbourhoods of Lima can be divided into three main periods. The beginning of the first is unclear but it continued up to the occupation of the slopes of the hill ranges of San Cosme (1946) and El Agustino (1947), three kilometres from...
"Hunc mundum tipice laberinthus denotat ille ... Intranti largus, redeunti sed nimis artus.“
Alinardo of Grottaferrata in The Name of the...
Fragments 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...
The site of the PREVI international architecture competition was located some kilometres north of the built border of Lima in the 1960s, bounded and crossed by three important expressways. The area forms part of Peru’s long desert strip between the Andes and the South Pacific Ocean: an arid, dusty...
Read moreWe do not subscribe to the assertion that "the city is a problem and architecture is the answer." That point of view is a pure product of modern architectural theory, which as such weighs very heavily on today's architectural education programmes: What are the problems running through the city?...
Read moreAfter an end-of-century dominated by the iconic object as an end in itself and after a global crisis that introduced the need to bring new paradigms to architectural production, we are seeing the increasingly frequent appearance of architects and collectives who are shifting their focus towards...
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