Publications Update

For the record, two of my more dispersed articles this fall appeared in the following publications:



Photo © Lluís Casals

I served on the Jury this year for the IV Edition of the Enor Architecture Prizes, organized by the Enor Elevator Group of Vigo, in the northwestern region of Galicia, and open to works in Spain and Portugal. I wrote a lengthy review of the winning projects and the finalists, some 40-odd buildings in all, which appears in the book presented at the awards ceremony this November. It's an attempt to sum up the current post-crisis architectural scene (in Spanish).

Radiografía de la Actualidad
Carlos Quintáns Eiras, editor, IV Premio Ascensores Enor, Grupo Asensores Enor SA, Vigo, 2009, pages 23 - 41.

Here's a quote:
La arquitectura es una negociación entre el presente (en términos de medios y necesidades), el pasado (a través del patrimonio, el territorio, y el legado cultural colectivo) y un futuro que ella misma nos ayuda a definir. El arquitecto es un mediador en ésta negociación, y su papel es tanto interpretativo como creativo. Los proyectos reconocidos por el Premio Ascensores Enor de 2009 son ejemplares en éste sentido, demostrándonos las distintas dimensiones de una arquitectura comprometida con el proceso vital de crear el futuro.

Illustrated: The Grand Prize winner, a house on the site of a former leather-curing factory in Santiago de Compostela by by Victor López Cotelo and Juan Manuel Vargas Funes.




I was invited to contribute an essay on the SyV Tower in Madrid by Rubio + Álvarez Sala Studio, for a book published by the architects and the building team: The Tall Building Reconsidered (Repensar el Edificio en Altura).

It appears in:
Enrique Encabo Seguí, Inmaculada E. Maluenda, editors, Técnica y estrategias: Sobre la construcción de la Torre SyV, Q! Estudio, Madrid, 2009, pages 48 - 53. Text in Spanish and English.

The essay begins:
Carlos Rubio and Enrique Álvarez-Sala's approach to the design of the SyV Tower could be described as a search for formal elegance through the logical elegance of their solutions to the technical and programmatic problems that the project presents. Yet this apparently conservative approach, emphasizing formal contention and restraint rather than the liberty of formal invention now customary in contemporary architecture, has given rise to a solution of striking originality. This result is due in great part to the architects' rigorous and non-formulaic study of the problem, and their framing of the problem in its particular, contemporary context, which conditions the solution in new ways.