2g Ensamble Studio

Ensamble Studio is a cross-functional team founded in 2000, led by architects Anto?n Garci?a-Abril and De?bora Mesa. Balancing imagination and reality, art and science, their work innovates typologies, technologies and methodologies to address issues as diverse as the construction of the landscape or the prefabrication of the house. From their early works: SGAE Headquarters, Hemeroscopium House or The Truffle in Spain, to their most recent: Ensamble Fa?brica in Madrid and Ca'n Terra in Menorca, Spain, every project makes space for experimentation aiming to advance their field. Currently, through their start-up WoHo, they are invested in increasing the quality of architecture while making it more affordable by integrating offsite technologies. Their new research and fabrication facility in Madrid, Ensamble Fa?brica, has been built to support this endeavour. Together they are committed to sharing ideas and cultivating synergies between professional and academic worlds through teaching lecturing and research: she is Ventulett Chair in Architectural Design at Georgia Tech and he is a Professor at MIT, where they co-founded the POPlab - Prototypes of Prefabrication Laboratory- in 2012.

Radical Logic is a publication that explores the work of the award-winning architecture office Ensamble Studio led by Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa. 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 projects Ca'n Terra House in Menorca and the Ensamble Fabrica in Madrid 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.

Anne Holtrop (1977) graduated in 2005 from the Academie van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam with a cum laude degree in architecture and in 2009 started his own studio. Today his office is based in Muharraq (Bahrain) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands). His work ranges from models to temporary spaces and buildings. Until very recently, he had only built a few small pavilions and various installations between art and architecture. Outside of the conventional architectural circuit, and more related to art installations, these extremely poetic pavilions consisted of small-scale spatial concepts and personal research on materials. In 2015 he completed his first two major buildings, Museum Fort Vechten and the National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain. He was course director of the Studio for Immediate Spaces master at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam from 2012 to 2016, and was editor of the architectural journal Oase from 2005 to 2013. For his practice he has been awarded several grants from the Mondrian Fund, as well as receiving the Charlotte Kohler Prize for Architecture from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds in 2007.

The latest in the 2G Architecture series focuses on the Parisian based practice Bruther. Bruther is a French architectural studio based in Paris. Stéphanie Bru and Alexandre Theriot opened their office in 2007, at the very beginning of what capitalists call a 'crisis' and Marxists might define as new round of 'primitive accumulation and dispossession'. Having grown up and trained during the heyday of the French welfare state and inspired by the optimism of the early European Union, Bru and Theriot are well aware of the pressure that the political shift to the right, social inequality and insecurity about the future of Europe are exerting on public institutions. Bruther stands for a specific architecture, adapted to the needs of each project in order to offer maximal living conditions. Adaptability and evolutivity of the building are fundamentals in the office practice. Since 2007, Bruther have developed national and international projects such as Cultural and Sport Center Saint-Blaise (2014), Helsinki Central Library (2013) and New Generation Research Center (2015).

Using salvaged lumber and bricks, discarded tires, hay and waste cardboard bales, concrete rubble, colored bottles, and old license plates, they create inexpensive buildings in a style Mockbee describes as "contemporary modernism grounded in Southern culture."".

Fala is a young architecture practice founded in 2013 in Porto, and led by Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares and Ahmed Belkhodja. Hedonistic yet restrained, the studio takes lightness and joy very seriously. Their projects can be characterized by a strong tendency towards autonomy, or better: towards an emerging independence of architectural language. Many of the refurbishment projects in Porto were initiated by private investors, trying to make a fortune by real estate speculation. After the economic crisis of 2008 the downtowns of Porto and Lisbon were confronted with a rampant boom in tourism. Speculation was propelled by special governmental measures such as the relief of a far-reaching protection against dismissal or the easy availability of golden visas. This may be the reason why some of Fala's projects come across like topical declinations of the same program: separation of auxiliary functions from the main space, zoning of the plan, opening and staging of the view onto a small courtyard.

Papers present research from different regions ranging from ancient Mauritania, through Africa, Egypt, Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, as well as sites in Crimea and Georgia. Topics include: topography, architecture, interiors and décor, religious syncretism, the importance of ancient texts, pottery studies and conservation.

The latest in the 2G Architecture series focuses on Junya Ishigami 'To have a vision that is as flexible, as open, as subtle as possible to go beyond conventional wisdom about architecture' Ishigami In his works, which he compares readily to landscapes, Ishigami removes the boundary between the outside and the inner space. Transparency, lightness, organic forms, vegetation make up his vocabulary. His vision of the future is optimistic, ecological, and the prospects of this young Utopian are not barred by any limit. The first time Junya Ishigami made himself known in Europe, with his proposal for the Japan Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2008, he was a young and almost unknown architect who had worked for several years with Kazuo Sejima, and had only founded his studio junya.ishigami+associates in 2004. In the Venice pavilion, Ishigami filled all the interior walls of the pavilion with delicate and somehow naïf drawings of gardens and decided to build several greenhouses with real gardens in the outdoor gardens of the building. The following year, he finished the Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop, and with only two works he was acclaimed as one of the most innovative proponents of new Japanese architecture. Initially forcing the limits of transparency and lightness, his latest works explore in a conceptual way the relationships between the built matter and the nature, in works such as the Botanical Farm Garden in Tochigi, a multi confessional chapel in China, or the house and restaurant for a chef in Japan, where the exploration of the tectonic merges with the earthly and nature.