The publication Inhabiting the ‘White Island’. Interpretations of Ibizan Architecture deals with the subject of the Mediterranean house, tracing its presence in a peculiar geographical and existential environment, that of the island of Ibiza. This research focuses on how the Ibizan house has been understood and interpreted at various times in the 20th century: firstly through the photographic vision of different authors (Joaquim Gomis, Leopoldo Plasencia, Luigi Figini and Luigi Moretti; late 40s), then through the international exhibition of its heritage (Gio Ponti, José Antonio Coderch and Rafael Santos Torroella; IX Triennale di Milano, 1951), and finally by observing certain modern architectural interventions (Can Cardona, by Erwin Bechtold and Erwin Broner, from 1959; Broner House, by Erwin Broner, 1959-1960; 2011).

This book is organized, then, in three complementary parts: an extensive presentation that contextualizes the object of the investigation, a section entitled “Internationalization of the popular” —from the exhibition Imagining the Mediterranean House. Italy and Spain in the 50s (ICO Foundation, Madrid, 2019-2020) and the homonym catalogue— in which several texts deal with specific aspects of these different approaches to the popular and rationalist architecture; and some essays that, under the heading “Foreign Perspectives to Vernacular Architecture”, they analyse the Broner House and the Cardona House, entering into a dialectic with the timeless theme of the Mediterranean house, from the present and from a more projectual perspective. The architectures presented here (both the “popular” and the “modern”) refer, therefore, to a Mediterranean ideology conceived as a repertoire of formalizations and primary construction techniques, which aspire to a building action more related to the specificities of the place, with the aim of satisfying the basic instances of contemporary life in polemic opposition to an alienating uniformity of a totalitarian and mechanised urban civilization.

Domestic Dawns. Collective housing issues in 21st Century Europe presents, based on built works, the main issues shaping European collective housing in the 21st Century. Through a series of concepts, exemplified by built projects, its editors, Carmen Espegel, Andrés Cánovas and José María de Lapuerta, propose a place for reflection and debate on the present and future of the spaces we inhabit. Through 28 paradigmatic examples of built housing organized around seven categories: Climate Awareness, Active Recharging, Domestic Care, New Management, Urban Contexts, Living and Sharing and Iconic Identities, plus a COVID epilogue are shown the fundamental concepts of the new habitability that are being developed in collective housing in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century, thus fostering a debate that allows further progress in this direction.

Texts by Carmen Espegel, Andrés Cánovas, José María de Lapuerta, Eduardo Prieto, Almudena Ribot, Hilde Heynen, Marina Otero Verzier, Elli Mosayebi, Amparo Lasén, Uriel Fogué and Javier Echeverría.

"Just like in the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Lucien Steil’s miniature Capricci are not mimetic sketches of a singular object but sublime agglomerations of detached images and metaphysical recollections of his memories of place, space, and time. His are not paintings but painted-drawings. His imaginary universe is represented through a collection of ideal archetypes; archetypes which make us feel at ease with their unique degree of inventiveness and yet with their strange sense of familiarity. A fragmented collection of landscapes, plazas, streets, civic and domestic buildings, towers, roofs, porches, arcades, balconies, rooms, windows, etc. constitute the repertoire of his location-neutral places; his fictional images portray spaces that do not exist today; nevertheless, at a simple glance, his places could very well occupy an existing reality in some sort of parallel universe; these are places we’ve never visited and yet spaces which, with their materiality and familiar characteristics, stir our imagination toward new moral and ethical values". Jaime Correa

Lucien Steil is an author, educator and architect dedicated to the design and building of healthy, durable and beautiful places and buildings in a world of many and diverse inspiring traditions and cultures. He believes traditional cities and architecture have always been the ideals of harmony and beauty in a destabilized, disrupted world. For him traditional cities and architecture have remained desirable models of cultural identity, home, urbanity and civilization. He maintains that the traditional city remains a good and desirable place to live, and that tradition is a good home for modernity and originality. It has proven to be perfectly compatible with modern life, despite an array of pressing challenges, to be considered as opportunities rather than as limitations. For Lucien Steil, “this is both a tangible reality, time-tested and perfected, and a realistic, buildable, operational and necessary project for contemporary civilization”. Rather than becoming obsolete, the traditional city has suddenly gained a new actuality as a remedy to the inconvenient truth of global warming and climate change. Both its morphological and typological components, as well as its socio-economic and convivial patterns and paradigms, etc., seem the ones best adapted to refresh and adjust to the dramatic challenges of a post-pandemic urban civilization and a new ecology of Città Slow and Glocalism. Traditional architecture and urbanism have the organic and inherent sustainability to confront the greatest challenges of the 21st Century and they demonstrate not only a great resilience but also highest standards of the Good Life, modernity, creativity and originality, etc., in their acceptance of Perpetual Becoming. Lucien Steil maintains that contemporary traditional architects and urbanists, provide a counterbalance to an opportunistic architectural and planning establishment that clings nostalgically to past paradigms of Capitalism and Modernism, and has resigned in its social and cultural mission for a better and more harmonious world. For him, they are poets, idealists, craftsmen and artists who invent, design and build places and buildings of durable quality in a perspective of firmitas, utilitas, venustas, allowing people of our time to live in comfort, security, harmony, enlightenment and pleasure.