The appearance of glass in architecture, explored from projects that envisaged a new materiality, like the towers for the Friedrichstrasse by Mies van der Rohe, the Danteum glass columns by Guiseppe Terragni or the Monument to six million Jewish martyrs by Louis I. Kahn, meant the discovery of a new idea of limit.

This book goes through those concepts that transformed their meaning renewing the conceptual basis of contemporary architecture. The incorporation into architecture of poetic values that the artistic vanguards of the twentieth century found in glass implied the revision of classic ideas such as horizon, matter and time, ultimately affecting the very experience of architectonic space and the recognition systems of the man that inhabits it. Thus, the author invites us to discover the conceptual legacy of those architects that were involved in the construction of this dreamy limit.

The four essays that compose this book depict infrequent orbits around the relationship between architecture and the bodies that inhabit it, accounting for the resistance presented by corporeity to disappear from architectonic space. From the start of modernity the body has seen its carnality substituted by a whole series of systems or devices: geometrical, functional, perceptive or emotional, amongst many others. Space has suffered a similar instrumentalising which, in a terrorised scenario facing substances and more prone to adjectivation –always safer than nominalism, has been adjectivated, like the body, for not belonging to any specific field of knowledge and belonging to all of them at the same time. In the first case we have a dynamic system of axis, in the second an obedient engine, in the third an unexpected sensor and in the fourth a compound of affections. None of these models result in a satisfactory portrait because they are incomplete, but all together perhaps they can provide a gradual approach to these intimately connected complex substances. As any other path, this one can also be done in the opposite direction, but doing it does not imply going back to the origin point in the same state in which it started.

Antonio Gaudí is, without a doubt, the most famous Spanish architect in the world and, as it happens sometimes, much more valued abroad that in his own country. The creative genius of this universal Catalonian left an exuberant, luminous work, full of formal fantasy but also sharp structural inventiveness and extreme constructive rigour. His works, very famous, attract thousands of visitors. Buildings such as the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia, Güell Park, Milá house (the Pedrera), Batlló house or the Capricho de Comillas are still capable of enchanting, or even moving people of different class and condition. The fistful of pages that compose this volume are a enjoyable and sagacious inquiry about the obscure and zealous motives that drove Gaudí during that fascinating period of fin-de-siècle, to work with mystic tenacity until he erected buildings whose personal signature makes them , even today, unmistakable.

The first part of this book constitutes a route through four places that were once inhabited by human beings, four houses where the fate of painting, its peak and its fall: Villa of Livia in Prima Porta, Villa Farnesina, Palazzo Borghese  and Mario Praz’s house in Palazzo Primoli. If the first part is and elegy, the second one is a pamphlet against the process of ‘gimcracking’ of the artistic experience, which implies a loss of its rejoicing carnality in favour of that abstract, stark ‘feeling of ownership’ of which Marx talked about and which is worsening with the modern mania of buying and accumulating all sorts of artistic knick-knacks. From room to room the author unveils the dismal aspects of that swindle of art collecting

With his ingenious but not realized Tokyo Urban Planning as detonator –an expansion of the Japanese megalopolis that floated above the bay, conceived in organic key, Kenzo Tange surrounded himself with one of the most interesting modern utopias, the Japanese movement Metabolism. His radical proposals blurred the limit between architecture and city, competing with the technological and psychedelic of the British Archigram. Antón Capitel proposes a very interesting investigation about Tange’s work from the initial influence of his master Mayekawa, in the brutalist work of Le Corbusier, to end with the work of other Metabolist architects like Kikutake, Kurokawa or Maki

‘In any art, the means of regeneration must be external’. Thus begins this book, with a categorical and precise phrase that also synthesises the common purpose that beats behind these texts gathered: the certainty in the demand on the regeneration of architecture and the inescapable need to turn to exterior instances to accomplish this renovation. Maria Teresa Muñoz revises the work of Beckmann, Höch, Kandisky, Steinberg, Oteiza and Ferrant, all plastic artists one way or another related to the vanguards (therefore, with the functional and terminal simultaneously), keeping one attentive eye on the creation process, whose ultimate ratio will always be elusive, enigmatic, and the other eye looking against the light to the unstable and imprecise condition of architecture that can and must be considered presently.

Architects are regular travellers, especially if they have works in different cities or give lectures often. These quick trips produce, as valuable residue, a paradoxically slow time in which the horizon or the clouds accompany their thoughts. For Luis M. Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón each journey is a parenthesis that opens up in their daily activity, a pocket of time, a vacant fold which they fill up in a systematic and free way with conversations, memories, reflections and intentions. Tokyo, Vigo, Aachen, Valparaiso, photography, landscapes, actions, flowers, Siza, Miralles or the interminable Le Corbusier, squares and rhombus, sake, Roman foundations, Perec, Kafka, Leo Basi and Olafur Eliasson are some of the varied presences conjured up in the pages of these road tales.