Articles by Nicolás Valencia

Named 2019 Pritzker Prize Laureate, Japanese architect Arata Isozaki is incredibly prolific and influential among his contemporaries. Deeply aligned with the period of change and reinvention that Japan experimented after Second World War and Allied Occupation, Isozaki has developed a solid career on a truly global scale, avoiding being labeled in a specific style throughout his life.

Starting this month, ArchDaily has introduced monthly themes that we’ll explore in our stories, posts and projects. We began this month with Architectural Representation: from Archigram to Instagram; from napkins sketching to real-time-sync VR models; from academic lectures to storytellers.

We’ve already talked about this. You’re preparing your final project (or thesis project). You’ve gone over everything in your head a thousand times; the presentation to the panel, your project, your model, your memory, your words. You go ahead with it, but think you’ll be lousy. Then you think just the opposite, you will be successful and it will all be worth it. Then everything repeats itself and you want to call it quits.  You don’t know when this roller coaster is going to end. 

Humanity has become obsessed with breaking its limits, creating new records only to break them again and again. In fact, our cities’ skylines have always been defined by those in power during every period in history. At one point churches left their mark, followed by public institutions and in the last few decades, it’s commercial skyscrapers that continue to stretch taller and taller. 

Venice captured all architects’ hearts and minds last year, but 2019 —a Venice-less year— will be still a year full of biennials and festivals around the world (many of which we’re proud to be official partners of). The excitement is already building. 

As an initiative of the Archiprix Foundation, Archiprix International 2019 recently invited all schools worldwide in Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture to select and submit their best graduation project. “This graduation work presents a wealth of ideas for a broad range of contemporary and future challenges”, explains the organization on its website.

The greats of twentieth-century Colombian architecture were regarded for their genuine interest in brick. To this day, many of Colombia’s iconic neighborhoods are filled with brick buildings. 

According to architect and academic Frank Locker, in architectural education, we keep repeating the same formula from the 20th-century: teachers transmitting a rigid and basic knowledge that gives students, no matter their motivation, interests, or abilities, little to no direction. In this way, says Locker, we are replicating, literally, prisons, with no room for an integral, flexible, and versatile education.

With the help of Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano/Urban Development Company (EDU) and La Sociedad Colombiana de Arquitectos/the Colombian Architect’s Society (SCA), Medellín has launched an international competition to design a space to remember and reflect on the period between 1983 and 1994.

Kazuyo Sejima, co-founder of the architecture firm SANAA, shared details of their upcoming project the New National Gallery – Ludwig Museum in Budapest at the Hay Festival Segovia in Spain. The 2010 Pritzker Prize winner linked the underlying premise of this project to three iconic museums: the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (2004), the New Art Museum in New York (2007), and the Louvre Lens in France (2012).