En el filo de la navaja is a book made with fondness, above all with attachment to objects –to certain objects- and to their images. With the aim of revising the episodes in which art and architecture intermix with special intensity, Enric Llorach resorts to the figure of anachronism as an approximation and analysis tool. A concept rescued by George Didi-Huberman for writing history, anachronism refers to the intrusion of one time into another, and amongst the consequences of its value is the legitimation of all the subjectivity that goes between reality and its interpretation, amongst them memory and montage. Once anachronism is admitted, the truth as such –in its most rational and authorised acceptation- loses supremacy and in its place an invitation for dialogue makes way.

Thus, anthropocene is examined placing it in retrospective relation to Gabriele Basilico’s photographs, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or Gordon Matta-Clark’s perforations. We travel through modern, postmodern and contemporary periods in the hands of photographers and architects like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Le Corbusier, Robert Frank, Aldo Rossi, Jeff Wall and Steven Holl. The concept of mimesis is reworded along with Rosemary Laing, Francesca Woodman, Andrei Tarkovski, Anna and Eugeni Bach and Eduard Bru. The minimalism of Herzog & de Meuron in the nineties is put into context by exploring the influence of Rémy Zaugg’s plastic work in the work of the Swiss architects. From the application of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method and its delirious interpretation of L’Angélus by Jean-François Millet arises an unexpected formal flow which inundates the work of Rem Koolhaas. Also a bridge between Andy Warhol’s work and the German painter Gerhard Richter is outlined to better understand the work of the British architects Caruso St John and Sergison Bates. Amongst all the crossed illuminations, Le Corbusier emerges as the true protagonist of the book, presenting him as an architect of the anachronistic instead of the blind apostle of modernity we all know.

Has architecture died? After the era of show architecture is it possible to start again? Today, when virtuality takes on innumerable victims in the form of souls without body, the reality offered by architecture gives us a firm grip in the unstoppable descent towards the immaterial. Architecture allows us to feel a special continuity with the world. By making us conscious of the elemental facts of life or revealing its mere relation with the universe, architecture becomes present.

Few 'bites of reality' can be savoured in just one day, but we still feel the need to go back home after a long day and sit in front of trillions of back-illuminated ones and zeros at sixty hertz. Like a puddle that forces our steps and makes us jump over it, the real stimulate us as an experience. Architecture and the city have become the penultimate refuge of reality, a haven where we feel alive: that is the architecture that life demands.

Perhaps architecture will not be necessary when it stops offering what Sartre called 'aesthetic joy', that is, a special kind of pleasure man procures by improving himself with the knowledge of his surroundings and of himself. But that time without joys has not come yet. This book by Santiago de Molina is an invitation to confirm that the most proper field of action of architecture is precisely man in his everyday life. That architecture has a long future. That there is still hanger of architecture, of course, but of real architecture.

Santiago de Molina is an architect and a teacher, who received an Outstanding Award for his PhD, he combines his teaching work with his work in his architecture office. His built works were selected in the Spanish Architecture and Planning Biennale in 2013. He has published two books Arquitectos al margen and Collage y Arquitectura, the latter was selected in the FAD prizes of Architecture and Criticism 2015. With Ediciones Asimétricas he has published the title Múltiples estrategias de la arquitectura.

‘There is nothing like looking at the making to know what the saying means’, wrote Gómez de Liaño in one of the pages of this book, which collects the author’s best essays –from a distant 1977 up to the present, and includes some unpublished texts– a subtle observatory of an analytic steel blue scalpel, whose encyclopaedic erudition can only be compared to his endless curiosity.

From a close and passionate knowledge of the artist and his work glossed in each occasion, and with the honest intention of venturing to present creators and creations using words that are not those of a sales agent or a master of ceremonies, the texts also outline the inventory of a personal sensibility, a cartography of Liaño’s interests are wound together, until they reveal a biographic Arcimboldian portrait in which subjects such as symbol, image and imagination, reality, memory, Giordano Bruno, romantic impulse, the Avant-guards, Dali, the vanitas, the monstrous, mercantilism, the incognito, and knowledge systems combine.

Written with evident delight and freshness, attempting to unite the logic of concepts with the logic of affections, the texts are the fruit of the expectation of sharing the elation that the work gives him and the abundance of reflections that this releases, and they have the rare virtue, for being unusual, of being kind and generous with the reader.

Ignacio Gómez de Liaño (Madrid, 1946) is a philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist, diarist and translator. PhD in Philosophy, he has been a university lecturer of Aesthetic, Philosophy and Sociologic Theory. In a permanent state of creative combustion, he developed a pronounced activity in the field of cutting-edge experimental poetry and explored the possibilities of cybernetic art in the 60s and 70s. Later on would come travels around the world and his long stays in the East. Today, with more than thirty books published, the work of Gómez de Liaño is a landmark in the Spanish panorama, a necessary point of passage and an essential reference.

According to the artist Perejaume, the concept of "sospecha de estiércol" (manure suspicion) is based on the conviction that the ultimate end of every human work is disappearance, including those works destined for an extraordinary duration. In this sense, the oblivion sack where all works end up is compared to manure agricultural deposits that, as indiscriminate storehouses of organic residues, constitute in turn a nutritious substratum, an origin of fertility which, with time, will give birth to new works.

In this essay by Josep Llinàs looks into this "manure suspicion" applied to one of the most enigmatic works by the architect Josep Maria Jujol: Casa Mañach, ironmongery located in the centre of Barcelona, built in 1911 and which disappeared years later. In an original combination, between historical essay and iconographic analysis, Llinás not only replaces this work by Jujol into the position that is appropriate for it, but demonstrates that, despite its brief existence, Casa Mañach contains that unique vital substratum capable of giving birth to other new works.

Josep Llinás is an architect. He has been a professor at the architecture school in Barcelona ETSAB) and the Universitat Ramon Llull, as well as being invited to numerous courses and workshops in Spain and Europe. He was the coordinator of the exhibition Josep Maria Jujol (COAC, Barcelona, 1991) and in several occasions has written about Jujol’s work. In 2002 he published his compilation of writings Saques de esquina.