Ensamble Studio's POPLab Prototype in Brookline

Photos © Ensambl,e Studio

Spanish architects Débora Mesa and Antón García-Abril have built a prefab prototype as their Boston home. It's the subject of my latest article in the April-May issue of Mark magazine (Holland).

Here are some excerpts from the text (article not available online):

"The Cyclopean House is a live-work loft, built over a former garage in Brookline, Massachusetts, where the Spanish architects Débora Mesa and Antón García-Abril live with their three children. The house is also the first completed prototype for a novel system of prefabrication that the couple is developing at the POPLab, which they founded at MIT in 2013, and in their architectural practice known as Ensamble Studio."

"The key to the system is the use of large sections of expanded, high-density polystyrene foam, popularly known as Styrofoam, which is the core of prefab elements…. The architects shape the foam into beams with different profiles, including Is, Ls and Cs. They reinforce it with an exoskeleton of galvanized steel studs, and finish it with a double layer of 6mm cement board."

"The experiment is driven by their interest in developing an "ultra-light" prefab system that, "without adding mass, provides tectonic qualities of solidity and firmness," Antón explains."

"The galvanized steel framing on the interior reads in many ways like conventional wood trim, recalling Japanese paneled interiors, as Antón points out, or perhaps the Prairie Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright…. These references are coherent with the essential concept of the prefab units, which use modern versions of the materials of traditional American balloon-frame construction."

"Antón considers their system a hybrid between American and European building concepts, between the balloon frame and the solid wall. "Compare houses by Richard Meier and Eduardo Souto de Moura," he says. "There's a difference in weight. European construction is about the continuum, solidity, firmitas. We've put together these two traditions, to try to get the best of both. Prefabricating, but not in little pieces. Light but not thin. Solid and thick, building walls, not frames." "

Case Studt in Prefab

Mark, April  - May 2017, p. 152 - 159

More pictures and plans:

Divisaire Journal, July 29, 2016

Ensamble Studio webpage

Internal Meltdown and Exile

Floating Structures by Antón García-Abril, Ensamble Studio

My two latest articles chronicle the golden exile of Antón García-Abril, who has found a refuge at MIT, where he is setting up the POP-LAB, a prefabrication research and development lab, and the story of yet another public building project in Spain's ravaged provinces that got built but lacks funds to open.

I interviewed García-Abril for the biannual Russian journal Speech, a more technical version of my interview published in El País last January (in English and Russian, no web version).

And for Bauwelt I reported on the unopened Cultural and Civic Center in the former State Prison of Palencia, in the northern region of Castilla-Leon, after the building was all but rebuilt by the young Madrid studio Exit Architects (German only, no web version) .

Here's García-Abril on his experiments with a Styrofoam house:

"What is the structural language of the Modern Movement? The slab, the column, the wall. I don't want any of that."

"Primitive mass had a predetermined volume. Stone, earth. Contemporary mass has been concentrated in a few highly defined elements, in steel, concrete or glass, that bear an enormous structural demand."

"But in our case, mass is expressed volumetrically, as in the Antique world. What disappears is weight. In the Antique world, mass and weight were very similar. But here weight disappears from a physical point of view, but not from a spatial point of view. It becomes an energy, something perceptive."

"What is our statement in building this? The mass of a body is irrelevant in the weight of space."

Cultural and Civic Center, Palencia. Exit Architects

  In my conclusions about the debacle in Palencia, I return to some of the themes I covered for another finished but unopened project, a creative arts center in Córdoba by Nieto + Sobejano that I wrote on in The Architectural Review this March.

"If new contemporary spaces were required, why not then demolish the prison and start from scratch? ... Another option would have been to carry out a much more modest intervention, simply consolidating the existing pavilions at minimum expense and preserving their raw character. This has been the approach in Madrid's abandoned 18th century tobacco factory, the Tabacalera, which the Ministry of Culture has ceded temporarily to non-hierarchical management by neighborhood associations, who fill its unrestored walls with the kind of social activities that the citizens of Palencia reclaimed for their center, and at a minimal operating cost. This is just one example of how, in the face of the inability of government bodies to supply basic civic services, citizens associations are stepping in to fill the vacuum. Why not do the same with the once and future ruin in Palencia?"

Original state of cell block

Problemfall Palencia: 
Wie aus: einem Gefängnis kein Kultuzrentrum wurde 
Problem in Palencia: The Prison That Didn't Become a Cultural Center
 Bauwelt 13.13, April 5, 2013, pages 14 - 19, cover

Making Gravity Irrelevant 
Interview with Antón García-Abril
Speech 10, January 2013, pages 208 - 228

García-Abril in El Pais

The newspaper El País published my interview with the Spanish architect Antón García-Abril in their weekend cultural supplement Babelia on Saturday.  García-Abril is now a Professor at MIT's architecture school, where he is setting up a research and development laboratory on prefabrication known as the Pop Lab -- a younger sister to the school's famous Media Lab. The Lab brings together the resources of the university and venture capital to come up with new technologies. I interviewed him on the site of his current experiment, a house made of expanded polystyrene, also know as Styrofoam.

"En las construcciones arcaicas, la masa tenía un volumen predeterminado. La piedra, las tierras... En los edificios contemporáneos, la masa se ha concentrado en unos pocos elementos, el acero, el hormigón, el vidrio, que llevan una enorme exigencia estructural. Es el lenguaje del Movimiento Moderno. No quiero nada de eso."

"En nuestro caso, la masa se expresa volumétricamente, como en el mundo antiguo. Lo que desaparece es el peso. Pero sólo desde un punto de vista físico, no desde un punto de vista espacial. Se convierte en algo perceptivo. ¿Qué quisiéramos poder afirmar construyendo esto? Que la masa de los cuerpos es irrelevante en el peso del espacio."

Unfortunately the web version is available only to subscribers.

Antón García-Abril: Fun with Precast Concrete

© Roland Halbe. Used wit permisssion

This week, Bauwelt (Berlin) runs my article on the House of the Reader in Madrid's Matadero Cultural Center by Antón García-Abril, where he adapts three of the early 20th century industrial sheds of the old municipal slaughterhouses for a center dedicated to fomenting reading  (sorry, no web version).  

"Where's the challenge in a simple renovation project? Characteristically, García-Abril found that challenge not so much in the design as in the process of its construction, introducing eleven precast concrete catwalks, U-shaped in section, into the existing structures, each 13 meters long and weighing 52 tons, without knocking down a single wall. "

"Go to Youtube and look up Building the Reader's House, and you will find a time-lapse video, set to the mechanical music of a popular Madrid organ-grinder tune, of workers sliding the precast elements one by one through the masonry window openings of the existing structure. The fit is as tight as a greased drill shaft going into an oil well, and is comically hard-core." 

"It matters little that the final product of this sleigh-of-hand seems tame in comparison.... "

Bauwelt 43
November 9, 2012
Pages 28 - 32; cover

FAD Prizes Turn to Madrid

Matadero. Casa del Lector by Antón García-Abril. © Roland Halbe

Catching up on news, the winners of the 2012 FAD Prizes were announced this summer. And though based in Barcelona and traditionally anti-centric, the two most significant awards this year went to projects designed by multiple teams in Madrid.

The Prize for Architecture went to the conversion of the sprawling halls  of Madrid's early 20th century slaughterhouses, the Matadero, into a sprawling cultural center.

Madrid Rio. Bridge by Dominique Perrault. Photo: DC

 And the City and Landscape Prize went to the equally sprawling  Madrid Rio, a 10-kilometer park along the banks of the Manzanares River, passing directly in front of the Matadero. It was designed by a team lead by Ginés Garrido and including the firms Burgos & Garrido, Porras La Casta, Rubio & Álvarez-Sala and West 8, with special interventions by Dominique Perrault (pedestrian bridge over the river) and others.

Like Madrid Rio, the Matadero project has is sponsored by the municipal government, which has conceived the complex as "a creativity support center." And it describes the rehab of the existing pavilions as a "field of experimentation for new architecture" (both quotes from the Matadero web page).

Spaces include:

• Nave 16, dedicated to art and artists' studios, by the architects Alejandro Vírseda, Iñaqui Carnicero and Ignacio Vila Almazán.
• The Casa del Lector or House of the Reader, operated by a private foundation and opening this month, by Antón García-Abril
• The Cineteca by José María Churtichaga and Cayetana de la Quadra Salcedo
•  Plaza Matadero and other outdoor spaces, by Ginés Garrido, Carlos Rubio y Fernando Porras
• Escaravox, plaza shading devices, by Andrés Jaque
• Nave de Múscia by María Langarita and Víctor Navarro
• Entry Pavilion by Arturo Franco
• Design Center by  José Antonio García Roldán
• Naves del Español, run by the national Teatro Español and designed by theater director Mario Gas and stage designers Jean Guy Lecat and Francisco Fontanals, under the coordination of municipal architect Emilio Esteras
• Home of the Ballet Nacional de España and the Compañía Nacional de Danza, rehabbed in the 1990s by Antonio Fernández Alba 

Escaravox shading devices by Andrés Jaque. Image: Andrés Jaque.

Nave de Música by María Langarita & Victor Navarro. Photo © Luis Diaz Diaz

Nave 16. Photo © Roland Halbe

Cineteca by Churtichaga & De la Quadra Salcedo

Nave de Musica, Plaza from Wikipedia by AlesKubr2