The government of Aragon once again attacks the MNAC. The vice-president of the government of Aragon, Mar Vaquero, accused the museum's officials this Tuesday of new "dilatory practices" in the return of the mural paintings from the monastery of Sixena, and of failing to comply for eleven weeks with the schedule set by the magistrate of court number 2 of Huesca, Rocío Vergas. Vaquero explained in a press conference that they have already presented the allegations to the court of Huesca regarding the risk assessment report on the mural paintings submitted to the court by the MNAC, and two more documents: an evaluation of this report and another with information about the monastery of Sixena, the reserve areas where the works will arrive, and their conditions.

New milestone for 20th-century architecture: UNESCO has declared thirteen works by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) World Heritage. Among the recognized buildings are some of Aalto's most famous works, such as the Paimio Sanatorium, Villa Mairea, the Experimental House of Muuratsalo, and two works the architect made for himself: the dwelling and a studio. "Rooted in Finnish building traditions and yet open to global modernist ideas, the works express a human-centered, site-specific, and empathetic vision that distinguishes Finland's contribution to modern architecture," states the UNESCO press release, which highlights the architect's collaboration with his first wife, Aino Marsio-Aalto, and with his second, Elissa Aalto, as well as with the workers in his studio.

The art historian, critic, and exhibition curator Joan Maria Minguet Batllori (Cornellà de Llobregat, 1958), a retired professor from the UAB, is a restless and incisive mind. He assures that his new book "Contra l'obediència. Per acabar amb els consensos de l'art" (Raig Verd) is a summary of his career and how he began to rethink it about fifteen years ago. "I go very much against things that I myself had said," he states.

Singer Julio Iglesias has filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court against the second vice-president of the Spanish government, Yolanda Díaz, for "illegitimate interference with the right to honor and personal privacy", due to publications about the singer that Díaz made on her Bluesky account; and requests that she compensate him with 50,000 euros for moral damages.

Change of script in the Catalan pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, promoted by the Institut Ramon Llull. According to what ARA has been able to find out, the Llull is pausing to rethink it and add partners, among whom may be the Barcelona City Council, the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, the Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya and the Departament de Territori. Initially, the pavilion for the next edition will not be part of the official program as a collateral event of the Biennale. And instead of a project selected through a competition, as is usual, the Llull will bring to its space at Docks Cantieri Cucchini an adapted version of the exhibition Seny i rauxa. News of Catalan architecture, currently on display at the Dhub until September 6. The exhibition is a production of the Barcelona City Council within Barcelona 2026 World Capital of Architecture.

The architect Denise Scott Brown was born in 1931 in Nkana, Zambia, with the surname Lakofski, which she changed upon marrying her first husband, the also architect Robert Scott Brown, who tragically died in an accident in 1959. As seen in the exhibition that the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum dedicates to her until August 16, her training as an architect began in South Africa and continued in London and Philadelphia, where she met the architect Robert Venturi, whom she would marry in 1967. Their studio was one of the most influential in the second half of the 20th century. Together with Steven Izenour, Venturi and Scott Brown wrote the essay Learning from Las Vegas, which marked a turning point in architecture. However, Venturi received the accolades. The most significant grievance Scott Brown suffered was being excluded from the Pritzker Prize that Venturi received in 1991. In 2013, she stated in a speech that they owed her not the prize, but "a ceremony of inclusion." In fact, Scott Brown did not accompany Venturi to the Pritzker ceremony. Thus, this exhibition, Scott Brown's first retrospective, is an act of justice.

The Sant Jordi Club was, in reality, a training ground annexed to the Palau Sant Jordi. For decades, however, the Sant Jordi Club has functioned as a concert hall with the quality of a shoebox, and as a residual piece in the ensemble of the Olympic Ring of Montjuïc. The access and surroundings are rather depressing. The winning project for the new Sant Jordi Club, which was made public this Wednesday, aims to break with all these inertias: the architect Jorge Vidal (Barcelona, 1980) and the Parisian studio Bruther, formed by Stéphanie Bru and Alexandre Thériot; have won the competition convened by Barcelona Serveis Municipals (BSM) with a project that, beyond a new building, includes improving the connection with the southern sector of the Olympic Ring and the landscape restoration of the surroundings. The future Sant Jordi Club will have a capacity for 9,000 people, almost triple the current 3,500. The Vidal i Bruther project is characterized by its flexibility of use. To create good acoustics, it proposes the construction of a rather hermetic acoustic box within the building. The technical equipment will allow it to be divided into smaller spaces with dividing panels, from 1,000 people, and it will also be possible to create specific layouts for events such as congresses and fashion shows. The objective is to be able to hold concerts simultaneously at the Palau Sant Jordi and the Sant Jordi Club and for the audiences to be able to cross paths. The budget is around 70 million euros. The forecast is to inaugurate part of the building in 2029.

The team formed by BAAS architecture and h3o architects has won the competition convened by BIMSA for the rehabilitation of the Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu de Barcelona complex. The project includes the rehabilitation and expansion of the spaces of the Biblioteca de Catalunya and the future District Library, as well as the rehabilitation of the theater, the chapel, the Icub offices, and various common spaces. The approximate budget for the work is 29.6 million euros.

The painting Wounded Militiaman, by Francisco Mateos, preserved at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), is in an irrecoverable state. What happened to it? Has its condition worsened over time? Did the painter have anything to do with it? All the answers can be found in the corresponding episode of the series The Science of Art, a production by the museum and Cábala Films, with the associated production of CaixaForum+. The reconstruction of 'Wounded Militiaman' is one of the six episodes that are now available on CaixaForum+. Exceptionally, the making of the documentary led to the painting being exhibited, despite its poor state of conservation, accompanied by a reconstruction made by the artist Pilar Rosado with the help of AI.

La Virreina hosts from this Saturday until November 1st a strange duo formed by the playwright and actress Juana Dolores Romero and the artist Frederic Amat. She presents her first exhibition, Declaration of Love to Lenin, and he Vuit, an anthology of his collaborations with great authors. The curator of both is Valentín Roma, the center's director until a few weeks ago when he was elected as the new director of Macba. That's why the presentation was a recital of emotions, with some of Roma's colleagues at La Virreina thanking him for ten fantastic years of work. Frederic Amat has added poetry: he assures that if Roma were an animal, he would be a dog, because he has "an eye, a nose, and a fang". And Juana Dolores has thanked him for allowing her to work under unprecedented conditions. "I am not used to sharing a class with the directors who program me in festivals or theaters and I think it has become very clear here that, when a class is shared, one works from another place, and with another confidence," said Romero. "Insolence is no longer in the popular classes. Fascism is insolent, and perhaps what we should do is recover the popular use of insolence," Roma asked.

More than forty years after his death, the artist José Pérez Ocaña, the great Ocaña, continues to be a libertarian reference. He shines in a performance recorded by the collective Vídeo-Nou/Servei de Vídeo Comunitari that can be seen at the Macba from this Thursday in the exhibition Contrainformació: Video-Nou / Servei de Vídeo Comunitari. In this video, Ocaña and another artist, Camilo, play all the roles of the 'auca': they perform a copla in playback, and also French songs and the mythical Lili Marlene in Marlene Dietrich's version. In the final section, the video takes a turn, the space where the artists are fills with people, and it all resembles what could be an orgy. Furthermore, this video has added value, as the performance was recorded on the same day that a demonstration of gays and lesbians against the law on social dangerousness was held in 1977.

Winning the Pritzker Prize, the Nobel of architects, can be overwhelming. "It was a nice surprise, and it has meant a lot of work, but not architectural work, but rather doing interviews and giving talks," he tells ARA.this year's winner, the Chilean Smiljan Radić (Santiago, Chile, 1965). "It has also brought me a lot of negative things, in the sense that I have had to say no to many things, because I don't have time, and because I don't want to lose certain practices that are important, like designing or sitting in front of a computer to work. Then a kind of mediation, or a game, appears between what reality offers me and what I can really accept".

The legal battle for the murals in the chapter house of the Sixena monastery continues. As the ARA has learned, the legal services of the Generalitat have just filed an incident of nullity of proceedings against the order of the Provincial Court of Huesca, dated June 2nd, which confirmed the exclusion of the Generalitat in the execution of the sentence that obliges the transfer of the mural paintings preserved at the MNAC to the Sixena monastery. This incident can be considered, if the Provincial Court of Huesca does not take it into consideration, as the previous step to elevate the case to the Constitutional Court.

Exceptional discovery in the legacy of Diego de Velázquez: an unpublished portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares in armor has appeared in a private collection. The find was made by the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Salvador Salort-Pons, as he himself explains in the July issue of the magazine ARS Magazine. This would be the first portrait Velázquez made when he arrived in Madrid from Seville. Salort-Pons plans to exhibit it at his museum in the fall. The article does not specify the location of the painting, which would reach astronomical prices in the art market, nor whether it is cataloged.

The honorary presidency of the UIA World Congress of Architects has fallen to a dean of urbanism, Joan Busquets (El Prat de Llobregat, 1946). Busquets directed the Planning Department of Barcelona City Council between 1983 and 1989 and during the preparations for the Olympic Games, has worked in cities across Europe and was a professor at Harvard University. "A congress like this must open the eyes of the youngest ones," he states.

"The planet does not negotiate. Climate collapse, war, displacement, and a technological acceleration that outpaces the profession are not topics for a congress. They are the conditions within which architecture works today": thus begins the Barcelona Declaration of the UIA Architects Congress, which concludes this Thursday at the Palau de Congressos de Barcelona (CCIB). "Every formal decision leaves a measurable trace. A material is already a carbon figure. A housing typology is already a statistic of who will survive the next heatwave. A footprint is already territory taken, or left, from another species," says the text read by the president of the Superior Council of Colleges of Architects of Spain, Marta Vall-llosera.

The thirty or so Catalan firms participating in the UIA architects' congress, most as speakers, others as moderators, reveal the character of the new generations: rooted and at the same time with international ambition. Many of these architects entered the market in the midst of a crisis and had to diversify to get by. And all are more aware than ever of the sector's great social and environmental challenges. "The selection of firms is not a matter of people, but of contexts. There are certain practices that are at a professional moment of introducing new parameters that have marked a turning point," states Pau Bajet, the congress's curator along with Maria Giramé, Carmen Torres, Pau Sarquella, Tomeu Ramis, and Mariona Benedito. "While forty years ago we spoke of the autonomy of architecture and its undeniable capacity to transform spaces and the city, the practices represented at the congress, both Catalan and international, make us realize that there is a great diversity of phenomena and disciplines that interact with space." Previous generations, those of the architects who built Olympic Barcelona, are also represented at the congress, but on routes organized by the congress itself. "There is no tabula rasa, but rather the younger ones collect, with more or less significant transformations, built, geological, cultural legacies...", says Bajet.

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban (Tokyo, 1957) has often been defined as the Robin Hood of contemporary architecture: he has built buildings for the luxury sector, such as a factory for Rolex in Switzerland, but he is also known for his humanitarian work. Since the mid-1990s, Ban has designed emergency shelters and housing during numerous conflicts, from the Rwandan genocide to the War in Ukraine, as well as earthquakes and floods in Japan, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, China, Haiti, Italy, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

The Japanese Junya Ishigami (Tokyo, 1974) is one of the most exceptional architects on the international scene for his radical approach to integrating architecture into the landscape. Among his latest works is the Zaishui Art Museum in China, prepared to be floodable, and a house and restaurant in Ube (Japan), the result of filling a structure excavated within the plot with concrete.

In the architectural treatise par excellence, The Ten Books on Architecture, the Roman architect and theorist Marcus Vitruvius proposed that architecture must fulfill three values, "firmitas, utilitas, venustas", that is, buildings must be solid enough, functional, and beautiful. But 2,000 years later, these values are insufficient to face the challenges of today's world, the ravages of the anthropocene. "Now perhaps we need other words, other ways of thinking: perhaps it is not about firmness but about instability: the ability to work with changing soils, rising seas, transforming climates, and uncertain futures," said architect Eva Franch on Monday at the first plenary session of the World Congress of Architects 2026, held in Barcelona.