I feel very happy to increasingly see my photographs published in many magazines digital editions that are now showing their contents through reading applications for iPad, tablets and smartphones.

The two last I have found are two Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and Alonso, Balaguer y Arquitectos Asociados Barcelona Las Arenas renovation project photographs -one of them in a beautifully saturated double page- appearing in an article by Jeff L. Brown for the January 2012 Civil Engineering issue, the journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

I do find it very gratifying to see that my images work so well in such reader interactive applications, quite interesting and fast growing apps -so fast that one of these applications actually advertises itself as “the world’s largest newsstand” … – and knowing that a reference magazine for a highly specialized professional field such as American engineering is giving that much relevance to my photographs.

All Barcelona Las Arenas photographs were made in order to serve both the project editorial communication as well as the two architectural firms that created and developed the project corporate communication.

Las Arenas renovation has been shortlisted among the finalists for the 2012 Civic Trust Awards to be awarded next March 2nd in Edinburgh. Much of the project presentation is based on my photographs and I very much hope that both the project and my photos can gain the recognition of such an important British professional organization.

Diagonal Zero Zero tower powerfully strucks me because of the elegant way the building faces its surrounding urban landscape and the way her skin purely white crosses the blue saturated sky in all its glory.

My photographs of this project interpret it according to the idea of representing the kind presence of a fascinating white sculpture that extraordinarily rises above the city that decidedly deserves to be contemplated with great tranquility and attention.

It is because of the combination of this strong and yet beautifully suggestive presence of Diagonal Zero Zero that I have decided to use a photograph of this project -the only photograph in wich the tower faces the clouds of a clearing storm- as the background of my greeting card for 2012.

Let me please wish you all the best for next year 2012. I do hope to see you here again very soon: Happy New Year.

Barcelona Open House has included among the projects that will be visited in its 2011 edition the two 34 Carme and 66 Sant Pere més Alt streets rehabilitation projects that I have photographed for his authors, architects Agustí Costa and Josep Llobet.

Both projects are interventions that raise from a particularly uninhibited dialogue with the preexisting dwellings to propose new and imaginative solutions in domestic space.

Carme and Sant Pere més Alt projects can be visited on October 22 and 23: you can read more details on the organization website.

Barcelona Open House is part of Open House World Wide and is one of the cities like London, New York, Chicago, Rome and Helsinki promoting through this initiative architecture as a cultural value to learn in a social and interactive way to improve  debate and exchange of points of view and the collective identity of the inhabitants of the cities.

The office of Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners has commissioned me to take some photographs of his conversion project of former Barcelona Las Arenas bullring into an entertainment and leisure complex.

The space has been projected to become a new landmark and a monumental entrance to the city that has as main feature a dome that crowns the building as a new public square suspended in the air that is supported by the powerful orange brick mass enhanced and carefully preserved from the old historic building.

My pictures had to represent as essential requirements by the project architects in London both the decided presence of the building in its urban setting and the new and prominent floating square over the city.

Being obvious that any point of view from street level interpreted the ideas that I had to represent with very little resolution and that they could even get dissolved, it became necessary to locate some vantage points in Plaza de España and Tarragona street from where to work and graphically inscribe the large bullring oval dome on the dense and ordered urban fabric of the Barcelona Eixample limits.

Similarly, it was also vital for the graphic treatment of the images the choice of a more vivid contrast and saturation in my photographs in order to highlight the particular use of color in Las Arenas project as is characteristic and distinctive in the work of Richard Rogers.

You can see more Las Arenas photographs in the Specials section in the Gallery of the site.

The new Barcelona Telefónica headquarters building designed by architect Enric Massip is a 110 meters tall tower rising from the very beginning of Diagonal Avenue as a delicate curtain wall supported by a light white steel mesh growing from the pavement to complete and decidedly dominate the surrounding urban landscape.

The presence of Diagonal Zero Zero tower in Barcelona Fòrum area and the visual power of its white sunlit color determine the choice of very specific hours in which to photograph it to carefully control the shadows projected by neighboring buildings and to select, above all, a contrast ratio to preserve the detailed drawing of the white façades silhouetted against the dense blue sky.

Sunlight is clean and exact and always lights up the frame with precise direction and contrast: in architectural photography is always the sun who says the last word.

The first thing that called my attention when looking at Barcelona Rosselló Street Emma Room Mate Hotel by architects Yolanda Nadal and Luís Moneo were the many white lit pieces distributed on its façade rectangular surface and how these pieces were dissolved by the surrounding urban landscape.

The hotel façade is intentionally lightweight because of the pieces apparent motion as seen from Enric Granados Street on the left side of the building and compact when looking at the very same lit rectangles as seen coming from the right from Balmes Street.

I was specially concerned in preserving the subtle connection between the white texture inside the lit pieces in the night façade and the detail in the huge black area in wich the white rectangles are rhythmically arranged: although exposure and contrast were difficult to control, losing detail in both blacks and whites would have meant a quite unpleasant look in my photographs far from what I saw and felt when I first noticed the hotel delicate urban presence.

I found this nice Shirley Temple graffiti on a small door at the entrance of a former squat building at the corner of Ciutat de Granada and Pallars streets in Barcelona 22@ Poble Nou district. I walked many times in front of the building when photographing the 22@ area and I always noticed this happy sight and pleasant smile, quite an unexpected contrast in an old quarter all shaken by heavy works and immersed on a powerful transformation process.

Two months before photographing the graffiti, the squat -a building that had previously been a car repair workshop, and even before a small factory- was razed and the site cleared for new construction. The graffiti was lost and only one single beautiful element from the old XIXth century factory was preserved, a long and tall chimney.

That’s why I want to share with you this photograph and wish you all the best for the new year to come. Season’s greetings and happy new year 2011.