Soviet Aviation

One of the aims of this platform is to present selected news items on Spanish architecture that are not usually picked up in English-language media.

Here's the first:
The architect and editor Ricardo Lampreave has just published, in Spanish and English, a facsimile edition of Alexander Ródchenko and Varvara Stepánova's Soviet Aviation. The book was originally published in English in 1939 for the Soviet Pavilion of the New York World's Fair.

The edition includes essays by Alexander Lavrentiev, grandson of the authors, and the Spanish art historian Angel Gonzalez Garcia.

The Celestial Sublime

Continuing a regular collaboration with the Viennese magazine architektur.aktuell, in this month's issue I contribute a feature on Dominque Perrault's Olympic Tennis Center in Madrid: The Magic Box, architektur.aktuell, October, 2009, pages 54 - 65.

"When seen from inside the vast open spaces of the stadiums, as their movement gradually exposes the infinite blue of Spain's summer sky, the roofs' opening acquires the solemn ceremony of a primitive religious rite.... Well-framed by the elegant formal clarity of Perrault's design, with its clean structural rhythms and luminous spatiality, this unveiling of the celestial sublime packages the sky-viewing epiphanies of American artist James Turrell for a mass audience."
 
Table of contents    Order issue

Photo by DC.

MUDE Museum in Architectural Record

The cover story of Architectural Record's September interiors issue features my report on the Museum of Design and Fashion in Lisbon by architects Ricardo Carvalho and Joana Vilhena. See the web version here.

The Museun is installed in a former bank building in the heart of the Baixa Pombalina. (Photo by DC).

Bauwelt: Aires Mateus in Cascais

My story on the Lighthouse Museum in Cascais, Portugal by Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus has just been published in Bauwelt 37.09 (October 2, p. 34-39).

From the text: "This tension between past and present has been brilliantly addressed by a number of Portuguese architects on different occasions – think for example of the Pousada of Santa Maria do Bouro, where the ruinous state of the original convent is fully legible against Eduardo Souto de Moura's exquisitely minimalist "occupation" of its gutted interior (see Bauwelt 4, January 22, 1999). In the project considered here, the Aires Mateus brothers propose a radically different approach from Souto de Moura's dialogue across time, a solution that carries the site out of time entirely, out of the dialectic between past and present, and situates the work instead in the timeless realm of the icon."

Photo: Amelia Moreno