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JULY/AUG 2012 display until SEPT 03

TALENT: ARCHITECTURE

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63 (FROM LEFT) Miguel García-Redondo, Mario Sanjuán, José María Tabuyo, and Ángel Sevillano at Madrid’s Luis Martín-Santos public library. (Not pictured: Ibán Carpintero.) (OPPOSITE)

open-minded studio Exit architects brings a friendly dose of japanese minimalism to spain.

PORTRAIT COKE BARTRINA

“We don’t think that having recognizable influences is something that’s a problem, something that devalues your work,” says Miguel García-Redondo, principal of Exit Architects. Based in Madrid, the scarcely 10-year-old practice has already completed a suite of high-profile projects, many of them packed with familiar references from contemporary and modern design. But in

PHOTOS: TOP TWO, SERGIO GUERRA/FG+SG. BOTTOM THREE, MIGUEL DE GUZMAN.

Under the Influence

every instance, the team has also demonstrated a knack for invention, an ability to take existing architectural tropes and turn them to their own purposes.

The purposes, in Exit’s case, are especially diverse and varied, since they’re the product of an unusually large number of individual agendas: García-Redondo, 36, is only one of the office’s five founding principals, and each one has a voice in the design process. Once a project leader has established the basic contours for the proposal, “the group participates in an informal way as it develops.” This collaborative approach may account for the way partners’ assorted influences have been woven into their work.

In their minimal Luis Martín-Santos public library, completed in 2007 and situated in Madrid’s working-class Vallecas neighborhood, the firm took a tack that registers their affinity for modernism with a distinctly Japanese flavor. Faced in a ridged metallic cladding, the building

recalls the work of SANAA—particularly the firm’s New Museum in Manhattan. GarcíaRedondo also cites designer Toyo Ito as a touchstone for the firm, noting that Japan’s architects in general have demonstrated a laudable capacity for buildings “that seem to be the distillation of a single idea.” In its straightforward dedication to a simple visual concept, the Vallecas library exhibits a similarly forthright ethic, showing Exit’s distaste for bombast.

Another project, this one a little more muted in its allusions, is a museum in the community of Hellín. Located in the southeast of Spain, the town is famous for its Holy Week festivities each spring, when hordes of drummers take to the streets in a ritual march. Exit’s Semana Santa Museum, which finished construction last year, is dedicated to preserving some of the outstanding artifacts connected with the annual procession. “The project was born from a desire to house the sculptural groups

Top two, a civic center, completed in 2011 in Palencia, Spain, which Exit converted from a 19th-century prison. Bottom three, Luis MartínSantos library, completed in 2007.

paraded through the city,” García-Redondo says. As befits its subject, the building reveals its complexity only by being walked around—appearing in places like a charming restored villa (its exterior wall is what remains of an old aristocratic mansion), at others like an austere, enigmatic iceberg of translucent glass and stone. In the latter capacity, the museum’s blockiness seems to point toward Rem Koolhaas’s Casa da Música in Portugal. The interior effect, though, is altogether different, with Exit’s new volume charging the old space with what García-Redondo Villar calls a “luminous and diaphanous” presence.

“We’re increasingly immersed in a world where ease of access to the work of others enriches your own,” García-Redondo says.

“Knowing and being up-to-date on the work of others, past and present, is an obligation.”

Certainly his firm seems to be drawing from both. But what they make from them looks a lot like the future.–Ian Volner

TALENT: ARCHITECTURE

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hago delivers site-specific,

fluor works remotely

“We never think about what we’re going to find,” says architect Antonio ÁlvarezCienfuegos Rubio, who cofounded the Madrid-based studio Hago in 2005 with Emilio Delgado Martos. “We only know that we’ll work and then find something, but we never expect the final result.” If this analytic approach seems similar to Rem Koolhaas’s, that’s because Álvarez-Cienfuegos Rubio, 35, and Delgado Martos, 37, see a muse in the famed Dutch architect. The duo also looks to the minimalist work of Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA, such as the firm’s Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen, Germany. “It’s just a cladding and windows and that’s all,” Álvarez-Cienfuegos Rubio says. “Wonderful!” Spanish architect and ardent purist Alberto Campo Baeza is their third major reference, “because he was our teacher.” (Both worked in Campo Baeza’s office before launching their firm.)

So far Hago has completed five projects, three of them in Spain’s Badajoz region, each of which in its own way is an amalgamation of Koolhaas, Sejima, and Campo Baeza’s methods. For four severely shaped, 565-squarefoot concrete bungalows on a hilltop overlooking a reservoir in Orellana la Vieja, they established the horizon as the focal point; for a 2,850-square-foot house in Don Benito, they formed a private oasislike environment via blocky white forms. The firm’s Badajoz building-boom is still under way: A fine-art museum is set to be completed next year, and a night-care center and six homes are in development. Who knows what answers they’ll discover next.–spencer bailey

What if the most important technological development in architecture today isn’t the latest digital drafting program—but Skype?

Since 2005, France’s Fluor Architecture has been operating on a unique model: founding principals Hervé Schneider, 36, and Guillaume Avenard, 37, have been running a shared practice from their respective hometowns of Strasbourg and Avignon, a distance of some 500 miles, with the nominal joint headquarters being Strasbourg. The two met while working in the office of erstwhile Jean Nouvel associate François Seigneur, joining forces for a number of projects both in Avenard’s native south and Schneider’s north.

In just seven years, the team has worked on more than 50 projects together, all of them exhibiting complexity and aesthetic surprises.

One recent example is a villa, completed in 2010, in the county of Vaucluse in southeastern France. Approaching the house, it seems like a simple, square volume—until, says Avenard, “it explodes,” with an irregular, louvered facade and wooden forms that break up the interior space. Another is an 18,000-square-foot child-care center, also completed in 2010, in the Alsatian town of Drulingen. Providing a range of family services, it’s faced in a rough-hewn facade that seems, at first, at odds with its child-centric program. The reason, say the architects, is connected to the difficult site: hedged in by speeding cars, the building needed a sheltered quality. The duo thus “used the constraints as a structure for the project,” Avenard says, working through the difficult brief via a dynamic virtual dialogue.–I.V.

House in Don Benito, completed in 2010. Bungalows in Orellana la Vieja, completed in 2011. A dental office in Málaga, completed earlier this year.

PHOTOS: COURTESY FLUOR.

(top to bottom) Top two, Hago’s RG

and builds beautifully.

PHOTOS: RG HOUSE AND BUNGALOWS, CARLOS PESQUEIRA CALVO. DENTAL OFFICE, JAVIER CALLEJAS SEVILLA.

process-driven answers.

(Top to Bottom) Top two, Fluor’s Villa Prhova in the county of Vaucluse, completed in 2010. Bottom two, a child-care center in Drulingen, completed in 2010.