Barcelona — Gaudí as a key to reading the city
Gaudí was not a visionary out of time: he was solving real structural problems with natural forms. Understanding this changes the way you look at the city.
Berlin — The city that rewrites itself
Berlin is the unique case of a city in which every building bears the visible scars of the twentieth century — and where architecture has become the most honest way of telling it.
Istanbul — Where East and West are built
Istanbul is a layered text: every great building has been a church, a mosque, a museum — and tells that transformation in its structure, not only in its history.
Paris — Le Corbusier and the modern city
Paris contains three centuries of debate on what a modern city should be. Le Corbusier is the turning point — and five buildings tell the before and after.
Porto — Álvaro Siza and Atlantic stone
Porto is Siza's city — where he built an architecture that seems to have grown out of the city's stone, not designed on top of it.
Frequently asked questions
Why do Gaudí's works in Barcelona have such organic forms?
Not out of visionary whim, but because Gaudí was solving real structural problems using nature-inspired forms — inverted catenary curves to calculate the arches of the Sagrada Família, tree-like structures for the leaning columns of the Colonia Güell crypt. Understanding the engineering reasoning behind the forms changes how you look at his buildings.
Why is Berlin's architecture so tied to twentieth-century history?
Because unlike many European capitals, Berlin hasn't hidden the century's scars: bombed buildings rebuilt with the damage left visible, the Wall turned into urban memory, contemporary interventions (like Foster's dome on the Reichstag) explicitly designed to confront the past instead of erasing it. Architecture here has become the most honest way to tell the city's history.
What makes Istanbul's architecture unique?
The layering of different religious functions within the same building: Hagia Sophia has been a Byzantine church, an Ottoman mosque, a museum, and a mosque again, and its structure carries the physical marks of every transformation — added mihrabs, mosaics covered and later rediscovered. Every major building in the city tells this layering in its own fabric, not just in history books.
Which buildings should you see in Paris to understand Le Corbusier and his impact?
Five buildings trace the before, during and after of his urban thinking, from his early experiments with reinforced concrete to the confrontation with the historic fabric of the city his Plan Voisin would have partly demolished. It's an itinerary built to show Le Corbusier as a turning point in the French debate over what a modern city should be, not as an isolated name.