2G 56 Ábalos+Sentkiewicz

Table of contents:

Introductions 
Against Naturalism: Ábalos+Sentkiewicz and the
Beauty of Sustainability by Philip Ursprung
The Thermodynamic Architecture
of Ábalos+Sentkiewicz by Florencio Manteca

Works and projects
Orfila Street housing block, Madrid
Carpark, Princeton
Osmose station, Grand Paris
project, Paris
CaixaFórum, Saragossa
Senior citizens’ leisure centre, Azuqueca de Henares, Guadalajara
Orange County Museum of Art, Orange County
Porte de la Chapelle Tower, Paris
Lolita office building, Madrid
Performing Arts Centre, Taipei
Observatory of Elche Palm Grove
Atelier Albert Oehlen, Bülher
Spina Tower, Turín
Intermodal station, park and housing
towers, Logroño
CaixaFórum, Seville
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona

Biography

Nexus
Thermodynamic beauty by Iñaki Ábalos

15 Notes + 5 Annotations by Iñaki Ábalos, Renata Sentkiwicz
and Enrique Walker

Excerpt from ‘Thermodynamic Beauty’, by Iñaki Ábalos:

'Sustainability has turned into a new cliché, like a paean to good intentions that brings to mind the homonymous title of Colin Rowe’sThe architecture of good intentions -an indictment of the moral attitudes of modern architecture, in the sense of entertaining doubts about its technical, architectonic and merely rhetorical, not to say market-driven, nature. The present essay starts out from a simple hypothesis: only if there is genuine aesthetic debate, if there is an idea of beauty associated with sustainability, will the latter be able to appeal to architecture in a non-circumstantial way and will encourage architects to work on it. This leads us to adopt a first axiom: not to speak in moral or ethical terms about sustainability, but to limit ourselves to the purely technical and aesthetic aspects. 

Origins and evolution: the two triangles 

While the origins of an idea are always important, we should remember that the field of architectural sustainability has gone in a few decades from being a political manifesto that took root in the hippy and post-hippy context, with individualist and romantic manifestations -often inspired by Richard Buckminster Fuller, crossed with different thinkers- to being a logo worn by the big engineering firms and a few architects who originally promoted high-tech architecture. Not by chance has this displacement coincided with the change of attitude of the main electricity and oil companies, who since 1973 have gradually but persistently moved from head-on rejection to leadership in the sectors of renewable energy and building products. The phenomenon has been accompanied by a growing social, media and political interest in sustainability that is transforming, through new regulations and popular demand, the practices of architects and design techniques themselves. So, whereas architects were previously more or less focussed on the tectonic, now they are directed towards a 'bioclimatic' understanding of the design object. This conception calls for new kinds of knowledge, new experts and new ways of tackling the project.'