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Title:
AV 120 : casa nuestra, Iberian houses

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AV Monographs dedicates each issue to a theme involving a city, a country, a tendency or an architect, featuring essays by prominent scholars and commentaries on built works and projects illustrated in detail.

Title:
AV 116 : formal housing - vivienda formal

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AV monographs dedicates each issue to a theme involving a city, a country, a tendency or an architect, featuring essays by prominent scholars and commentaries on built works and projects illustrated in detail. With edorial text "The fatigue of Europe" by Luis Fernandez-Galiano : (...) " Europeans vaunt about their tenacious experimental tradition in the field of housing, but a distracted review of the latest residential projects leaves a bittersweet aftertaste. Apart from some odd technical displays and a few typological novelties, the majority of the projects presented in this issue stand out for their geometric rigor, their material sophistication and their compositional elegance. Rather than a product of the Welfare State, they are a consequence of the welfare of the State – promoter of a large number of them – and also of the social prosperity made evident by the boom of private real-estate development. Examples of the refinement of the European elites, these works also bear witness to the creative fatigue of a continent that finds itself demographically aged, economically less and less competitive, and with a knowledge industry that continues to lag behind the universities and laboratories of the American north, and now also in comparison with the dynamic surge of Asia.(...)"

Title:
AV 126 Housing in common

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The 20 housing projects collected here share in common a concern for such matters as densification, energy conservation, the use of local materials, flexibility of programmes, and the legacy of the European tradition of social commitment. Drawn from several decades of practice, this volume features works from Baumschlager & Eberle, Brendeland & Kristoffersen, DKV Architecten, MVRDV, Nieto & Sobejano, Ofis Arhitekti and Álvaro Siza. Accompanied by colour photographs, plans, details, and sketches.

Title:
The architect is present

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The exhibition ''The Architect is Present'' shows the work of five influential international studios who have turned austerity into their ethic and aesthetic motto. With offices located in five continents, these young architects work in underprivileged contexts, proving that scarcity of means can stimulate technical inventiveness and community participation, and become the basis for a responsible architecture where the vocation of service does not exclude beauty and emotion. From Norway and Germany to Burkina Faso, and from Paraguay to Australia passing through India or Thailand, these studios have built housing, rural schools or social centers with an extraordinary economy of means, admirable adaptation to collective needs and exemplary material execution.

Title:
Architecture : the common

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In 2012, the international congress ‘Architecture: The Common’ was held in Pamplona, presented by Norman Foster. It appealed to civic solidarity as an instrument of architecture in facing the urgent economic and environmental challenges of today. This publication is a record of the event through the interviews conducted by four prominent critics – Peter Buchanan, François Chaslin, Juli Capella and Kosme de Barañano – with the participating speakers, including Eduardo Souto de Moura, Rafael Moneo, Ann Heringer, Roger Diener and others. In this way, it covers a broad spectrum of contemporary sensibilities in architectural practice.

Title:
Architecture : more for less

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In 2010, the international congress ‘Architecture: More for Less’ was held in Pamplona. Its aim was to take stock of the changing mood in architecture, which today faces huge ecological and economic challenges. This publication is a record of the event through the interviews conducted by five prominent critics – Richard Ingersoll, Antón García-Abril, Estrella de Diego, Vicente Verdú and Llàtzer Moix – with the participants, among them Renzo Piano, Anne Lacaton, Carlos Jiménez, Mark Wigley, Slavoj Žižek and Glenn Murcutt, who themselves cover a broad generational and geographic spectrum. Through the lens of architecture, it offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of our time.

Title:
Surrealist Koolhaas

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This collection of articles on the work and person of Rem Koolhaas introduces the Rotterdam-based architect with a simultaneous reference to his surrealist impulses and the disjointed nature of a career, in which books and exhibitions mark intellectual and formal turning points. Commentaries on these seminal moments are interspersed with critiques on the major buildings and projects. In the end, it is difficult to pinpoint which are more important in defining the architect’s conceptual and aesthetic trajectory. The book concludes with a detailed analysis of Koolhaas’s curatorship of the Venice Biennale, yet another swerve in a dazzling, provocative, and paradoxical itinerary.

Title:
AV Monografias / Monographs 109-110 (2004) : China boom, growth unlimited

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A ‘Pacific’ century, an Asian century or a Chinese century? On the threshold between the 20th and the 21st century, the transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific is forecasted by all; the move from America to Asia is noticed by many; and the replacement of the United States by China is feared by some: the awakening of the dragon provokes both wonder and distrust. After the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, in the last 25 years China has grown at a rate of 9 percent; in this period, its GNP has tripled, and the percentage of population living in cities has doubled, exceeding 40%. Fueled by exports, and backed by the postotalitarian protectionism of a single-party government, the stunning growth of China has not yet created global companies – the Sony or Hyundai that led the Japanese or Korean booms – but its large oil firms (PetroChina, Sinopec, CNOOC) try to find in several continents the energy needed by the world’s second importer; its technological companies (from Lenovo, that has purchased a division of IBM, to Huawei, that has created in Shenzhen a Silicon Valley-style campus, Doric Disney designs included) make up for scarce innovation with low labor costs; and its new breed of fancy millionaires, who build chateaux or buy French cosmetic brands, spearhead a large consumerist middle class, supplying a strong domestic demand that adds to the thrust of foreign markets. China’s unequal growth does not appear to be a large risk: the differences in income are similar to those of the US, and the contrast between the wealthy coast and the rural inland – where most upheavals have started, from Boxers to communists – is blurred as the development of Shanghai extends upriver along the Yangtze corridor, and as Hong Kong’s dynamism expands in concentric waves over the superregion of Guangdong, from that Pearl River Delta known as ‘the factory of the world’. More dangerous seem to be the weakness of the financial system, the persistence of administrative corruption and the scarcity of energy resources, the supply of which is being secured by heavy investments on the military, something that upsets its neighbors – Japan and Taiwan most of all, but also Korea and another awakening giant, India –, its competitors, and even the US, that urges its European allies to maintain the arms ban on China. On top of all this, in a country that has reached 1,300 million inhabitants in 2005, is the demographic scenario created by the single child policy and the accelerated ageing of the population, with an increasing number of 4+2+1 families, where now there are four grandparents and two parents satisfying the needs of a little emperor, but where in just 30 years a single adult will have to take care of six retirees. This huge economic and social transformation has expressed itself via an unprecedented urban explosion, shaped by titanic public works – large dams and suspended bridges, elevated highways and submarine tunnels – and with the foreseeable devastating impact on the environment and cultural heritage. The building frenzy that has attracted so many foreign architects to China – initially for technically complex or symbolically significant works, like some of the skyscrapers of Shanghai or the olympic projects in Beijing, but now more often for urban plans or conventional commercial developments – receives, according to The Economist, the added boost of a real-estate bubble that feeds on hot money placing its bets on the yuan’s revaluation. This process has turned some districts of Shanghai such as Pudong or Puxi into the most sought-after office areas in the world, and has caused in cities like Beijing an increasing decay of its architectural legacy, which barely respects World Heritage sites (The Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Ming Imperial Tombs and the Temple of Heaven), besieged already by a unanimous tide of trivial constructions.

Title:
AV 122 : USA tour twelve works, coast to coast

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AV Monographs dedicates each issue to a theme involving a city, a country, a tendency or an architect, featuring essays by prominent scholars and commentaries on built works and projects illustrated in detail. It is published in a bilingual edition, Spanish and English.

Title:
AV 113 : Spain builds / architectura en Espana 1975-2005

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This issue of AV is dedicated to an examination of the dramatic evolution of Spanish architecture since the death of Franco in 1975, and as such forms part of an exhibition being held at the MoMA, in New York. Contains a wide range of authoritative contributions form the likes of Kenneth Frampton, Peter Buchanan and Tzonis & Lefaivre along with a long list of architects, including: Moneo, Calatrava, Miralles, Oiza, Cruz & Ortiz, Navarro Baldeweg and Lapeña & Torres.