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AMP Arquitectos,
by AMP Arquitectos.
This small, apparently self-published
book on the Canary Island-based AMP
Arquitectos (formerly Artengo Menis Pastrana, though
now without Menis yet keeping the acronym) collects 17 built
works, four projects on the boards, and two under construction,
spanning from 1982 to the book's publication in 2006. These
range from a filling station and swimming pools to parks
and a college. To date
the firm's best known works are the Presidential
Headquarters (incorrectly attributed to another architect
at the linked page) in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and the Magma
Arts and Congress Center in Adeje, Tenerife. These large-scale
works are indicative of their design ethos, what David Cohn
in the book's introduction articulates as "an architecture
which returns us to a material, existential world of existence
and being."
This being is achieved via a strong
relationship to place, and in the case of Tenerife, it is
to the volcanic crater that lies at the center of -- and
gave life to -- the island. Some of their projects appear
to be like lava solidified in mid-flow. Even when their
designs are more restrained expressively, they always appear
rooted in place, especially via the superb articulation
of concrete and stone that give the buildings a weight many
contemporary buildings lack. One of the projects under construction
embodies this rootedness stronger than any previous design,
and it promises to make the projects more well known: the
Estadio Insular de Atletismo (Google
Earth link), a stadium in the Tincer district of Santa Cruz
de Tenerife. Not only does the bowl of the stadium resemble
a crater, its gently-sloping, stone walls give the impression
that the building grows from the landscape, that it has
always been there, like the stadium was carved from an existing
mound. It's a project that is a fitting extension of the
office's work, presented here solely in photographs, sketches,
and models (no drawings or explanatory text accompanies
the images), an unfortunate situation that will hopefully
be remedied by a full-blown monograph on the Tenerife architects
in the future.
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