Luis Fernández-Galiano   Iñaki Ábalos graduated in 1978 from the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM), which in those years harbored two different traditions represented by two influential faculty members, Alejandro de la Sota and Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza. Sota’s disc

David Cohn   In the new, thermodynamically-tuned practice of Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz, the aloof, prismatic volumes of the Ábalos + Herreros era, heirs of Alejandro de la Sota in their technical directness and formal austerity, have evolved into buildi

Eduardo Prieto   Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz like to make clear that their work together did not begin in 2006 – when Ábalos & Herreros split –, but during Sentkiewicz’s previous phase at the studio. It is thus easy for them to acknowledge how much they owe t

Iñaki Ábalos   Sometimes they ask us how the concept of thermodynamics is brought into our design process and why we are so reluctant to show the operational ‘kitchen’ of these processes, probably because the sustainable cliché seems to ask for diagrams with arrows

Iñaki Ábalos   To rethink materiality through thermodynamics it is essential to concentrate on the so-called ‘architectural interiors.’ In the convective air conditioning model, the interior meant the arrival of a huge and trivial collection of ‘products,’ commerci

Iñaki Ábalos   The expression ‘experience of art’ clearly refers to contemplation occurring under certain circumstances of ‘disposition’ before the object. This disposition can be the result of an individual initiative (going to the Prado Museum to contemplate Van

Iñaki Ábalos   0. Preamble. Mies malgré lui. The current proliferation of the skyscraper with its mono-functional configuration (divided between dwellings and office space) and its ring encircled tectonic and circulation core offers an urban milieu without attribu

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   The sunning and ventilation conditions in Madrid (+600 meters above sea level; continental climate), let us imagine a city that is one hundred percent passive, and to develop a prototype based on this hypothesis. Given its location in the historic ce

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   This office building goes up by the intersection between two Madrid highways, the M-40 and the A-6, with a small park at its feet and views of the city to the south and of the mountains to the north. The guiding concept is to create a stimulating wor

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Switzerland   The studio is located on a steep terrain that is almost always covered with snow, tucked into the hillside towards the north and opening up to the south to harbor an open-plan space for the artist’s workshop, and a lower-ground floor for storage. A l

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   Itziar combines a rural and mountainous environment with an industrial complex connected to the highway, and built brutally interfering with the contours of the place. Through a volume that organizes four dwellings for members of the same family in a

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   Created in 1984 by the Catalan artist to promote the study and knowledge of modern and contemporary art, the Antoni Tàpies Foundation is housed, since June 1990, in the old headquarters of the publishing house Montaner y Simón, built by Lluís Domènec

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   The leisure Center for the Elderly in Azuqueca de Henares (Guadalajara), consists of a series of halls that are linked to one another. With this organization, the Center is set forth as a contemporary variation of the traditional casinos, whose rooms

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   The Solar Tower in Sociópolis, Valencia, is based on the same preliminary sketch as the Tour Porte de la Chapelle project, in an attempt to distance social housing developments from the anonymous iconographies by exploring the possibilities of a towe

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   The competition for the construction of Logroño’s new Transportation Hub was called in 2006, a scheme comprised within a larger urban plan to bury the railway tracks as they go through the capital of La Rioja, and that also includes the construction

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   China   The urban block where this complex will go up has an area of 170 x 170 meters and contains a mixed use program, including four residential towers, a taller one with a hotel and convention center, and retail spaces at the base. The objective is to giv

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   China   The construction of the new financial district in the flourishing city of Yiwu demands adjusting architectural timing – design and execution – to heretofore unknown production requirements. To this end, the project is a vertical reinterpretation of a

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Lebanon   Located in an urban context close to the new marina of Beirut, the project – a residential and commercial complex that takes up a whole urban block – is organized around two cores, a layout that makes interior courtyards unnecessary, generating a com

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   China   Commissioned by a private patron, the museum project was born from an interest in addressing both place and program by introducing tension between the solid and closed vocation appropriate to museum spaces, and the desire to generate a festive world