Located in the beautiful city of Madrid, Spain, Antón Garcia-Abril and Débora Mesa lie the headquarters of Ensamble Studio. The studio deals with sourcing out diverse services in architecture, interiors, and technology. The studio was founded in the year 2000 and is led by a cross-functional team that balances education, research, and practice. They look into innovative approaches for architectural and urban spaces and the technologies required to build the same. They mainly focus on prefabricated structures and landscape-sensitive design.
Their encounters with a raw industrial abstract landscape that is the source of the built environment and their palette of working with the tools, methods, and technology. They have a fascination for transformation processes in landscape and industrial processes and the will to learn how to bring those processes into the architecture of spaces in everyday life. Some of their projects act like prototypes, they act as a planted seed, that is now being reflected in their practices.
Ideology & Concept of Architecture
Ensamble Studio looks at its projects as a structural dance that reflects prefabricated parts in an orchestration of the construction. They like to reinterpret the meanings of different prefabricated parts as something that would later create a space with character. As architects, they wanted to explore the capability of a building to be built out of the terrain with technology with the concept of hybridisation. They largely work with large-scale prefabricated beams that are stacked one on top of the other.
With a team of almost 50 employees, the studio has been awarded various international prizes like the Architizer A+ Award, Lakov Chernikhov prize, MOMA NY, etc and their work has also been extensively published in both digital and printed that has been exhibited worldwide. Their endeavor is supported by the newly opened Ensamble Fabrica which acts as the research and fabrication facility.
Ensamble Fabrica
Ensamble Fabrica is mainly the manufacturing unit of the prefabricated structural pieces and is also the laboratory that develops the spaces we dream of. This unit manufactures prefabricated pieces and delivers the parts to be assembled quickly and safely in situ anywhere in the world.
Exhibitions and Projects
Toto Gallery is the first Japanese solo exhibition of Ensamble Studio as they continue to explore the possibilities of architecture through unique models of construction. The studio terrestrial size architectural approach is what grew into the exhibition theme – Architecture of the Earth. They take up projects employing earth-based perspectives and forms that resonate with nature.
The exhibition projected the architect’s exploration of the relationship between the earth and architecture, backed up by original research, design, and construction processes. The architects go beyond the minimum requirements of an architecture firm and also devise their specialised construction methods.
Each one of their projects makes space for experimentation which aims to advance their field. For example, Missing Pieces is an art sculpture located in Massachusetts, USA. This artistic sculpture is 7.3m x 3.3m x 0.5m in size and was completely prefabricated in Madrid, which was later shipped and assembled in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA. The project emerged from the conceptual idea of ‘Kintsugi’ which is a Japanese practice of embellishing cracks of broken vessels to add beauty to it. This art sculpture is a composition of a series of stone-like pieces of concrete that belonged together but were later broken apart.
After one of their first projects in the USA, Cyclopean House, which is a multi-domestic housing, is when they recognised how to accelerate these processes towards collective housing. The concept behind their collective housing is said to reach a new level of complexity which involves framing individual differences in our lives that try not to impose any kind of scheme as all of our lives are essentially identical in terms of basic needs. They believed in a housing that involves people with different incomes and has a reflection on society. The variations of the vertical prefabricated prototypes designed by the studio are – Zip Tower, Loft Tower, and Fulcrum Tower.
The Flower Tower located in Zhendong New Business District, China is 120m high and takes a flower to be of functional and structural reference trying to achieve an equally balanced design structure. The vertical system is formed by two elements which are a petal which is a prestressed concrete beam and a stem which is the vertical core. The structural system is simple but rich and connects through a central core. This structure allows for great flexibility which increases functionality and enriches interior spaces.
The Truffle is the studio’s experimental project on using concrete in its liquid form rather than a solid rigid body to see what kind of chemical reactions it would provoke with the local materials in Costa de Morte. With wanting to achieve a very strong connection with the place, which initiated them to even use cattle in the building process. Through this, they discovered the richness of the different textures of concrete i.e. a rough finish when encountered with the soil, a sublime materialisation like the sea, etc.
The studio is driven to take over with its basic design ideas that turn into extremely profound architectural structures. Their idea is to constantly experiment and evolve with having a very active research and academic agenda.
REFERENCES:
- https://www.ensamble.info/
- https://architizer.com/firms/ensamble-studio/
- Ensamble Studio · Divisare. Divisare. https://divisare.com/authors/70573-ensamble-studio
- Ensamble Studio. Dezeen. https://www.dezeen.com/tag/ensamble-studio/
- Lekka. S. DesigtnBoomEnsamble studio exhibits ‘architecture of the Earth’ at Toto Gallery·MA in Tokyo. https://www.designboom.com/architecture/ensamble-studio-exhibits-architecture-earth-toto-gallery-ma-06-26-2021/
- https://www.detail.de/de_en/ensamble-studio
- https://youtube.com/@EnsambleInfo?si=CJAf20yGkXdL60d7
IMAGE REFERENCES:
- https://jp.toto.com/gallerma/ex210608/index_e.htm
- https://www.ensamble.info/
