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 Foster in the Future volume from the publisher:
Norman Foster’s trajectory is so mighty that the biography offered by these essays hardly does it justice. After an interview on his formative years, the first article celebrates the completion of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and subsequent texts deal with the Bilbao metro, his most popular Spanish project; his interventions in historical areas for cultural institutions like the Nîmes media library, the Royal Academy, or the British Museum; the saga of airports, the concept of which he transformed with Stansted and brought to colossal scales with Chek Lap Kok and the one raised in Beijing for the Olympics; and the work of greatest symbolic weight in his career, the Reichstag in Berlin; constructions, all, that speak the language of technique and prefigure the future while continuing to listen to lessons of the past. This visionary humanist has built his oeuvre on the margins of aesthetic fashions, and with an extraordinary continuity between early and later projects, as shown in the conversation that wraps up the book, where his penchant for flying is mixed up with musings on his life journey.
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.
