In his new book Absolute Beginners, acclaimed Spanish architect Inaki Abalos explores forms of innovation in architecture. Drawing on diverse materials elaborated during the 20 years since the publication of his best-known book, The Good Life, Abalos examines questions centred on how and why architectural creation - at least the kind that arouses the greatest cultural interest - is strongly linked to philosophical thought, especially to the essay and the aphorism. He guides us to an understanding why innovation - as happens in philosophy - is inextricably linked to a reflection on the past and to the emergence of new ways of appropriating old problems. Absolute Beginners is a single essay written with effort and passion, made for the pure pleasure of composing a new and complex work and understanding the source materials as necessary fragments, while remaining open to adjustments, changes, and bridges between them. Abalos organises his materials like a piece of music into a cohesive composition, to the delight and insight of his readers.

With his book The Good Life, Inaki Abalos takes the reader on a tour of seven iconic 20th-century houses. Some of them were actually built, others merely imagined or film sets: Mies van der Rohe's House with Three Patios, Martin Heidegger's cabin in the Black Forest, the houses from Jacques Tati's movie Mon Oncle, Picasso's house in Cannes, the New York loft of Andy Warhol and the Factory, the self-build house from Buster Keaton's movie One Week, the house in David Hockney's painting A Bigger Splash. Abalos's selection represents a variety of concepts for living. It is based on a clear archetypal assignment of a place to a particular modern way of living. He analyses each house from key philosophical points of view. He demonstrates relations between architectural concepts, philosophical schools, and various approaches to planning and designing, constructing, and inhabiting a space. Abalos offers an intellectual introduction to these icons, rather than a manual for the design of residential architecture. He focuses on the 20th-century's radical pluralism, rather than celebrating modernism as a triumph of positivism. This new and revised edition of this book, first published in 2001 by Gustavo Gili and out of print for many years now, makes the significant contribution to the perennial discourse on concepts of living available again.