Luis Fernandez Galiano: The Latest Architecture and News

“Lightness and transparency are very close friends. You start from something and then you take off, you take off, you take off... And at a certain point you have to stop taking off, otherwise, everything falls down. If you do this you find that there’s a kind of beauty there. It’s a beauty that is profound, it’s not cosmetic.”

In this video by Luis Fernández-Galiano, Italian architect Renzo Piano talks about his path to finding beauty in lightness and transparency. This clip is a part of a full documentary and interactive booklet series by Fundación arquia and produced by White Horse.

Last month the Norman Foster Foundation, created to promote "interdisciplinary thinking and research to help up-and-coming architects, designers and urbanists to anticipate the future," coincided the opening of its new Madrid-based headquarters with an international conference. Future is Now pulled together a broad collection of professionals—including Sir Jonathan Ive, Marc Newson, Olafur Eliasson, Maya Lin, Alejandro Aravena, and Luis Fernández-Galian—who addressed an audience of 1,800 (including 1,100 students) in the Spanish capital's Royal Theater.

Watch the conference in its entirety, or read a summary, after the break.

As part of their mission to foster debate about architecture and the city within a broader social context, the Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad will carry out the 4th edition of their International Architecture Congress from June 29-July 1st in Pamplona. Titled “Architecture: Change of Climate,” the latest event echoes themes from the previous years, which were related to the crisis affecting Spain and its architects. This year the debate seeks to emphasize the need for change in architectural practices in order to improve our environment.

The title of this year’s congress refers as much to the change of climate taking place in architecture, which the crisis has put at an economic and ethical crossroads, as to the importance of architecture and planning when facing the challenges posed by climate change, perhaps the most pressing matter of our time. 

Read on after the break for the full program and text from Luis Fernández-Galiano, Director of the IV International Architecture Congress, which introduces the paradigms that architects like Rem Koolhaas, Bjarke Ingels, Winy Maas, Pierre de Meuron, Iñaki Ábalos and Jean-Philippe Vassal will examine at this event.

"From his first conceptual, colorful phase, Koolhaas has traveled through dirty realism, enlightened deconstructivism and commercial pragmatism, grafting Leonidov on Le Corbusier, hybridizing mambo fifties with dry sixties, and joining programmatic diagrams with sculptural volumes to end in the realm of heritage and history, ecology and sustainability, elements and the discipline." - Luis Fernández-Galiano

The first monograph that AV has dedicated entirely to the Dutch architect covers his work at OMA starting in 2000, the year in which Koolhaas was awarded the Pritzker Prize. Accompanied by an essay and 12 critical texts by Luis Fernández-Galiano, the publication covers the work built by the studio during the last 15 years.

+ 8