Anto Lloveras’ early architectural formation is inseparable from the intense experimental climate of Madrid in the early 2000s, when large-scale housing projects operated as laboratories for social ambition. His involvement in the Edificio Mirador marked a decisive encounter with architectural mass, void, and collectivity. There, the void ceased to function as a purely compositional device and became a social condenser—an aperture rather than an absence. This experience embedded a deep understanding of scale, density, and shared life, but also revealed the limits of monolithic solutions. Rather than remaining within that paradigm, Lloveras gradually redirected his practice toward what might be described as a finer grain of intervention: a move away from architectural totalities toward situational, lived, and repair-oriented actions. This shift does not negate architecture; it metabolises it. The discipline of infrastructure—roads, channels, logistics—remains present, but it is translated into a language of proximity, friction, and care.
This transition becomes fully legible in the development of the “Mesh” (Malla), a growing constellation of works that replaces linear authorship with relational topology. The Mesh does not function as a catalogue but as a living map of actions, gestures, and encounters distributed across urban space. Each node—whether a bag, a meal, a blanket, or a tag—operates as a micro-infrastructure, activating latent social energies rather than imposing form. Scale loses its hierarchical privilege: a minor intervention carries the same conceptual weight as an institutional commission. The city is no longer approached as a stable object but as a mutable organism, requiring translation rather than control. In this sense, Lloveras’ practice aligns with a post-architectural condition in which the artist operates as a situational fixer—someone who reads the city symptomatically and responds through precise, often ephemeral acts.
At the core of this socioplastic logic lies an ethics of instability. Lloveras’ works resist permanence, spectacle, and accumulation, favouring instead duration, repetition-with-variation, and disappearance. Everyday materials—food, bags, citrus, textiles—are mobilised not symbolically but operationally. They function as mediators between bodies, climates, and social rhythms. Rituals such as cooking or sharing become architectural acts, producing temporary shelters of attention and affect. This approach foregrounds what could be called a physics of affection: a material intelligence attuned to vulnerability, care, and maintenance. Rather than proposing solutions, the work sustains conditions for encounter. In doing so, it exposes the fragility of contemporary urban life while offering modes of repair that are tactile, modest, and repeatable.
These accumulated practices converge in the concept of the “Fifth City,” understood not as a new urban layer but as an affective dimension that cuts across existing ones. Beyond the historical city, the industrial city, and the sustainable city, the Fifth City is relational: built from gestures, rituals, and shared temporalities. Here, the architectural void of the Mirador reappears transformed—not as a spatial device, but as a commons of attention. The completion of the first hundred nodes of the Mesh does not signal closure but maturity: a threshold after which socioplastic practice operates as a soft yet resilient infrastructure. Lloveras’ work suggests that the future of urban life will not be secured by harder materials or smarter systems, but by practices capable of repairing the social fabric through presence, care, and continuous adjustment. Architecture, in this expanded sense, is no longer what stands—but what holds.
MVRDV (2005) Mirador - Housing Complex Madrid, Project Credits: Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, Nathalie de Vries with Antonio Lloveras, [online] Available at: https://www.mvrdv.com/projects/135/mirador
Architecture Magazine (2005) ‘EMV Housing, Sanchinarro, Madrid: MVRDV with Antonio Lloveras’, Architecture Magazine, November issue, [online] Available at:
AV Monografías (2004) ‘MVRDV: Edificio Mirador’, AV Monografías 107-108: Madrid-Madrid, Madrid: Arquitectura Viva.
El Crouis (2002) ‘MVRDV 1997-2002: Vertical Village and Mirador Madrid’, El Croquis 111, Madrid: El Croquis Editorial
Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘021-MESH SITE ARCHITECTURAL SUMMARY’, Anto Lloveras Blog, [online] Available at:
