The Building was a five-year project led by José Aragüez between 2014 and 2019. It is widely regarded in international circles as one of the most significant contributions to architectural discourse in the 2010s.

The Building was launched through two symposia in 2014—held at the Architectural Association in June, and Columbia University in November—and a theory seminar at Cornell University in Fall 2015. The two events brought together a number of historians, theorists, architects, and PhD candidates from both Europe and the U.S. for an exchange around the problem of architectural thinking as a form of knowledge. Each participant was asked to choose a building, built or designed within the last 25 years, which they could show embodied a historically significant contribution in terms of a particular design aspect or a concept relevant to the reading of buildings in general.

In late 2014 The Building became a book project whose outcome was published in November 2016 by Lars Müller. Many of the essential figures in the discursive scene worldwide contributed to this unprecedented volume with a view to propel architectural thinking to a new level of importance across the humanities and the social sciences. Those include Penelope Dean, Stan Allen, John McMorrough, Peg Rawes, Sylvia Lavin, Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Vera Bühlmann, Enrique Walker, Michael Meredith, Cynthia Davidson, Joan Ockman, Mary McLeod, Mario Carpo, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Andrew Benjamin, Dora Epstein Jones, K. Michael Hays, Philip Ursprung, Amale Andraos, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Mónica Ponce de León, Marina Lathouri, Bernard Tschumi, Mark Cousins, and Sarah Whiting, among others. The book’s agenda can be summarized as follows:

Over the last few decades, architectural history and theory have done a remarkable job of expanding their limits and audiences. The flip side of this expansion, however, has been a marked displacement of the object, and with it ultimately a certain neglect of architectural thinking proper. On the other end of the spectrum, discussions centered strictly round design process and outcome have often proved self-referential or restricted to the spheres of practice and studio teaching alone. This book constructs a bridge between the two tendencies by mobilizing a topic—“the building”—that typically belongs in the latter while pursuing the former’s expansion. Forty-three contributors based in Europe and the US, including deans and academic leaders, architects, historians, theorists, philosophers, and doctoral candidates, offer poignant explorations of key architectural structures conceived across Asia and the West from the late 1980s to the present. In exploring these structures through a number of questions both intra- and meta-disciplinary—like sameness, value, iconography, objecthood, the urban subject, boredom, and digital technologies—this volume suggests ways in which buildings can trigger conceptual frameworks whose influence extends beyond architecture into other domains of knowledge and practice. Such domains include cultural and intellectual history, philosophy, literary theory, the city, the arts, and design at large.

​The last phase of the project unfolded between 2016 and 2019 in the form of lectures and panel discussions events that took place across the United States (Cornell, MIT, Harvard GSD, NYIT, Columbia GSAPP, University of Illinois at Chicago, Taubman College University of Michigan, and A+D museum in LA) and Europe (Lisbon Architecture Triennale, AA London, ETH Zurich, EPFL Lausanne, The Berlage in Rotterdam, VI PER Gallery in Prague, FUP Brno, Politecnico di Turin, COAM Madrid, EAM Málaga, and VOLUME in Paris). Over 400 people from around the world directly participated in or helped with The Building ever since the project kicked off.