Ensamble’s track seems inseparable from trial. Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa have assembled their life and work as a sequence of material and mental essays that are interwoven to join experiment and experience, production and perspective, exploration and expression. Fusing construction and creation, they have brought together fields as distant as engineering and the arts, using the most advanced manufacturing techniques and the most archaic procedures to raise formally diverse yet intellectually connected works. After two decades, their journey has an unusual consistency, because there is a guiding thread of research, audacity, and risk that ties the granite megaliths of their Galician beginnings to the American Cyclopean House where they test a new way of building.

In their first works there is a tactile seduction and a material violence that makes permeable the hermetic and light the heavy, opening a path of invention and dazzling excess that their own home and the Reader’s House materialize in an antithetical register: two Madrid works that use the rhetorical monumentalization of the structure to become memorable places. They named their house Hemeroscopium, and from this observatory they conceived a return to the essence of their beginnings with La Trufa, a fascinating organic and mineral work where aesthetic imagination, material creativity, and communion with nature converge to create a piece that must be featured in the histories of architecture and in the histories of art, gathered by chance on the edge of a cliff in the Costa da Morte.

Their American period, characterized both by the innovation labs of the MIT for the study of prototypes and fabrication, and by the oneiric landscape structures in Yellowstone, shows the two souls of their oeuvre woven together like warp and weft, and the same applies to the two Spanish works that mark their return and the opening of a new chapter in their experience log: the factory in Madrid that set outs to transform the conventional panorama of the building sector and the quarry in Menorca that hopes to become a melting pot of architectural and artistic ideas. The blunt pragmatism of many professionals shuns visionary ambition and risk, but that is precisely where the future and our hopes reside, and no studio is more committed than Ensamble to this project, and to this path that is their own.