This book presents the work of the Spanish architect Julio Salcedo in a series of built and speculative projects. Salcedo’s houses, early achie- vements that stunned both academic and professional circles with their fresh originality and precocious sophistication, are presented along with unpublished competition proposals for large-scale buildings. The projects’ varying locales, scales and ambitions all demonstrate a commitment to architecture as a conceptual medium with the capacity to tackle complex ideas as well as a material practice of transformative, worldly practicality. Each is a built essay that works through architectural problems of form, construction and material to achieve thought-provoking resolutions of a difficult yet satisfying beauty * The book complements a thorough graphic documentation of selected projects with Salcedo’s own writings and critical essays by Luis Rojo and Ivan Rupnik. They situate the projects in Salcedo’s multi-faceted conceptual and professional world and place them in the context of the constellation of ideas that currently shape and propel the field * …Julio Salcedo’s ongoing interest in landscape and urban design has informed his architectural work, producing a rich, invested and responsible practice. In all, I believe his work illustrates his ambition to inform even modest architectural projects with broader issues present in contemporary practice, something that I believe speaks highly for his intense and profound interest in design. Rafael Moneo