Books
Nieto Sobejano, a Self-Portrait
Because of the cosmopolitan spirit of Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano, combined with an indefatigable, tenacious devotion to the profession, both in actual building and in teaching, they are perhaps the most ‘international’ and prolific members of their generation of Spanish architects, and their practice – set up in Madrid in 1985 and with a Berlin branch since 2007 – is a perfectly greased machine that has enabled them to win almost twenty competitions in the last twelve years.
For this book the German publisher Hatje Cantz brought together fourteen buildings of this latest phase of their career in a carefully produced monograph that presents them from the angle of the architects, exposing the connections between germinal ideas and completed works. Through a scrupulous selection of images and with texts prepared by Nieto and Sobejano themselves – a dozen of them originally published in AV Monographs 146 (2010) – the new volume reveals the frame of thought around which the architecture of the Madrid partners revolves, and the rich visual universe that inspires it, besides showing the tools that they use in their creative process. Matters like dialogue with history and landscape, the aplication of geometric systems, the generative role of roof, and experimentation with materials are just some of the keys to understanding their works, as well as to understanding the often unexpected links between them,“reflecting each other in an infinite play of mirrors.”
