Spanish architects are no stranger to making the most out of crisis conditions. When faced with the 2008 global financial crisis, a generation of Madrid designers found ways to initiate new research and unlikely projects, and to diversify what has long constituted capital-A architecture, with a sense of curiosity and generosity rather than austerity or retreat. Some 14 years later, the discipline finds itself at another crisis crossroads, this time at the scale of a global pandemic. How may designers reformat notions of practice and expertise in an uncertain future? Are there ways to revalue what it means to do architecture, to offer up good ideas in unlikely places, and to experiment with different ways of working in/through a growing climate of crisis (and crisis of climate)?
AR: Let’s look back to that other crisis of 2008. What changed for architects in Madrid at that moment? And what is changing today?
To give a bit of context… in Spain and the European Union, all major public projects
