Radical Logic

Radical Logic: On the Work of Ensamble StudioIker Gil (Editor), James Florio (Photographer)MAS Context, April 2021Hardcover | 9 x 11-1/4 inches | 328 pages | English | ISBN: 9781736743607 | $70.00PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:Radical Logic reflects on the work of the architecture office Ensamble Studio. The book documents the first twenty years of the Boston- and Madrid-based office at a key moment in their career. After having designed and built a series of remarkable structures, such as the Hemeroscopium House in Madrid, the SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela, The Truffle in Costa da Morte, and Structures of Landscape for Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana, their Ca’n Terra House and Ensamble Fabrica projects mark the next phase of the office. Through specially commissioned interviews with the architects, essays, and photographic documentation of their work by photographer James Florio, the book provides unique insight into the ideas that drive the studio, the ambitions behind their key projects, and their ongoing explorations.Radical Logic can be purchased via mascontext.com.dDAB COMMENTARY:It must have been 2006 when I discovered the work of Ensamble Studio, for  that November I wrote about the Musical Studies Centre in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on my old weekly blog. I described the work of Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa then as "refreshingly different: heavy rather than light, opaque rather than transparent, rough rather than smooth." Those qualities have continued in the duo's subsequent buildings, including the SGAE (General Society of Authors and Publishers) Central Office, also in Santiago de Compostela, the Hemeroscopium House in Madrid, and the Cyclopean House in Brookline, Massachusetts. Two of Ensamble's most recent, and most high-profile, works can barely be called buildings: Structures of Landscape is made up of large sculptures — pieces of "Land Architecture" — at Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana; and Ca’n Terra is a house in an abandoned quarry in Menorca, Spain, a house that looks barely habitable in any conventional, architectural sense of the term.Although Radical Logic, the new monograph on Ensamble Studio published by Chicago's MAS Context, features all of these projects, and more, the last two are the stars of the book. Editor Iker Gil describes the book as "not a catalog of their built work but a conversation about the ideas and themes that drive their office." The "conversation" is illustrated by the architect's own models and other images (3d scans, mainly), but primarily by the photographs of James Florio, who apparently moved from Chile to Montana, via Colorado, to be closer to Tippet Rise, the project he started documenting in 2016. As such, Radical Logic is loaded with photos of the Structures of Landscape — images that are incredibly beautiful, jaw-dropping as much for the weather conditions as for the sculptures themselves and the rolling landscape they sit upon. Florio visited other Ensamble projects in the making of the book, though they are presented without captions and jump back and forth from one project to another, eschewing the conventional project presentations of most monographs in favor of a visual consistency that is interrupted by intertwining essays, an interview, and "model explorations."The carefully and beautifully constructed book (the Swiss binding and other details can be seen on MAS Context's website) starts with some full-bleed photos by Florio and brief words from Ensamble explaining their manifesto: "We think with our hands, we experience. [...] If we do not have work, we invent it." Ca'n Terra, a space for research, is very much a work of their invention, as is Ensamble Fabrica, the recently constructed industrial hangar that is the firm's prototyping facility and fabrication laboratory (Ensamble Fabrica, more than by its name, can be seen to be as important to the studio as Tippet Rise and Ca'n Terra). Following an introduction by Gil, who first encountered two of the studio's buildings when visiting Galicia in 2008, some words by Rafael Moneo, and the first of four "model explorations," is a lengthy interview between García-Abril, Mesa, and Gil. The conversation starts on page 49 and ends on page 164, but, as alluded to above, the transcript is broken up by Florio's photographs of their projects and brief texts by other contributors: Moneo, as well as K. Michael Hays, Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, and Christian Kerez, among others.Later in the book — following lots of photographs, images of the duo's always provocative, sometimes messy models, and words of praise from these fellow architects — García-Abril and Mesa articulate, individually, five words that thematically tie their various projects together: Time, Uncertainty, Resolution, Freedom, and Reclamation. The monograph arrives as the studio nears its twentieth anniversary, and even though the terms describe the work completed in that time, the themes also look forward. For insta