The 'Retratos' collection from Arquitectura Viva is a series of biographical sketches of the leading exponents of contemporary architecture. They contain in-depth interviews, reviews and analyses of major building works, accompanied by drawings by the architects themselves.
About the Piano the Builder volume from the publisher:
This selection of articles on Renzo Piano’s life and work begins with a short biography and ends with an extensive conversation held in his home at Punta Nave, in which the architect from Genoa looks back on his long trajectory, from his formative years to current projects around the world and the support he provides to young people through his Foundation. In between is a chronological reprinting of texts on different episodes of his career, which is sometimes contrasted with the approach of other architects. The airport of Kansai explores scale as the headquarters of The New York Times does height, while the church devoted to Padre Pío and the convent in Ronchamp offer solutions differing from the usual religious commission. But museums are perhaps the architectural type in which he has been most influential, from the mythical Pompidou he did with Richard Rogers to that absolute masterwork that the Menil is, and on to his first project in Spain, the Botín Centre in Santander. All these buildings evince a combination of technological refinement, love of craftsmanship, and civic sensibility.
Over the course of a fruitful career as critic of the newspaper El País and visible head of the magazines AV and Arquitectura Viva, Luis Fernández-Galiano has written on architecture and many other things. A rich sampling of his articles has now been grouped by themes in four series of nine booklets, together offering a vivid chronicle of architecture in the past decades.
Arquitectura Viva, 96pp, paperback, English text, 2023
