AP 164 : Ábalos and Herreros (Paperback)

Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros established their office in Madrid in 1984, working together until 2006. Iñaki Ábalos is since 2006 a partner with Ábalos+Sentkiewicz, based in Madrid and Cambridge (MA) and a Professor in Residence (since 2012) and Chair of the Department of Architecture (since 2013) at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Juan Herreros founded Estudio Herreros (formerly Herreros Arquitectos) in 2006 and Chair Professor of Architectural Design at Madrid School of Architecture and a Full Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in New York.
In Madrid during the 1980s and 1990s, in a period of transformation following the end of the Franco regime, architects were still valued for their technical ability and for their capacity to redefine the built environment. In this context, Ábalos & Herreros were remarkable for their different response to these assumptions: they deliberately established a permanent coexistence of theoretical research and professional work. This activity overlapped with their teaching at ETSAM (Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid), as well as with their publications and curatorial work. Notable examples include the 1992 publication Técnica y arquitectura en la ciudad contemporánea, 1950–1990 (translated into English in 2003 as Tower and Office) and the 2000 exhibition on Cedric Price, An Architecture of calculated uncertainty.
Many ideas were developed in more than twenty years of the office. Ábalos & Herreros’s way of working was based on conversation: conversation between the architects themselves, with collaborators in the office, with artists involved in their projects, and with other architects through their teaching and writing. The many essays by Ábalos & Herreros on other architects’ works clearly explain and reconstruct their way of thinking. In their practice the project is developed through research, which implies finding the right tools, appropriating past experiences and defining new methods. This approach explains Ábalos & Herreros’s interest in drawing from existing systems and arriving at a built form through minimal effort.
Many architects and critics have observed, studied and commented on the work of Ábalos & Herreros while the firm was active, but these reading were mainly based on their built work and their ongoing research activities. The arrival of the archive at the CCA presents a new opportunity for observation and discovery based on materials related to process rather than to the final built projects. The CCA acquired the Ábalos & Herreros archive along with several others that relate to contemporary architecture practice, most recently the archives of Foreign Office Architects (FOA) and of Álvaro Siza.
Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros donated the archive of Ábalos & Herreros to the CCA in Montreal in 2012. It comprises some 250 projects dating from 1985–2008, mainly in the forms of sketches, drawings in both print and digital form, collages, related textual documents, slides and models. As always, an architectural archive is a fundamental repository of the architects’ ideas, a crucial instrument for revealing their way of thinking and their process towards design. In the case of Ábalos & Herreros specifically, the archive holdings vividly illustrate their professional work—built projects as well as unrealized ideas for competitions— along with their research, writing, curating and teaching. What is not present in the archive also hints at their way of working: for example the absence of study models shows that Ábalos & Herreros did not privilege this medium—in their opinion time-consuming and of little help in their thinking process—and favoured collages instead.
The CCA’s intention is to activate acquisitions upon their arrival by immediately initiating a process of research and investigation, foreseeing a unique opportunity to exhibit this unseen material to the public while taking an active part in the contemporary debate on architecture. To continue and develop this approach with the Ábalos & Herreros archive, the CCA has conceived a new program that will strengthen the connection between archival material, research and public presentation of the Collection. The program consists of a Research Residency, for which individual scholars and collectives are invited to study and interpret the work in the CCA archives. The recipients are selected in accordance with their connection to the archive’s content and the relevance of their experience and expertise.
The selected researchers and curators—OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen (Brussels), Juan José Castellón (Zurich) and Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu of SO–IL (New York)—were invited for residencies of two weeks between October and November 2014, designed as focused immersions in the Ábalos & Herreros archive. Each group has determined a precise line of investigation and has articulated a way of reading the archive and the architects’ work. They all dig in the archive, each one with a precise set of questions in mind. OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, who studied under Ábalos & Herreros in Madrid, investigate the architects’ fascination with an industrial approach to architecture. Castellón, who worked with Ábalos & Herreros between 2003 and 2007, is interested in their capacity to construct a hybrid materiality while avoiding any manifestation of the building technology as a language. SO–IL, who share many academic endeavors with Ábalos & Herreros, are interested in their approach to inhabiting an urban or rural site and their visions for new landscapes. These critical arguments, paths of investigation and opposing points of view have generated a series of seminars and discussions and also three “out of the box” exhibitions at CCA between March and September 2015.
This new book presents three contemporary encounters with the Ábalos & Herreros archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). The architects OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Juan José Castellón and SO – IL conducted research into the archive and developed specific readings of the material, which they articulated through exhibitions and public presentations. This book reframes these three research projects: it shows archival material as it was taken out of the box and reinterpreted, while nevertheless representing the continuity of the archive.
Texts consist of elaborations on the research, exhibitions and presentations and give voice to the three curators as well as to Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros themselves. Illustrations of the archival material appear throughout the book, and a series of photographs by Stefano Graziani provides a complementary perspective by exploring the question of representation in an architecture archive. Through its combination of curatorial perspectives with illustrations of archival material, the book reveals just as much about the work and the interests of a new generation of architects as it does about the work of Ábalos & Herreros.