By Juan Domingo Santos

Something happened during the past years that ended up in destabilizing our relationship with the city and the cityscape. We have lived some time, from which it seemed that we would never wake up. A time when we witnessed an indecent waste and missuse, a merciless abuse of the power, we were made believe that everything is possible in exchange to nothing, time of an outrageous and limitless speculation, which concequences are still far from being measurable. Step by step, unnoticed, a wave of bad taste and corruption invaded us, and it is finishing off our landscapes and the memory of a place. Cancerous urban surroundings and never ending stripping of the identity, horrible housing estates abandoned in the countryside, intustrial zones and shopping centres in the middle of nowhere, the skyscrapers and residential establishments deserted due to overconstruction, crossing the limits of the sustainable and necessary, unexplainable buildings, out of scale and size next to La Vega… We have burried the cityscape of Granada, opening the door to a disproportionately ugly and unimaginetive city. Buy, sell, permute, requalify land or exchange units of urban use have been the usual procedures for constructing our city, without addressing a project that would protect the historical and landscape values of the place. We live in the era of ugliness and bewilderment, the era of urban planning agreements without money, a time of false promisses.

Continue reading…

The article by Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, dated Sunday 29th of January 2012, talks about the tendency or need for transformation, extension and reparation of the architecture as an alternative to the new construction. The saturation of the market by the empty properties reinforced by the economical difficulties obliges to reinvent, recycle and take care of what we have. As an example of a mixture of restauration, remodeling and extension, the journalist presents Alameda Theatre in Tarifa (Cadiz, Spain). The project by Julia González and Miguel Bretones is a complex case, executed with a help of an archeologist and urban planner. “It constructs a bridge between the past and the future” without leaving the funcional needs unresolved, which  “constitutes today the most complete architecture”.

Continue reading…

Last December the results of the 11th session of Europan competition were oficially announced. In the Spanish edition we have 5 winners, 7 runners-up and 7 honourable mentions. Among the European results there were 36 awarded Spanish teams: 9 winners, 15 runners-up and 12 honourable mentions. Among the awarded studios we are happy to see Donaire Arquitectos and with their proposal for urban-architectural stategies for the entrance point to the city of Graz in the neighbourhood of the Arnold Schwartzenegger Stadium.

Continue reading…

In this post we would like to present a recently photographed building in Valle Navarro de Salazar designed by Gutiérrez-Delafuente Arquitectos: Natalia Gutiérrez y Julio de la Fuente. The complete report on this project will be soon uploaded to our web, however we consider that this image, some drawings and the model, are worth anticipating.

Continue reading…

We would like to present a complimentary entry about the works on the Rehabilitation of Casa Pinillos designed by the architect Francisco Reina.

Continue reading…

Between the 4th and the 6th of November we took part in a workshop organized by Fotomata and conducted by a Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma, nevertheless we did not mention it here, as it seemed  it would have been impossible to transmit, even get close to, the extraordinary sensations we went through these days spent together. Last Saturday, by coincidence, we came across this photograph by Luís on the cover of a cultural supplement Babelia and we cannot avoid a small review of his work anymore.

Continue reading…

A few days ago we had a chance to see an Article by Zabalbeascoa Anatxu published in the newspaper El País, dated 23rd of October, 2011, and with a note od satisfaction we observe that the concise analysis of Culinary school in a former slaughterhouse in Medina Sidonia confirms all the impresions we had about the project, while realizing the photographic report and through the contact we had with its authors, the architects Juanjo González and María de la Cruz.

Continue reading…

A follow-up on the construction of the new public liberary in Ceuta (Spain) through a photographic site documentation. The Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos studio will continue to manage the execution of works, that have already started to reveal the richness and complexity of its interiors.

Continue reading…

Hatje Cantz publishing house has just published the book Metropol Parasol. It is directed by the author of the project, architect Jürgen Mayer, and includes several specialized bilingual articles (in Spanish and English).

Continue reading…