Ca'n Terra House / ENSAMBLE STUDIO

Ca'n Terra is the house of the earth: first just that, earth; after quarry, voided from its Mares stone; then used by the military as ammunition dump during the Spanish Civil War and later abandoned, to be rediscovered decades later and come to be architecture. The found space has industrial logic, artistic potential as a sublime cavern carved by hand, and mineral nature as an extract of the stony landscape on the island of Menorca. Finding this excavated space in the guts of the earth and reinventing its use implies writing a new story that can rescue it from its abandonment. If the history of civilization has evolved transforming ideas into matter, here the process is inverted.