“We are what our environment makes us,” said architect Rudolf Schindler in 1963, “and if our environment is such as to produce excellent health, beauty, joy, and comfort, it will reflect immediately in our lives.”
It is easy to agree with Schindler, of course. Architecture is itself an environment, and the best architecture embraces and supports its surroundings. This book explores the work of a loose constellation of four Spanish architects based in the Canary Islands: José Antonio Sosa, Magüi Gonzalez, Miguel Santiago and Evelyn Alonso.
They are committed to thoughtful, lasting design, and their work is bold in its modesty. They have the unusual experience of years of work on their own and with each other in various collaborative combinations – pairs, trios, or all together. Some of their collaborative relationships go back decades; others are relatively new. Architects, they have said, are catalysts of a way of being, a way of acting, a way of living in a particular moment. Architecture rooted with integrity in its setting, they argue, is the only architecture with a chance of enduring.
Projects
Las Palmas Courthouse (Ciudad de La Justicia de Las Palmas)
Library at Ludwig Maximilian University (Philologicum)
Z House (La Casa Z)
Black Pavilion (Pabellón Negro)
Town Hall (Las Casas Consistoriales)
Lomo Apolinario Senior Center (Centro de Tercera Edad Lomo Apolinario)
Playa del Inglés Train Station
Helsinki Central Library
