Architect Rafael Moneo spent ten very important years of his academic life at the UPC, and has built some of his most outstanding works in Barcelona, such as L'Illa Diagonal and L'Auditori. The esteem his Catalan colleagues hold for him is also profound, as could be seen in the full house at the presentation of the ambitious intellectual biography of Moneo, the work of fellow architect Carmen Díez, at the Pati de les Dones of the CCCB, within the Biennial of Thought. The editor of Acantilado, Sandra Ollo, pointed out that the event was not the presentation of Rafael Moneo, Building Ideas (1954-2024), but the "celebration" of the book. The list of established architects who did not want to miss it is also striking. Among the public were Beth Galí, Esteve Bonell, Elías Torres, Ramon Sanabria, Francesc Pernas, Lluís Domènech Girbau, Juli Capella, Jaume Bach and Joan Busquets. Also the filmmaker Poldo Pomés, author of a documentary about the Navarrese architect.

Josep Aparici i Fins is one of the most important geographers of 18th-century Catalonia, and at the same time, he is surrounded by controversy. During the War of the Spanish Succession, the Austrian authorities commissioned him to map Catalonia and, after the war, he entered the service of King Philip V, who granted him the title of His Majesty's geographer. Furthermore, he was one of the main collaborators in the implementation of the cadastre, a measure that was detrimental to the Catalan economy. But, despite everything, his career has been considered ambiguous.

Angélica Liddell does not want to be buried, but devoured: "If I die right now, throw me out so they can quarter me and eat me," she said this evening in the conversation that closed the first day of the Biennial of Thought. "I would like to be a victim of cannibalism. Deep down, eroticism has a lot of cannibalism in it. That nothing would be left to bury, that it would remain in stomachs, that it would pass into the blood, into the cells," added Liddell, who spoke with writer Luna Miguel to present her first novel, Silk Road (Malas Tierras), and the poetry collection I ask for the end of life (La bella Varsovia). If not, she would like to end up in the Montparnasse cemetery, where she visits references like Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett, Baudelaire, and Cioran, "with a tombstone that says nothing." "Although it doesn't matter: even if my name is on it, no one will know who I am," she lets slip.

"The practical success of a theoretical project": this is how architect and urban planner Manuel de Solà-Morales defined Ildefons Cerdà's Eixample. Now this statement can be read within Models. Cities and utopias 1859-1958, the exhibition that the COAC is hosting until October 18th as part of the Ildefons Cerdà Year. "A lot was already said about Cerdà during the Cerdà Year in 2009. What we had left in the inkwell was to place him alongside Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, the greats," states Fernando Marzá, the curator of the exhibition, together with UPC urban planner Carles Crosas and Generalitat architect Beth Tuà. "Cerdà did not just plan a city; he wrote a treatise on urban planning, almost the first one," Marzá asserts. Before drawing the Eixample, Cerdà created a great topographical map and a statistical study of how the working class lived. "Engels had done it in London five years earlier," the curator recalls.

The artist Marisol Escobar (Paris, 1930-New York, 2016), known simply as Marisol, welcomes the public to the exhibition dedicated to her at the Centro Botín in Santander until October 25th from an Andy Warhol film, who said of her that she was the first artist "with glamour." In this film, Marisol appears motionless for a few minutes next to her sculpture Women and Dog (1963-1964), currently owned by the Whitney Museum, as if she were just another wooden figure. This film serves to remember that Marisol triumphed on the New York scene even before Warhol, and that she was defined as "the queen of pop art".

One of the masterpieces by architect Josep Antoni Coderch, Casa Rozes, at the tip of Almadrava in Roses, is trapped in a judicial maze. It was sold without the owners' consent and with forged documents, and five years later the case is still not resolved. One of the owners of the house, Monika Laskowska, lives in Poland and is very much alive. Even so, according to the deed with which the property was sold in March 2021, she had died in Nuremberg.

A sound artistic duo, a writer, a publishing house, a stage director, a musician, an actor, and a playwright are the winners of the 2026 National Culture Awards, the accolades that have been presented since 2009 by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CoNCA). The winners are Cabosanroque, Pol Guasch, Jande Editorial, Àlex Ollé, Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Oriol Pla, and Victoria Szpunberg, as announced this Friday at an event held at the Pau Casals Auditorium in El Vendrell, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Pau Casals. The ceremony was hosted by journalist Andrea Gumes and was attended by the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, the Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, and the President of the CoNCA, Margarida Troguet. Each award comes with a prize of 20,000 euros, and starting this year, there are no longer five winners, but seven. In their acceptance speeches, the winners agreed on championing culture, collective values, and public services as tools to confront reactionary forces.

With the permission of the Guggenheim Museum, the metro is the other great icon that a contemporary architect has left in Bilbao. While Frank O. Gehry often created spectacular buildings, Norman Foster adheres strictly to function. Almost forty years after the inauguration of the metro, Foster's new work in the city, the expansion of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, which opens its doors this Monday, is once again a lesson in silent architecture. And yet, Foster's intervention –designed together with Luis Maria Uriarte– has emblematic elements, such as a spectacular open-plan temporary exhibition hall of 1,300 m²², which leads to about 700 m²² of terraces. Another is the old courtyard converted into a large atrium where sculptures by Eduardo Chillida and Richard Serra can be seen, all of them around the monumental fountain that Francisco Durrio made for the composer Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga, who died prematurely at 19 years old. Until now this sculpture was outside, and with the new location it has recovered its character as a sound monument: the noise of the water evokes the weeping of the sculpture of the muse Euterpe that crowns it. "The ducts and pipes of the great hall are hidden to achieve a pure space to make the works of art shine," said Norman Foster this morning. "When Foster and Uriarte won the competition and Foster came to explain the project, they told us that we had asked for a good exhibition hall and that they would give us the most beautiful hall of any European museum," explains the museum's director, Miguel Zugaza, who wanted to close the tour with a room dedicated to Jorge Oteiza, the only monographic one, which has the air of a sanctuary.

For the German artist Anselm Kiefer (Donaueschingen, 1945), considered one of the great creators of the second half of the 20th century, art is like a lifeline. "I only have faith in art, without it I am lost," says Kiefer, as can be read on a wall text at the end of the major exhibition dedicated to him by the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera starting this Friday and running until January 24th, titled The Secret Life of Plants. Anselm Kiefer in the Grothe Collection. With a statement like this, it might seem that Kiefer is having a moment of weakness, but in reality, he is a titanic artist who, since the late 1960s, has addressed the trauma of Nazism with every means at his disposal; and, beyond the Holocaust, he has forged a very broad cosmogony where the Germanic myths of the Nibelungs and Wagnerism, the Old Testament, and the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah converge. Also alchemy, Sumerian and Egyptian cosmologies, the philosophy of Heidegger, the romanticism of Hölderlin and Goethe, and the poetry of Celan and Bachmann. "Kiefer says of himself that he looks, at the same time, towards the past and towards the future, and only art can do that," states the exhibition curator, Walter Smerling.

A white European woman arrived with her camera at a public housing complex in South Los Angeles, Imperial Courts, whose population was mostly Hispanic and African American. The timing could not have been worse: after the 1992 riots following the beating of Rodney King at the hands of the police, the neighborhood and its inhabitants were in the spotlight. The gangs had agreed to a truce, but there was still a lot of violence. It was most likely that the whole thing would have gone wrong, but little by little this woman, the photographer Dana Lixenberg (Amsterdam, 1964), earned the people's trust and managed to take a magnificent series of portraits. She talks to the people and gives them portraits she takes of them with a Polaroid. Soon she began to be known in the neighborhood as "the photo lady".

Renoir's painting does not admit half-measures: either you hate it or you love it. Detractors consider him the height of kitsch. About ten years ago, the movement Renoir is a terrible painter emerged on Instagram, and a few dozen people demonstrated at the door of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston demanding that his works be removed from the museum. The motto on the placards could not have been more blunt: "God hates Renoir". Today this group has 17,800 followers. For now, however, the followers of one of the pioneers of Impressionism are outdoing them. The exhibition Renoir and Love will open its doors at the National Gallery in London on October 3rd with a record number of advance ticket sales: 32,000, ahead of Van Gogh.

In Catalonia, the architect Josep Lluís Sert (Barcelona, 1902-1983) is remembered above all for being the author of the Joan Miró Foundation. But his legacy is much broader, from the pioneering works of rationalism in Catalonia, among which are the Casa Bloc and the Antitubercular Dispensary, developed together with Josep Torres Clavé and Joan Baptista Subirana, to the most emblematic ones of his time in the United States, where the Peabody Terrace stands out, that is, the residential complex for married students at Harvard University.

André Breton played the role of Pope of Surrealism with great forcefulness: he did not tolerate any of the movement's members deviating from the path of aesthetic and political radicalism he had set. And when they did, he would exclude them or subject them to public scorn, as happened to Joan Miró in 1926 with the sets and costumes for the Russian Ballet's production of Romeo and Juliet, created in collaboration with Max Ernst. André Breton and Louis Aragon led a group of surrealists who burst into the premiere with whistles and shouts and handed out a pamphlet titled Protest, in which they accused Miró and Ernst of having betrayed the principles of surrealism by creating commercial art. "It is not acceptable for thought to be in the service of money," said the authors, for whom that collaboration meant "domesticating dreams for the benefit of the international aristocracy."

Miquel Barceló is a painter voracious with tradition. Over the years, he has updated the legacy of the great masters with material paintings that often evoke decomposing flesh. In Mapa de carn, one of the featured works in the new CaixaForum exhibition, Una força del passat; Barceló evoked Pablo Picasso's Guernica,with a scene full of "animals, bodies, eyes, and deformed creatures," as stated by the exhibition's curators, Nimfa Bisbe, director of the La Caixa contemporary art collection; and art historian Carlos Martín. The goal of the exhibition is to reveal "how art history continues to be a very fertile ground for contemporary artists," as Bisbe says. In Mapa de carn, Barceló also used repeated eyes that refer to the iconic Romanesque paintings of Sant Climent de Taüll. "Barceló does not represent only war or the spiritual, but a world seen as dismemberment, viscera, and matter. The work can be read as a brutal update of ancient images of suffering," say the curators.

The change of era at the Macba is becoming a reality. This Tuesday, the first speech by Valentín Roma as director sounded spot on: among the novelties he has put forward are a three-year master plan and the desire to change the contents, to go from the 200,000 visitors of last year to the 320,000 from before the covid pandemic. "In 2025, the Macba was visited by 200,000 people and that is clearly insufficient. We will not look the other way regarding this issue. We will face a growth process that will neither be easy nor immediate, but it will certainly be among our priority objectives," said Roma. Furthermore, he wants to develop "specific heritage plans" to exhibit the collections beyond the parameters of the "inventory," and an archive plan.

The exhibition Award-winning architecture: 125 years of awards proposes a journey through the intense relationship between Barcelona and architecture through the works and awards that have contributed to defining its physiognomy. Curated by architects Pau de Solà-Morales and Ignasi Bonet, the exhibition connects the antecedents of the Annual Artistic Buildings Competition –promoted at the end of the 19th century– with the 67 editions of the FAD Architecture and Interior Design Awards, created in 1958 and considered the architectural awards with the longest history in Europe.

The artist Mariaelena Roqué (Tarragona, 1952) speaks loud and clear: "I am not a prostitute nor have I ever been one, but, nevertheless, I have been treated like a prostitute and denied as a prostitute for being a free woman who defends her own language", states Roqué at the Rocío Santa Cruz gallery in Barcelona. Roqué is known for being the co-founder of the Carles Santos Company, and now, coinciding with the 12th edition of the Gallery Weekend, she is exhibiting for the first time in a gallery. She speaks about prostitution in front of photographs of a performance where she can be seen naked running through a forest at night, a reminder of the prostitutes that "hunters take to their wild parties". She raises her voice for these women and for those who sit on the side of a road waiting for clients.

Casa Rozes is one of the great works by architect Josep Antoni Coderch. It is also one of the most exceptional single-family homes in Catalan architecture, due to how it integrates into a cliff facing the sea at the tip of Almadrava in Roses. Its history was marked by years of abandonment, but since the end of last year, everything has been good news. The change of ownership has allowed it to be recovered, and the rehabilitation works began a few days ago. The company in charge of the works is the real estate and construction firm Procasa, according to a project by the Collgorgot studio. Since Casa Rozes is listed as a Cultural Asset of National Interest (BCIN), the main objective of the interventions is to restore it to its original appearance.

The case of Salvador Dalí reflects the historical reservations of the authorities when it comes to paying tribute to him with a public space in Barcelona. Since he died in 1989 and until 2021, all attempts to dedicate a street or a square to him remained in the drawer. One of the recurring ideas was to dedicate a space to him around the future La Sagrera station, but it did not materialize. Dalí is not in the nomenclature, but, instead, starting this Wednesday he will have a home on Passeig de Gràcia, specifically at Casa Amatller, which will permanently host a new, updated and expanded version of Cybernetic Dalí, the immersive experience that Layers of Reality and the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation premiered at the Ideal Centre for Digital Arts in 2022. "Four years later it was time to take a step forward," states the founder and director of Layers of Reality, Jordi Sellas.

Dutch businessman Joop van Caldenborgh (The Hague, 1940), when he was sixteen, bought his first piece of art, an engraving that cost him about 25 guilders he had saved by delivering newspapers. Over the years, as the founder of the chemical company Caldic, he has become one of the most important private collectors of modern and contemporary art in Europe. As can be seen in the museum he opened in 2016 in the city of Wassenaar, the Voorlinden Museum, Van Caldenborgh has brought together thousands of works, including those by many of the most renowned artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Damien Hirst, Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, James Turrell (who has a permanent installation there), Maurizio Cattelan, Pipilotti Rist, Anselm Kiefer, and Yayoi Kusama.