This book accompanies the fourth mounting in La Casita Azul of Centro Cibeles (presently the only space in Madrid dedicated to permanent exhibitions of architecture) and reproduces almost literally the great installation of such an overwhelming project. Both the exhibition and the book coincide in the approach to the vertebral concept of the work of Sánchez, which take us to the installations that the American artist Robert Smithson created since the Sixties, supported on the concept of ‘site/non-site’. Like Smithson, Sánchez produces dialectic between landscape and architecture, feeding back both experiences as opposed but complementary and activating a set of geometries such as nature and artifice, geometry and arbitrariness, background and figure, full and empty…

Without the exquisite work and the discrete teaching of Alejandro de la Sota, undoubtedly one of the fundamental pillars of architecture in Spain in the second half of the twentieth century, the definitive entry of Spanish architecture into modernity would have been different, probably less essential and refined. Not so well known is the hobby that the master cultivated all his life with genuine delight and diligence: drawing caricatures of those round him.

The accurate analysis of a figure to achieve the distillation of its characteristic features and the ensuing sketch, resolute and agile, of the most revealing lines of the physiognomy are in fact very close to the approach that is behind his architectonic work. The significant reduction of a face to its elemental calligraphy and the delicate purification of his buildings to get to the core substance emerge from the common root of drawing understood as a useful tool for scrutiny and expression, to the point that in some occasions he asked himself ‘Is this the building or its caricature?’

Josechu Lalanda is perhaps the best animal painter in Spain, according to the famous naturalist Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente, with whom he collaborated many years. This book collects the best illustrations of birds which Lalanda has been drawing throughout his extensive career. Field scenes, hunting sketches and illustrations for bird guides show the artistic skill, technical versatility and scientific precision with which Lalanda brings us closer to the Iberian birds in their environment.

Seldom has the same architect has the opportunity to restore two different historical buildings to adapt them for the same use in two nearby cities and so close in time nearby. The book documents the work carried out by the prestigious studio of César Ruiz Larrea, which resolves brilliantly the same equation set out in both cases with different variables.