Spanish Architects’ Lecture Series: Anton Garcia Abril

Spanish Architects’ Lecture Series: Anton Garcia Abril

Spanish architects Antón García-Abril Ruiz, Carme Pinos, and Alberto Morell Sixto will present their work and vision in a series of seminars and lectures organized by Catholic University with the collaboration of the National Building Museum.

The Madrid-based architecture firm Ensamble Studio explores architectural space through innovative uses of materials. Co-founding principal Anton Garcia Abril presents the firm’s work, which includes Madrid’s Reader’s House and Cervantes Theater in Mexico City.

Antón García-Abril, (Madrid, 1969) is a European PhD Architect, full-professor at the School of Architecture and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and he is currently developing a second doctoral thesis about “Stressed Mass” at the School of Civil Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Barcelona.

He received the Spanish Academy Research Prize in Rome in 1996. He has been associate professor at the School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (E.T.S.A.M.-U.P.M.) for a decade, invited professor at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University in 2010 and Cornell University in 2008, and visiting critic and lecturer in different universities and institutions in America and Europe.

In 2000 he establishes Ensamble Studio leading, together with his partner Débora Mesa, a cross-functional team with a solid research background on the lookout for new approaches to architectonical space, building technologies and urban strategies. Their built projects are exposed structures that explore the essence of materials to create space. The Music Studies Center and the SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela, the Martemar House in Malaga, the Hemeroscopium House in Madrid, The Truffle in Costa da Morte (Spain) and more recently the Reader’s House in Madrid and the Cervantes Theater in Mexico City have been internationally published.

Their office has been awarded with important prizes like The Rice Design Alliance Prize to emerging architects in 2009 or the Architectural Record Design Vanguard Prize in 2005, and was selected by SANAA to participate in the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2010. He co-founded with Débora Mesa the Positive City Foundation in 2009, with the aim of forwarding their views on urban development, and they are in the process of setting up a research laboratory at MIT, the POPLab (Prototypes of Prefabrication Laboratory).

This lecture is part of the prestigious series Spotlight on Design at the National Building Museum. Buy tickets online.

  • Architecture
  • Washington, D.C.
  • Feb 13, 2013
  • 06:30 pm – 08:00 pm

Venue

National Building Museum, 401 F Street NW Washington D.C., 20001

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Phone

202-272-2448

More information

Venue's website

Credits

Presented by the National Building Museum, The Catholic University of America’s School of Architecture and Planning, and the Embassy of Spain.

Image: Hemeroscopium House by Antón García Abril, photos by Roland Halb.