© Ángela Losa / Simon Menges

It is hard to sum up in a brief text our experience of building outside Spain over the years. Each work, each client, and each country is a distinct experience, and each case is unique, so it is not easy to draw up conclusions or synthesize clearly the undertaking of a project in a place that is unfamiliar and which in all likelihood you are working in for the first time.

In our case, the very fact of feeling out of place helps us understand the kind of architecture that we do. We have never built where we live. It is not in our place of residence that our career has unfolded and matured. This was not premeditated or planned; working abroad was a natural consequence of the competitions we were lucky to win, and fortunate to later be able to bring to fruition. And it has given shape not only to the manner in which we tackle projects, but also to our conception of the architecture we make. In other words, for us, building far away has been a most natural thing, and has in itself configured the architecture that we do...[+]