The purpose of this book is to rediscover the essence of classical architecture, as it avoids the simple chronological succession of styles and chooses alternatively certain periods to explain its evolution. The lucid descriptions of Cesare Brandi, prestigious Art historian, present the evolution of classical orders throughout history through some singular buildings from ancient Greek, Imperial Rome and Renaissance. His clever and extremely insightful observations, his peculiar way of understanding space and the relationships between interior and exterior, allow one to come to a deeper understanding of the genesis of some masterpieces, key pieces in the evolution of the history of architecture, explaining the intentions of their authors.

Unfortunately, Brandi's work has been scarcely published in Spain; apart from his indispensable Teoria del Restauro, only a few travel notebooks have been translated into Spanish. Confronted with the difficulty of gaining access to his entire essay corpus, the transversal reading generated by this selection of passages from different books, carried out by professor Guido Cimadomo presently offers the reader a first approximation to Brandi’s thought. They are high level critical texts that expose the genesis of classical architecture, and also demonstrate the literary value that Brandi always instills in his writings.

Cesare Brandi (1906-1988) has been one of the most recognised Art historians and founder of the Teoria del Restauro. In 1983 he founded the Istituto Centrale del Restauro along with Giulio Carlo Argan, giving total relevance to restoration, recuperation and conservation of works of art. His bibliography is extensive and varied, with a wide geographical and time scope, always with a personal and critical view that makes him one of the great Italian intellectuals of the 20th century. His profound knowledge of the history of art and architecture, compared to other great figures more specialised in specific fields, bestows him with the necessary knowledgable open-mind to express simply and clearly their genesis and transcendence. Works of art, whether pictorial or architectural, are seen as something unique and unrepeatable and his attentive analysis merges with other existing historiographic sources to give a clear reading of the intentions of the architects. Author of monographies, aesthetic writings, theory of art and of journalistic articles, his dialogues from the forties and fifties about painting, sculpture, poetry and architecture –which symbolically open this selection of texts–, remind us of the great treatise writers of the history of architecture.

Light, as visual energy and emotional perception inherent to architecture, necessary to optics and unifying thread of physics-mathematics, but above all, as a first need good for the development of contemporary societies, understood as transforming tool, has to be considered from the interdisciplinary cross cutting of knowledge. Light is presented as an opportunity to insist again about spatial qualities, its perceptive manifestation and its ordering principles from bordering areas which are supposedly divergent. Light, immanent presence of reality, talks to us in an expressive way about the poetic quality of space, about the visual miracle of contemplation and cosmic infinite, diverse scales of the scientific context of the same question, always redundant. Light, shade, illusion, indissoluble in their conception, proclaims the title of this book without any aspiration other than to think again about our own incomplete relationship with the truth. Light, shade, illusion, build a viable argument in which to capture only an instant of inspiration.

This book revises seven projects that Antonio Fernández Alba submitted to competitions in the 70s which were especially important in the Spanish architectural panorama, such as the Opera and the Palacio de Congresos y Exposiciones in Madrid, the Feria de Muestras (Trade Fair) in Gijón, or Bankunión and Banco de Bilbao buildings, amongst others. Antón Capitel analyses, compares and puts into historic perspective of these seven projects in which Fernández Alba developed some of his most ambitious proposals.

For Capitel, without the figure of Fernández Alba it is impossible to completely understand the evolution of Spanish architecture in the second half of the 20th century. In a few years of busy production the recuperation of rationalist modernity became connected with the organic revision that basically was forged in Spain thanks to Fernández Alba’s work and writings.

None of these seven projects were built, but despite being left in that limbo of paper architectures, or precisely because of it, they showed some intuitions that, if they had materialised, would have taken Fernández Alba's architecture to an even more experimental and daring trajectory, more singular and advanced than it was without a doubt.

For a better orientation in the blurred panorama of contemporary architecture, it may be adequate to insist on some basic issues that continue to configure the armature of authentic architecture: matter, light, structure and emotion. These issues are essential to architecture as a poetic of construction and a technique of the inhabiting. The specific approach on which Miguel Guitart focuses is the filter understood as tension between geometry, structure, gaze and light, and whose aim is to activate the architectural space in a profound and reflective way. Filters of gaze and light may be found in many cultures and under many guises, but they are always designed for a whole array of functions and made to measure for each region and for each person. The review of architectural filters presupposes the experience of the deep spatial emotion that they determine, the ascertainment and registering of the aforementioned invariants. The proposal of the author is to rediscover and deepen on these ideas of filtering, porosity and osmosis. The text wants to be an invitation to reintegrate them from timeless architecture into theory and practice of current architecture, as an analytical tool and a creative mechanism inherent to the architectural design.

The title is that of an early essay describing two cities whose ground surface had momentarily become paradigmatic. Mass in the Age of Media is the theme around which many texts thematically hinge, the status of architecture —the physical object— in relation to post digital perception. This selection of writings spans from the avant guard culture of the 1970's AA school —the Indian Summer of the hand drawn in which he was a leading exponent— to more recent architectural tropes such as 'the diagram' or 'the evaporating city'. With sideways glances in the direction of Bachelard, lifestyle modernism in the southern hemispher and the Picturesque, this panoramic anthology expounds an empirical narrative style that also characterizes the much published architecture of BOLLES+WILSON.

The filter, understood as tension between geometry and light, which is architectonically resolved in the enveloping and whose aim is to activate the space through vision. The review of architectural filters presupposes the verification of the deep spatial emotion that they determine, the reasons for it and the way it happens. The author’s proposal is to rediscover and go deeper in those ideas of filtration, porosity and osmosis, because it is intended as an invitation to incorporate them into the theory as well as into the practice of the present architecture, as instruments of analysis and as devices of creation inherent to the project.

The present texts chronologically illustrate a thirty years journey through the different topographies of architecture. The title Berlin-Tokyo-Earth corresponds to an essay in which these two cities were described, whose ground surface had momentarily become the paradigm of the exceptional. Mass in the Age of Media is the subject on which many texts revolve around; the status of architecture as a physical object in the light of post-digital perception. This selection of writings by Peter Wilson comprises from the cultural vanguard of the AA in the Seventies –the oasis of hand drawing, where Wilson was one of the foremost exponent, to the more recent architectonic concepts such as ‘the diagram’ or ‘the evaporating city’. This panoramic anthology, with winks at Bachelard, from the modernist life style in the southern hemisphere to the picturesque, is an example of his empirical narrative style, empiricism that also characterises the architecture of BOLLES + WILSON, widely published and recognised since their first works.