This book presents the work of the Spanish architect Julio Salcedo in a series of built and speculative projects. Salcedo’s houses, early achievements that stunned both academic and professional circles with their fresh originality and precocious sophistication, are presented along with unpublished competition proposals for large-scale buildings. The projects’ varying locales, scales, and ambitions all demonstrate a commitment to architecture as a conceptual medium with the capacity to tackle complex ideas as well as a material practice of transformative, worldly practicality. Each is a built essay that works through architectural problems of form, construction, and material to achieve thought-provoking resolutions of a difficult yet satisfying beauty. The book complements a thorough graphic documentation of selected projects with Salcedo’s own writings and critical essays by Luis Rojo de Castro and Ivan Rupnik. They situate the projects in Salcedo’s multi-faceted conceptual and professional world and place them in the context of the constellation of ideas that currently shape and propel the field. “Julio Salcedo’s ongoing interest in landscape and urban design has informed his architectural work, producing a rich, invested and responsible practice. In all, I believe his work illustrates his ambition to inform even modest architectural projects with broader issues present in contemporary practice, something that I believe speaks highly for his intense and profound interest in design.” Rafael Moneo

• Foreword by Luis Rojo de Castro
• Text by Julio Salcedo
• Essay by Ivan Rupnik
• Edited by Oscar Riera Ojeda

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Contributors Biographies

Julio Salcedo studied architecture and sculpture at Rice University and completed his architecture studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Salcedo is an associate professor at City College, New York, and has taught courses on design, history and theory of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Syracuse University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University. Salcedo also writes for several international journals. He is the principal of Scalar Architecture, an award winning international design firm based in New York City and Spain.

Luis Rojo de Castro architect, professor and theorist, practices in Madrid with Fernandez-Shaw. Their practice builds significant public and cultural projects many of which have stemmed from winning competition entries. He graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid in 1987, where he has been teaching design since 1992 and is currently associate professor at the Department of Architecture. Rojo obtained his Masters degree at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, in 1989 – the year he received a Fulbright Scholarship – and was Visiting Professor of Architecture at the GSD on a regular basis between 1994 and 1998, and again in 2002. Since 1999 he has been Visiting Professor of History and Architecture Theory at the Escuela de Arquitectura de Navarra. As a result of his academic and research practice, his writings on contemporary architecture have been published in A + U, El Croquis, Cassabella, Tectónica, Revista Arquitectura, CIRCO, etc.

Ivan Rupnik architect, urban designer, professor, and theorist, works bet- ween Boston and Zagreb. Rupnik co-authored Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition Strategy, Practice, a book published by Actar and Harvard University that explores the types of architectural design practices that emerge from the context of prolonged instability. Also at Harvard, Rupnik’s PhD work researches the notion of experimentation as distinct from avant-garde architectural practice in post-war theory and practice. Rupnik is assistant professor at Northeastern University’s School of Architecture and he is currently working on a 100 hectare university campus in collaboration with the Spatial Planning Office of the University of Zagreb and an urban park and infrastructural node in collaboration with HPNJ+ Architects, also in Zagreb.