Spain reigns: Terence Riley wound up his MoMA career with a Spanish tour d'horizon.

It would appear from maps that guide visitors around the exhibition Site: New Architecture in Spain that the whole country has not seen so much building 'since the Romans unified the Iberian Peninsula with roadways and aqueducts during the reign of Augustus,' suggests its curator Terence Riley in the catalogue to his farewell exhibition at MoMA. In selecting 53 projects either under construction or recently completed, Riley captured a social dynamism reflecting recent years of liberality and Spain's participation as a power in the European Union, thus attracting a windfall of financial investments.

Though Spain may be a unified political entity, the exhibition was flavoured by its historic ties to regional autonomy, what the architect Rafael Moneo described at an opening event as 'a referential richness spread out over the country' (his Town Hall Extension across from the Cathedral in Murcia was one of the finest examples on view, AR July 1999). At the same time, the magnitude of projects, including concert halls, museums, office buildings, hotels, sports centres, airports and both public and private housing, attracted a stellar group of international architects, not that Spain has ever been devoid of significant and influential homegrown design. The whole spectrum of the past, from the clean lines of Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion to the serpentine facades of Antoni Gaudi and his decorative splashes of colour, reverberated in this exhibition (where red predominated) without inhibiting innovative forms, not all of them successful.

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Mural-size photographs of the 18 completed projects conveyed the transformative power expected of all the new architecture, especially in urban neighbourhoods. Jean Nouvel's phallic tower in Barcelona, Torre Agbar, clad in frosted glass and corrugated aluminium shaded from dark red to light blue, vibrantly lit at night, is pure fiesta and blended curiously with a honky-tonk local street carnival at its base. Also, in Barcelona, Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue's Santa Caterina Market (AR November 2005) constructed over old convent ruins and the remains of a neoclassical market building, celebrates with its broad undulating multi-coloured tiled roof (an abstraction of the palette, the architects say, of a produce stand) the spirit of Gaudi's Park Guell as well as of the surrounding residential neighbourhood with brightly-coloured awnings.

In the sculptural motif, the folded and unadorned surfaces of Sol Madridejos and J. C. Sancho Osinaga's Valleaceron Chapel recalled the stark spirituality of Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp; Emilio Tunon and Luis M. Mansilla's faceted peaks for the Museum of Cantabria echoed a nearby mountain range; and most stark of all, the Casa Rural, a house for a family of five, consists of 11 rectangular cubes of rust-coloured steel embedded in a hillside with ribboned window grilles very like the one for Gaudi's Casa Mila on permanent view at MoMA.

The greatest strides for innovation are apparent in urban settings: a green building like the ecological razzmatazz of Enric Ruis-Geli's Hotel Habitat covered by a weblike curtain of coloured lights indicating energy absorbed during the day to be released at night; Thom Mayne's (with Begona Diaz-Urgorri) Public Housing that combines low-rise structures with a masterful gridded labyrinth of a village incorporating interior courtyards, communal gardens, trellises and pergolas (shades of old Beijing); and Herzog & de Meuron's La Ciudad del Flamenco with its facade a perforated screen of vaguely Moorish script that glows at night with light from the interior (AR June 2004).

A fascinating aspect of the exhibition is how these Spanish towns incorporated their ramparts, many of them medieval, into contemporary designs. In Badajoz, on the site of a seventeenth-century bullring within a pentagonal rampart, Jose Selgas and Lucia Cano designed a Congress Centre as a cylindrical volume surrounded by a stack of fibreglass rings. In Teruel, David Chipperfield Architects and b720 Arquitectos simply cut a trumpet-shaped, CorTen-steel-lined opening into the city wall as a passage from the train station below to a top-lit glazed lift shaft where people are transported to the historic promenade above. And most magic of all was Martinez Lapena-Torres Arquitectos' La Granja Escalators in Toledo, a 90-foot-high, six-stage escalator that rises along the city wall to connect a car park and public square to a belvedere on top (AR February 2002). At night it is a jagged ribbon of light. In navigating these amalgamations of old and new at MoMA, one felt quite like Jake in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises when he arrives in Pamplona along 'the road slanting up steeply and dustily with shade-trees on both sides, and then levelling out through the new part of town they are building up outside the old walls.'