Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Between 1959 and 1966, Javier Carvajal played a decisive role at the house of Loewe, materializing through its spaces the change that the firm was looking for. Thirteen new shops were built, eleven throughout Spain and two in London, in addition to the Barcelona Headquarters and the Tauro Factory in Madrid. These projects were the main impulse in the modernization of the company, promoting both change in the firm’s shops and products as well as commercial and image strategies.In mid-1963 the Loewe Shop designed by the architect was inaugurated in the centre of Valencia. The critical analysis of this project, which originates from the redrawn of Javier Carvajal’s original plans, not only allows knowledge on the commercial design process, offering a proposal of architectural analysis of shops, but also prepares new documentation for future research.

The Milanese architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni always worked in this city displaying his compromise with architecture and the profession. The present article is centred on the presentation and study of one of his most characteristic residential buildings, located in via Giuseppe Vigoni in Milan. Although the work of this author cannot be understood through just one building, the chosen case nonetheless collects, in an especially intense way, issues transferable not only to his own trajectory but also, without a doubt, to the architectural present. The validity and, above all, the need to recapture the housing project from surveys made on instinct, for the inhabiting from inside to outside, without looking for spectacle as the result, also to recuperate the importance of the composition and detail of facades, without setting aside the fundamental compromise that architecture has with history, with the city and with its occupants.

The main objective of this text is to propose a critical consideration on the role of the modern architect as agent of political mediation. Firstly, this reflection follows the figure and the ideas of the Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo. Using different theoretical references, ranging from Jaques Lacan to Henri Lefebvre, the idea of the architect as a political mediator of the real is explored through the experience of De Carlo in the Milan Triennial of 1968. Secondly, De Carlo’s critical tools and the notion of everyday life proposed by Guy Debord are used to study the depoliticization of the modern architectural tradition. Finally, as a conclusion, and linking the ideas of De Carlo with the critical reading of the city by David Harvey, the possibility of architecture as collective action is proposed.

The analysis of corporative architecture allows us to identify guidelines tested throughout last century that help us find a suitable space for work. After this study, four organization types have been established and clearly identified as timeless models that do not have so much to do with the time in which they were created, but instead they appeared to stay and last until our days, in some cases with minimal modifications in spite of the great social, structural and most of all, technical changes, which have been developing throughout the last one hundred years. Its internal structures’ geometrical order provides us with a specific name: linear, modular, free and informal, that indicates an increment in the amount of disorder not only from a formal point of view but also affecting directly the work organization flexibility degree.

This article describes the limitations of one of the components of the critique made about the construction of New York’s World Trade Center Twin Towers: that which identifies formal abstraction with communicative inability. To this end, it presents the dialectical synthesis between form and function that operated in the Twin Towers, as a key to understand the communicative program of the project. As that program was not only about strictly architectonical considerations, its cultural and philosophical roots are analysed here in order to understand it. Through that synthesis, the article concludes that the communicative ability of the Towers was underestimated at the time from excessively visualist positions. Indeed, part of the critique undervalued their communicative ability trough an insufficient analysis of the architectonical, cultural and philosophical adscription of the Towers.

The 1967 Montreal Universal Exhibition represents one of the most important experimental environment of the century to media, distinguishing itself from the earlier ones due to its particular use of screens and audiovisual technologies, as well as the new theatrical typologies developed to fit with the new ways of projection. This article explores some of the proposals developed in Montreal, where space and technology worked together looking for a total experience.

The first house exclusively powered by solar energy was designed, or rather assembled, in 1939 by MIT engineers without the intervention of any architect. Almost on the same date and also in Massachusetts, Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann patented a prefabricated prototype for a passive solar home. The disconnection of both prototypes speaks of the historical divergence between technological dominance and typological experimentation, between the traditions of the active and the passive traditions of environmental control. Both living and support space established the basis of a sterile coexistence that will not be reformulated until the Second World War. The text revises the debate between ‘eco-mannerism’ and ecological rationalism inaugurated at that time, proposing its validity in contemporary debate.

It was in the summer of 2012 when the architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, jointly with the artist Ai Weiwei, constructed the Summer Pavilion of London’s Serpentine Gallery. This project stood out for its distinctive character away from traditional ‘signature’ image in this kind of events and, on the contrary, following a relational approach far from the traditional understanding of authorship. As a matter of fact, very little had to be done as the core of the project already existed, and the objective was to highlight Summer Pavilion’s past by efficiently handling the traces and remainings of the pavilions built in the previous eleven editions. Ai Weiwei’s contribution was key due to its particular understanding of history and creative processes.

Given the idea of architectural forms as static and unchanging, there are few occasions when the inexorable, implacable passing of time has been accepted by the discipline of architecture. Through a collection of texts, illustrations, and works by architects James Stirling and John Soane, as well as by their draftsmen Richard Portchmouth and Joseph Gandy, it is possible to glimpse their acceptance of the temporality and evanescence of all construction. This acceptance enabled them to imagine wrought by the passage of time.

This academic article is based on the results obtained from doctoral research defended in May of 2016 , with the title: "Government advertising in the construction of cultures of peace: the case of the Mexican Federal Government (2006-2012) in the framework of the war on drugs", which highlights the potential of government advertising for the promotion of values, behaviors and actions that build collective well-being. The research analyzes qualitatively 127 T.V. spots issued by different Departments of the Mexican Republic during the six-year presidential term of Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa, to unveil that the Mexican government, instead of using its advertising efforts to contribute to the pacification of the country, used this communicative tool to legitimize its strategy of facing drug trafficking through an armed approach. Throughout the messages presented in the T.V. spots, a clearly differentiated story between "good" and "bad" people is described, using the threat of drugs as the axis of its persuasive strategy and transmitting a culture of fear that generates more concerns and insecurities than the values needed to counteract violence. At the same time, the promotion of cultures of peace in the story offered by the Mexican Federal Government is minimal and circumstantial, from what it can be affirmed that it does not offer keys to understand and transform the conflict, but a narrative that reinforces the war on drugs and legitimizes it.