Alberto Pérez Gómez first came to prominence as an architectural theorist and historian with his 1983 publication, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science; a book that won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for distinguished scholarship in architectural history the following year. Having established himself as one of the architecture world’s leading thinkers and most original historical theorists, he offered a book that completely broke all norms of either academic or architectural discourse; his 1992 treatise Polyphilo, or, The Dark Forest Revisited: An Erotic Epiphany of Architecture. The author and editor of numerous publications since, in 2007 he co-authored Towards an Ethical Architecture: Issues Within the Work of Gregory Henriquez, a publication “seeking to remind architects of the critical role they play in leading the creation of a community’s collective space”. In the first of these seminal texts he illustrated how architecture was profoundly transformed by the scientific revolution of the eighteenth century - and how the consequences of that revolution are still dominant in architectural practice and discourse today. The second investigates architectural ‘beauty’ through the prism of erotic desire. Described as treading the borders of fiction, theory, and pornography, it epitomizes Pérez-Gómez’s desire to reframe architecture as an emotive, corporeal and visceral phenomenon in the context of today’s scientific and material society. Running through these works is a constant argument that blurs the intellectual divisions of modern thinking – whether they be based on drawing a sharp distinction between the role of emotion and logic in architectural design; the part sentiments and feelings play in our use and understanding of the spaces we inhabit; or the divisions that have emerged in aesthetic and ethical theory that see the former as type of theorised formula and the latter as an isolated and fully quantifiable set of social practices. In addressing these issues, he begins this interview-article with comments on the phenomenological underpinnings in this thinking and his interest in both Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Constant change in current market and social conditions has triggered the demand for a more adaptable building stock. The capacity to assume and accommodate change has thus become a new requirement for buildings. At the same time, there is a growing demand for more environmentally conscious buildings. New protocols, building codes, and certification systems are becoming stricter regarding buildings’ CO2 emissions, energy efficiency, and other environmental aspects. The current building industry fails to satisfy these two demands; conventional buildings rarely enable change, unless undergoing complex renovations, and rarely consider environmental features beyond mandatory legislation. In this context, this paper proposes Modular Ecotechnological Architecture as a response to both demands. The basis is an integrated design that looks at energy, water, and materials’ efficiency altogether, combined with a modular industrialized building system. The system allows buildings to grow or reduce in size according to their needs, with little impact for their inhabitants, enabling versatility for a variety of uses within the same space and over time. This paper presents the concept of this new building system together with the technical, building code-related, and economic challenges encountered throughout recent experimental projects.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a valuable opportunity to carry out cohort studies that allow us to advance our knowledge on pathophysiological mechanisms of neuropsychiatric diseases. One of these opportunities is the study of the relationships between inflammation, brain development and an increased risk of suffering neuropsychiatric disorders. Based on the hypothesis that neuroinflammation during early stages of life is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders and confers a greater risk of developing neuropsychiatric disorders, we propose a cohort study of SARS-CoV-2-infected pregnant women and their newborns. The main objective of SIGNATURE project is to explore how the presence of prenatal SARS-CoV-2 infection and other non-infectious stressors generates an abnormal inflammatory activity in the newborn. The cohort of women during the COVID-19 pandemic will be psychological and biological monitored during their pregnancy, delivery, childbirth and postpartum. The biological information of the umbilical cord (foetus blood) and peripheral blood from the mother will be obtained after childbirth. These samples and the clinical characterisation of the cohort of mothers and newborns, are tremendously valuable at this time. This is a protocol report and no analyses have been conducted yet, being currently at, our study is in the recruitment process step. At the time of this publication, we have identified 1,060 SARS-CoV-2 infected mothers and all have already given birth. From the total of identified mothers, we have recruited 537 SARS-COV-2 infected women and all of them have completed the mental health assessment during pregnancy. We have collected biological samples from 119 mothers and babies. Additionally, we have recruited 390 non-infected pregnant women.