1959 - 2012

Born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1952, José María Rodríguez-Pastrana Malagón was one of three constituents of AMP (along with Felipe Artengo, like him a founding member, and Fernando Menis, who would go his own way in 2004), the studio that in the 1980s and 1990s revolutionized Canarian architecture and gave it a sure place in the national panorama. They achieved this through a style unmistakable even to the uninitiated, based on an earthy brutalism evoking the materials and volcanic environment of the Canary Islands, and thanks to a handful of exceptional buildings like the Texaco Petrol Station of Mercatenerife, executed with Felipe Artengo in 1979 – for which they won the Manuel de Oráa regional architecture award –, the El Tanque Cultural Space (1997), the seat of the President of the Canarian Government (2000), the public swimming pool on the river Spree in Berlin (2004), the visitor center at Drago Park (2009) or the Insular Athletics Stadium in Tincer (2007), which in 2006 earned international recognition through inclusion in the New York MoMA’s ‘On Site: New Architecture in Spain’.