Lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held Thursdays at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted. Registration required to attend in-person. Register here or watch the webcast on Youtube.
Ensamble Studio & Antón García-Abril
Ensamble Studio is a cross-functional team founded in 2000 and led by architects Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa. Balancing imagination and reality, art and science, their work innovates typologies, technologies and methodologies to address issues as diverse as the construction of the landscape or the prefabrication of the house. From their early works –SGAE Headquarters, Hemeroscopium House or The Truffle in Spain– to their most recent –Ensamble Fabrica in Madrid and Ca'n Terra in Menorca, Spain–, every project makes space for experimentation aiming to advance their field. Currently, through their startup WoHo, they are invested in increasing the quality of architecture while making it more affordable by integrating offsite technologies. Their new research and fabrication facility in Madrid, Ensamble Fabrica, has been built to support this endeavor. Antón and Débora are committed to sharing ideas and cultivating synergies between professional and academic worlds through teaching, lecturing and researching: she is Critic At Large at Pratt Institute in NYC and he is a Professor at MIT, where they co-founded the POPlab – Prototypes of Prefabrication Laboratory – in 2012. Recently, they have been awarded the Marcus Prize 2021 and the 2022 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award as a recognition of their innovative practice and their contribution to the field of architecture.
Antón García-Abril is a European Licensed Architect and a registered architect in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He established Ensamble Studio in 2000 and co-founded WoHo in 2020. He has dedicated his career to innovating typologies, technologies, and methodologies, advancing the fields of architecture and construction through works that are internationally recognized. Together with his partner Debora Mesa, he has progressively redefined the role of the architect, adding to his design competencies those from the developer, the contractor, the fabricator and the inventor. García-Abril is full-professor at the School of Architecture and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 2012, where he co-founded the POPlab that same year. He received the Spanish Academy Research Prize in Rome in 1996 and holds a doctorate degree from the Polytechnic University of Madrid.
