The IE School of Architecture is upending traditional models of architectural education, betting instead on radical new curricula to reinvigorate the discipline. For design professionals interested in business, the new international Master in Architectural Management and Design program offers pioneering training in business management for the AEC sector.

The program teaches designers the skills they need to become successful, understanding the design implications of business decisions and vice-versa. With a diverse group of instructing practitioners and advisers from unique academic backgrounds, the IE Master in Architectural Management and Design program allows students to access a wide network with deep industry expertise. “Most architects are entrepreneurs and vocational designers who need a specific management toolkit to build the career they want,” the program directors explain.

The innovative and pioneering content of this master program lies in the combination of IE’s well known entrepreneurial spirit and business expertise in conjunction with the design approach of IE School of Architecture & Design. Students gain the professional edge of attending a globally recognized business school that has been training field leaders for over 30 years. The program teaches critical skills such as business acumen and management know-how— skills that can play a key role in the success of an architectural practice. More after the jump!

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In only a few days, the biggest names in architecture and design across the world will descend upon New York City to attend the Architizer A+ Awards gala. Perhaps we’re just super exhilarated about the event and proud of our winners, but we can’t get over how big this has become, with honorees and guests flying from all over the world to be a part of it.

Take our A+ winners from Spain: Estudio A2arquitectos,  Josep MiAS ARCHITECTS, APARICIO + DONAIRE, and ÃBATON. These firms will not only be attending our party, but throwing their own the very next day! On Friday, May 17th, join the Center for Architecture and the Spain Culture New York-Consulate General of Spain in celebrating some of these extraordinary projects. The free event includes cocktails and runs from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Center for Architecture. (For more details, click here.)

Seeing these three remarkable Spanish projects made us think of all the amazing architecture going on in Spain lately. So in honor of La Furia Roja, we’ve rounded up some of the best examples of contemporary Spanish design, including, of course, our A+ winners. Click through to see them all!

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NYCxDESIGN’s 800+ events include a tour of New York’s Battery Park City. Photo: courtesy of NYCxDESIGN

NYCxDESIGN launches today, and if you’re in a tizzy over which of the 800+ events to attend, fear not! We’ve got the ultimate guide to the architecture installations, tours, parties, and talks that you can’t miss—or the ones we’ll be checking out anyway. Click through for our picks!

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The temporary pavilion made of ephemeral materials — recycled plastic bags, Tetrabriks, styrofoam, what have you — is slowly but surely losing its novelty. Organic-looking, inhabitable blobs made of welded-together yogurt cups and modular fortresses of stacked shipping palettes can still coax out a few retweets and Facebook likes in support, but in the end, the impressions they leave won’t outlast the shelf life of the products they’re made of — nor do they necessarily have to.

But one particular pavilion that was recently constructed and razed (burned to the ground, more accurately) struck us as different from the rest: For the annual “Fallas” festival in Valencia, architects Miguel Arraiz García of bipolaire arquitectos and David Moreno Terrón of Pink Intruder designed a structure made of 3,000 corrugated hexagonal cardboard boxes that privileges the poetry of space and form over the cheekiness of its materiality.

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We’ve written previously about IE MADes and their promising new master’s program in architectural design. The program takes an interdisciplinary approach to training the next generation of architects, with an ambitious agenda that incorporates elements of management and entrepreneurship as well as architecture and urbanism . A key component of this innovative curriculum are the Conversation series and the  Open Lectures, mediums for dialogue between students, faculty, as well as practitioners, specialists, and critics. The 2013 lecture series launched earlier this month with Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, who delivered a talk entitled “Evolving Ideas: Primitive Future.” Click through for more!

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Looks like the genius of celebrated starchitect Santiago Calatrava might be a little compromised. The trademark dramatic, undulating crown of his Ysios Winery in northern Spain apparently is failing its function of being a roof. According to the Guardian, the owners of the spectacular winery say the roof leaks, and they want Calatrava to pay for a new architect to design a better one. Ouch. Click through for more. 

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This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Jury Award and Popular Choice Award in the Health Care + Aging category. See the full list of winners here.

A lackluster pool is like a bad cheesecake. If it fails to supply delight and escape, its existence just seems pointless. The Hotel Castell dels Hams, on the Spanish island of Majorca, had a pool problem. Though it was housed in a glass and aluminum shell, “the pool was dark and thermally worked quite badly with a lot of heat loss through this enclosure,” writes architect Cristian Santandreu, whose firm Estudio A2arquitectos revamped the swimming situation—and added an adjacent spa—in 2011. The architects’ splashy new design wowed our A+ judges and our readers, garnering both the jury prize and the popular vote in the Health Care + Aging category of the A+ Awards.

The pool’s new wrapper is punctured with square windows and skylights on three sides (plus the roof). With all that light bouncing off the water and the pool floor, guests get a hint of topsy-turviness, as though they are swimming on the ceiling. Meanwhile, the really committed sunbathers can try for a geometric suntan! Read more.

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This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Jury and Popular Choice Awards in the art galleries category. See the full list of winners here. 

In another Architizer A+ Award upset, “DOMUSae, Spaces for Culture,” an exhibition at Madrid’s Salón de Reinos, swept both the Jury and Popular Choice Prizes for best art gallery. Appealing to professional critics and architecture fans-at-large, “DOMUSae, Spaces for Culture” fuses contemporary gallery spaces with a historic baroque armory. By showcasing a selection of canonical Spanish buildings within an opulent historic edifice, Architects Aparicio + Donaire celebrates the extensive architectural patrimony of Spain in downtown Madrid.

The architects were thrilled to be able to exhibit within Salón de Reinos, a 17th-century wing of the Royal Buen Retiro Palace. The grand halls of the former armory are capped with fresco-covered vaults and elaborate plasterwork from the former days of the colonial Spanish Empire. Chief project architect Jesus Donaire says that the opportunity to use the uninhabited building to house the exhibition “enabled us to construct an exhibition route through the building’s empty spaces. This means that the visitor can simultaneously enjoy the content of the exhibition and experiment by way of spatial transition with new ways of seeing the original building.” Read more after the jump!

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One last Real or Rendering for the road. This house in Spain is how we like to do camping: a house in the woods that’s not of the woods. The concrete forms rise above the tree line, with views in all directions. The house’s four bounding walls are reduced to just columns, sixteen in all, which frame modular open air rooms. Is this house too good to actually exist? Let us know what you think below.

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Project:  JP House

Architect:  MYCC Oficina de Arquitectura

Location:  Tragacete, Cuenca, Spain

The role of vernacular design traditions in contemporary architecture is contentious. Proponents of modernism have long concentrated on new ways of living, viewing provincial, often agrarian architectural models as inapplicable to contemporary life. More conservative designers have sought to redeploy aspects of traditional structures in a bid for nostalgia and social memory.

Finding a workable middle ground is often elusive, but the recent JP House in Tragacete proposes a viable workaround. The house was designed for an urban family with a strong contemporary aesthetic who desired a weekend home in a small, rural town. In keeping with the ‘compact urbanism’ of Spanish villages, the house is appropriately scaled for the community. The distinctive larch cladding acts as a rain screen, comprised by narrow slats that pay homage to the village’s historic wicker industry. A wrap-around terrace encourages outdoor entertainment, in keeping with the active street life of rural Spain.

Read more about this project in the Architizer database!

Images courtesy FG+SG | Fotografia de Arquitectura

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