We often “make memory” in order to recall past events. In doing so, we are compelled to “refresh memory”, to retrieve what we have “engraved in memory”; and that is, “if memory does not fail us”, and with greater chances of success if we have perhaps “learned it by heart”. At the core of the human condition lies the awareness of being and having been, and therefore of remembering one’s life experiences and giving them meaning in order to orient ourselves toward the future. Beyond being a psychological faculty of recall, memory is, in fact, the foundation of what might be called “historical reason”, to which Ortega y Gasset paid so much attention, and through which we distinguish the remembering human being from the (almost) amnesiac orangutan. Hence we can have a “record” (medical, academic, criminal, digital, etc.), and we are able to construct biographical or historical narratives, depending on whether the focus is placed on an individual or on a collective.

This brief essay-style piece suggests that women architects in the US are collectively rethinking some of the fundamentals of the profession, moving away from the heroic, object-centred and author-driven tradition historically associated with masculine professional identity, and steering it towards paradigms of practice that are relational, ecological, pedagogical, infrastructural and affective. It could be said that women are increasingly approaching architecture through relational epistemologies, which replace the object as an autonomous product.

Architecture, more than a discipline dedicated to erecting structures, is a silent language that organises our experience of the world. Each building, each room, and each street configures a stage where life unfolds, and in that sense, architecture is also a form of memory.

The research stems from a review of Super 8 home movies from the town of As Pontes (A Coruña, Spain), searching for images related to the industrialisation processes of the second half of the 20th century, to explore issues such as identity, territory, and the local climate. The study asserts the importance of home video footage as an archive capable of defining the collective memory of a population and providing a counter-perspective that differs from public audiovisual documentation. Furthermore, it highlights the heritage and identity connotations of this type of archive, as is evident in the specific case of As Pontes (A Coruña) and its industrial and architectural heritage.

In contemporary architecture, memory has shifted from its role as an operative tool to a rhetorical device, suspended between formal nostalgia and decontextualised abstraction. This text argues for the recovery of its disciplinary potential by understanding that to remember is not to reproduce, but to reprogram. Through the intervention at the San Francisco Javier Psychogeriatric Centre in Pamplona—an heir to the nineteenth-century pavilion model designed by Máximo Goizueta—memory is approached as a latent structure capable of organising the project in spatial, material, and therapeutic terms. Against the contemporary banalisation of the past, the proposal advances a prosthetic strategy: an architecture that neither imitates nor replaces, but rather extends and reactivates what already exists. Typology is not preserved as form, but as an operative principle; matter is not reproduced, but transformed into continuity; geometry is not repeated, but inscribed as trace. In this process, memory ceases to be an archive and becomes a system. Rather than fixing an image of the past, the intervention opens itself to time as a constructive agent. Architecture is thus conceived as an unfinished process, where the present does not close history, but continues it. In this sense, to remember is to project forward.

In the historiographic interpretation of architecture, the astronomical orientation of the plan constitutes a critical tool for reading the origin and transformation of compositions whose process of formation remains unknown. The relationship between geometry, primary axes, and celestial bodies makes it possible to understand the plan as a materialised memory, in which design decisions, successive extensions, and symbolic readings are inscribed through slight deviations and readjustments. Cases such as the Temple of Luxor or the Palace of Charles V in Granada show how the architectural plan can simultaneously condense geometric precision, celestial memory, and cultural intention.

In L’età sperimentale (Feltrinelli 2024), Erri De Luca delves into a profound reflection on what it means to grow old, emphasising all the advantages of having achieved “the momentum of accumulated time”. Reading this book by De Luca leads us to recognise the power of will — one only grows old if one allows oneself to be defeated — and this idea of the momentum of accumulated time makes us think of the long-distance race that being an architect entails. We are not travelling on a commuter train; our journey is on a long-distance train. Unlike other professions where achievements are determined by the strength of youth, our work is linked to experience. This is where the idea of serial work comes in, where one tries, fails, tries again, fails again, tries again... and with each attempt, with each mistake and each success, one moves forward on one's path.

The work Hermes and modernity exposed is presented as a strategic and original investigation into the complex implementation of modernity in Latin America, not as a linear success story, but as a field of tensions. Its central thesis is articulated around a powerful and ambivalent metaphor: the figure of Hermes. The book recovers not only the god of commerce and travellers, but also the ‘trickster, god of deception,’ whose powers of persuasion and seduction reflect the way in which the modern project was ‘sold’ to the continent. His iconography, a ‘young and athletic silhouette,’ becomes the paradigm of the new ‘fast and light’ architecture, technically transfigured into the aeroplane, the ‘symbol of the new era.’ The study convincingly argues that this ‘modernity on wings’ found its most tangible materialisation in the international fairs and exhibitions of the mid-20th century, venues where the promise of a globalised future landed, with all its spectacle and contradictions, to be exhibited to the masses.

The book Umbrales Urbanos en Madrid (Urban Thresholds in Madrid) is the result of several years of work by the Heritage, Architecture and Landscape research group based at the Higher Polytechnic School of the CEU San Pablo University. It is a compendium of articles, organised into chapters, that provide insight into the history, current affairs, culture and ecology of peri-urban areas, as well as the main access routes to the city of Madrid. Coordinated by three professors, the complete list of authors includes diverse profiles, experiences from different fields and an international perspective at the end of the volume.

There is a question that runs through this book like an underlying thread: who has the right to exist in the history of architecture? Patrícia Santos Pedrosa responds not with a linear, all-encompassing narrative, but with a deliberately fragmentary approach: dialogues, fragments and reflections which, as the author herself states, piece together a jigsaw puzzle “whose true dimensions are unknown”. It is precisely this lack of knowledge that reveals her starting point and her strongest argument.