Ábalos & Herreros

The two designers summarise the guide lines to their work in four statements. The gymnasium built in the Retiro Park, located in central Madrid, is the latest work by the Madrid-based firm. Photography by Paolo Rosselli. Edited by Rita Capezzuto

Expanding the Limits of the World
by Ábalos & Herreros

Technique
When we speak of technique, what we mean is that without an adequate knowledge – not a specialist knowledge – of the possibilities of the media that are in the market, it’s hard for us to find a coherent outlet for the fantasies – to put it quite simply – that we want to realise. There’s a direct relationship between fantasy and technical knowledge, at least when one speaks of such a pragmatic issue as architecture. This notion follows in the same vein as when we started talking about technique and wrote the Tower and office book. The most obvious difference for us is that the technical issues at the time were almost exclusively applied to the materiality of building architecture. Now we see that its field of action is wider: first, in relation to many other material practices that have links with the discipline of architecture and can be incorporated within it; and second, to what the process is of building the project. That is, the techniques used to build the project –what we call the project of the project– has become one of the moments we consider to be decisive. What we’ve been doing is expanding this notion, not negating or contradicting it. We have made it more open from the disciplinary point of view and more linked to our own subjectivity.

Recycling
It means giving life to something whose historical life cycle is already finished. This is produced through physical or chemical transformations that allow artificial life to be breathed into what was already dead, and thus prepare it for new contexts. This means recycling the period of “Modernism” which forms part of our tradition –the locus, the space in which we were born and have developed as human beings– and presupposes two things: first, recognising that its cycle is dead, that “Modernism” ceased to exist some time ago; second, that it’s a material we can breathe new life into and in that sense it’s necessary to think of it as a material that can be submitted to transformative processes that are often distanced from the purely disciplinary.

Nature
The idea of Nature is, and always has been, a cultural construct, something that’s continually mutating, an idea that’s constructed and that each culture perceives differently. To each era, to each vision and to each projection of culture dealing with nature there is a corresponding aesthetic model and a different compositional system. Nature is returning into the public spaces of the city, of this contemporary city that is expanding throughout the globe and making everything equal. On the other hand, this Nature is made up of different materials. If we dispense with one of them we’ll be speaking of a nature that isn’t the one we know, but rather a nature received through history. This amalgam is precisely the basis of many of the projects we’ve called “eco-monumental”, to use a provocative word, yet one whose aim is to demonstrate the urgent need to find an aesthetic definition that might integrate the values of contemporary society within the architecture and that distances itself from modern aesthetic principles.

AH system
The AH system consists of a basic interest in sustaining architecture first as an activity linked to artistic practices, and second as a discipline that has the responsibility to give form to notions of the public and the private sphere in contemporary society. From our years of training, we’ve witnessed successive ways of attacking this highly classical posture of architecture as one of the fine arts. If we did not have this motivation to create a new notion of beauty, we would not be architects. For that reason we defend it to the death. We believe that the architect is basically condemned to seek a redefinition of the idea of beauty at each historical moment –if he wants to be an architect– without cutting himself off from a certain political position, in the widest sense of the term and in that etymological sense where the polis is one with the city. Any notion of beauty that is developed today must be linked to a certain conception of what the city and the freest form of life of the people in it is. One could ask a final question in relation to this position: What is beauty for? And we would only know how to respond with a phrase of Juan Muñoz’s, to which we wholeheartedly subscribe: “For expanding the limits of the world”.
The architects drew on the historical landscape idiom of the Retiro Park, where high quality solutions are achieved by the simple use of grates and hedges
The architects drew on the historical landscape idiom of the Retiro Park, where high quality solutions are achieved by the simple use of grates and hedges
The new building 
is intended as an amalgamation of natural and artificial elements
The new building is intended as an amalgamation of natural and artificial elements
The grille enveloping the whole pavilion acts not only as a protection, but also as a support for the creepers that will with time cover the whole structure
The grille enveloping the whole pavilion acts not only as a protection, but also as a support for the creepers that will with time cover the whole structure
In the basement floor, the gymnasium receives light from the upper
translucent fascia, which also lets in shadows of the vegetation outside
In the basement floor, the gymnasium receives light from the upper translucent fascia, which also lets in shadows of the vegetation outside

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