Launch of “Why Architecture Matters”

On 15 October at 7 p.m. Ivorypress presented the book Por qué importa la arquitectura by Paul Goldberger, which will be the second volume of the Ivorypress Essential collection. The event was attended by the author along with architect Norman Foster, founder of Foster + Partners; architect Luis Fernández-Galiano, professor of architectural projects at ETSAM and author of the book’s preface; Jorge Sainz, professor at ETSAM and Spanish translator of the book, and Elena Ochoa Foster, founder and CEO of Ivorypress.

This book is the Spanish edition of Why Architecture Matters, a text published by Yale University Press in 2009 in which Goldberger elucidates why and how architecture affects us, both emotionally and intellectually. Jorge Sainz’s translation, in conversation with the author, has enriched the text accordingly, expanding its original, more local focus, and making it more universal in tone and scope. Faithful to his clear and concise prose, Goldberger has elaborated a treatise in which he explains how architecture not only provides us with shelter but also shapes our relationship to space and time in a singular way. Architecture contributes to the construction of significant spaces that bear our collective memory and which therefore hold a profound symbolic, civic and ethical value. This volume is not a work on the history of architecture, an architectural styles guide, nor a dictionary of architecture, although it contains elements of all three.

Goldberger’s style, imbued with convictions that are as eclectic as they are firm—as Luis Fernández-Galiano points out in his text—succeeds at bridging the gap between patrimonial architecture, which almost anybody can enjoy, and avant-garde architecture, which is often harder to accept. ‘The seduction of Goldberger’s prose must be found in its urban rooting and its absence of dogmatism, which allows him to resonate with the pulse of the city’, describes Luis Fernández-Galiano. In this way, Goldberger draws the lay public closer to the secrets of a discipline forever living in the threshold between aesthetics and function.

Paul Goldberger (New Jersey, US, 1950), has been described by the Huffington Post as ‘the leading figure in architecture criticism.’ He began his career in The New York Times, where he obtained the highest award in American journalism, the Pulitzer Prize, for distinguished criticism in 1984. From 1997 to 2011 he was the architecture critic of The New Yorker, where he wrote his well-known column ‘The Sky Line’. He is currently contributing editor of Vanity Fair. He is Joseph Urban Professor of Design and Architecture at The New School in New York and has been the dean of the Parsons The New School for Design.

Por qué importa la arquitectura is the second title of the Ivorypress Essential collection under which Ivorypress publishes essential works that provide new insight regarding disciplines related to contemporary art. The first volume of this collection was A Crazy Job. Leading Publishers in Conversation with Juan Cruz Ruiz, a book which approaches the present and future of the publishing industry by way of a selection of interviews to the most distinguished publishers of the 20th and 21st centuries.