Books
Introducing Architectural Theory. Expanding the Disciplinary Debate
(Routledge/Taylor&Francis: New York/London, 2024)
An engaging and reader-friendly work on complex ideas, Introducing Architectural Theory: Expanding the Disciplinary Debate broadens the range of themes, voices, and geographies represented, to provide a more comprehensive and contemporary theory book.
This book presents major discourses in architectural theory and design in a debate-like format, integrating a series of edited texts across architectural history with context and newly written commentaries by the authors. This new edition has been fully revised, updated and expanded to include long-standing debates, such as simplicity vs. complexity or the relationship between form and function, as well as newer discussions on innovation, globalization, and social equity.
Authors Smith and Guitart provide a comprehensive means and conceptual framework for readers to compare multiple points of view. The chapter structure, discussion questions, and additional resources allow teachers to facilitate in-class discussions and writing assignments.
Introducing Architectural Theory: Expanding the Disciplinary Debate remains the most accessible architectural theory textbook, written for beginning architecture students and those outside the discipline. Its reflective and critical approach will equally engage the minds of upper-level students and experts.
Behind Architectural Filters: Phenomena of Interference
(Routledge/Taylor&Francis: New York/London, 2022)
With a foreword by David Leatherbarrow: “Harmonic Interference.”
Behind Architectural Filters: Phenomena of Interference explores the active role of architectural filters in generating physically and sensory charged spatial experiences. The book addresses how the material and the psychological strategies of permeable physical boundaries determine our perceptual experiences of the spaces we occupy. This book explores architectural filters as connecting mechanisms capable of conjuring unique atmospheres that integrate the participation of several agents. The text analyzes ten case studies, grouped under five generative parameters: origin, density, thickness, function, and message.
Each study investigates the main aspects of the filters’ internal genesis and the character of the spaces informed by them. The cases illustrate a broad geographic, cultural, and historical scope, and connect past tradition with contemporary design. This methodology considers a historical and philosophical standpoint addressing vernacular, constructive, sustainable, and sensory considerations. Written for students and scholars of architectural history, theory, art, design, and philosophy, Behind Architectural Filters: Phenomena of Interference offers an unprecedented perspective on the production of spatial atmospheres, bridging past and present while connecting thought and practice in a highly visual study.
Approaching Architecture: Three Fields, One Discipline
(Routledge/Taylor&Francis: New York/London, 2023)
With a foreword by Nader Tehrani: “The Necessary Impracticality of Research, Circuity of Pedagogy, and Resistance of Practice.”
The study of the architectural discipline suffers a an increasing disconnect between its teaching and its professional practice. In this edited collection, eighteen architectural voices address this disconnect by reflecting on the ways in which they exercise the architectural discipline in three ways: research, teaching, and practice. This book argues that the totality of activities encompassed by the architectural profession can be best fulfilled when reconsidering the critical interactions between these three fields in the everyday exercise of the profession.
Split into three parts, ‘Architecture as Research’, ‘Architecture as Pedagogy,’ and ‘Architecture as ‘Practice’, each section focuses on one of these three dimensions while establishing continuity with the other two. In doing so, the book not only favors a more fulfilling interaction between academia and the profession, but also reinforces the implementations of design theory and research in everyday teaching and practice. The contributions come from eighteen teams of architects operating from geographically diverse locations, opening the design conversation to larger contexts and framing continuity and inclusion in time.
Written for students, instructors and practitioners alike, the inspiring reflections in this volume encourage readers to grow as architects and play an instrumental role in transforming the built environment.
Architectural Practice IV
(Nobuko/Diseño Editorial: Buenos Aires, 2020)
With an introduction by Alberto Campo Baeza: “To Project is to Research.”
Essays by:
Casanova + Hernández: “Building Knowledge in Interdisciplinary Design.”
FRPO: “Structures and Mechanisms.”
Kempster Jamrozik: “Memory Constructs.”
Ruiz Pardo Nebreda: “Neither Local Nor Global.”
Deborah Saunt: “A Focus for Architects.”
Nader Tehrani: “A Disaggregated Manifesto.”
Jesús Ulargui: “Good Forms.”
Architectural Practice III
(Nobuko/Diseño Editorial: Buenos Aires, 2016)
With an introduction by Juhani Pallasmaa: “Reason, Emotion, and Experience: The Rational and the Existential in Architecture.”
Essays by:
Alcolea Tárrago: “Somewhere in the Memory.”
Arroyo Pemjean: “Compete, Construct, Communicate.”
Fernanda Canales: “How to Design a House.”
Toni Gironès: “Topographies Over Time, or Time Turned into Form.”
Paredes Pedrosa: “Designing With Others.”
Juan Rey: “A Look From the Other Side.”
Architectural Practice II
(Nobuko/Diseño Editorial: Buenos Aires, 2015)
With an introduction by Elías Torres Tur: “Architectural Practice XXXIII.”
Essays by:
Josemaría de Churtichaga: “To Design? To Project?”
Eduardo Delgado Orusco: “As Many Words as Bricks.”
Arturo Franco: “Opportunity.”
Karamuk * Kuo: “Constructing Space.”
Luis Martínez Santa-María: “An Unexpected Continuity.”
Sol89: “Heuristic Excuses in Architecture.”
Tabuenca & Leache: “Everything Can Be Changed.”
Práctica Arquitectónica I
(Nobuko/Diseño Editorial: Buenos Aires, 2014)
With an introduction by Juan Navarro Baldeweg: “Alguien tiene que arriesgarse.”
Essays by:
Beguiristain Bergera: “Proyectos, inquietudes y estrategias.”
Cadaval Solà-Morales: “Expandir los límites de la profesión.”
Emergencia Creativa: “Estrategias de la emergencia creativa.”
Israel Alba: “De la arquitectura a la infraestructura.”
Pancorbo Arquitectos: “Ensayo sobre la arquitectura como ensayo.”
Paredes Pino: “Haciendo proyectos…”
Suárez Santas: “Los gigantes de Newton y las piedras de Pulgarcito.”
The Depth of the Skin
(Asimétricas: Madrid, 2015)
"For a better orientation in the blurred panorama of contemporary architecture, it may be adequate to insist on some basic issues that continue to configure the armature of authentic architecture: matter, light, structure and emotion. These issues are essential to architecture as a poetic of construction and a technique of the inhabiting. The specific approach on which Miguel Guitart focuses is the filter understood as tension between geometry, structure, gaze and light, and whose aim is to activate the architectural space in a profound and reflective way. Filters of gaze and light may be found in many cultures and under many guises,
but they are always designed for a whole array of functions and made to measure for each region and for each person. The review of architectural filters presupposes the experience of the deep spatial emotion that they determine, the ascertainment and registering of the aforementioned invariants. The proposal of the author is to rediscover and deepen on these ideas of filtering, porosity and osmosis. The text wants to be an invitation to reintegrate them from timeless architecture into theory and practice of current architecture, as an analytical tool and a creative mechanism inherent to the architectural design."
La Piel Profunda
(Asimétricas: Madrid, 2015)
"En un tiempo como el actual las nuevas opciones de trabajo no parecen ayudar a definir con claridad un panorama con referencias de rigor que faciliten la certidumbre y un obligado compromiso en esta ciencia poética que se desvirtúa a veces como un arte menor. Para ahondar en este camino borroso se propone un ejercicio de exploración de invariantes básicos que siguen constituyendo el armazón de la arquitectura auténtica: la materia, la luz, la estructura, la emoción. Se trata de que el objeto de estudio que aquí se presenta tenga como base aquellas cuestiones que son esenciales a la arquitectura como poética y como técnica. En la exploración de dichos invariantes, el texto propone la recuperación explícita de unas estrategias que son tanto atemporales como ahistóricas.
Los filtros de mirada y luz pueden encontrarse en muchas culturas y bajo muchos signos destinados a toda una variedad de funciones resueltas según la medida de cada región y de cada hombre. La revisión de los filtros arquitectónicos presupone no sólo una experiencia de la emoción espacial determinada por los mismos, sino la constatación y el abanderamiento de estos invariantes como conocimiento del proyecto y como mecanismo de creación carente de frivolidad capaz de ofrecer lo más sensato y poético al hombre. Trabajar con estos invariantes debería garantizar una investigación desde el rigor y la responsabilidad y su constante pulsión viene a confirmarse de nuevo hoy en el auge de la arquitectura actual. Nuestra propuesta es redescubrir esos filtros."
Emak Bakia!
(General Ediciones Arquitectura: Valencia, 2015)
Emak Bakia! Design Processes Around Man Ray’s Emak Bakia House is a publication that presents a teaching experience carried out in the Fall semester of 2014 in the context of the core Design Studio Proyectos 2 at the School of Engineering and Architecture, University of Zaragoza. The film Emak Bakia Baita (2012) by Navarre director Oskar Alegria explores the search of a house in the French Basque coast where the surrealist artist Man Ray filmed a short movie of the same title in 1927.
Starting from there, the students are asked to accomplish an architectural project that focuses on the evocative, visual, artistic, methodological and creative effects subjacent in both extraordinary reference films. The chance and the search —understood almost as an end in itself— are in this case the arguments that drive the first steps of the design learning experience of the architecture students.
Proyectos UPSAM 2011-2012
(Fundación Pablo VI: Madrid, 2012)
This edition presents a compilation of the most significant work from the Design Studios across all levels of the School of Architecture at the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca Campus Madrid from the academic year 2011-2012. The faculty who coordinated the studios were Israel Alba, Francisco Alonso, David Archilla, Eva Gil, Miguel Guitart, Pablo Martínez Capdevila, César Moreno, Carlos Palacios, Mara Sánchez Llorens, Susana Velasco, and Izabela Wieczorek. The volume was coedited by Daniel Gimeno and Miguel Guitart.
Out of print
Proyectos UPSAM 2009-2010
(Fundación Pablo VI: Madrid, 2011)
This edition presents a compilation of the most significant work from the Design Studios across all levels of the School of Architecture at the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca Campus Madrid from the academic year 2010-2011. The faculty who coordinated the studios were Israel Alba, Miguel Guitart, Arturo Franco, Idoia Otegui, Rafael de la Hoz, Susana Velasco, Bernardo Angelini, Izabela Wieczorek, Pablo Martínez Capdevila, Francisco Alonso, Eduardo González, David Archilla, César Moreno, Carlos Palacios, and Eva Gil.
The volume was coedited by Israel Alba and Miguel Guitart.
Spanish Fulbright Association 20 Years
(Spanish Fulbright Alumni Association: Madrid, 2010)
As part of the celebration for the 20th anniversary of the Spanish Fulbright Alumni Association, this book was designed to document the experiences gathered by the Association's members over two decades. A copy of the book was given to the widow of Senator J. W. Fulbright, Ms. Harriet M. Fulbright, in Washington D.C. The J. W. Fulbright Program received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation in 2014, one of the most important awards in Spain, from Felipe VI King of Spain.
Out of print