A set of structures that make inhabiting the landscape possible. Built with high engineering processes, their appearance is unpredictable and they stand as monoliths, forming sculptures that are also shelters.

Ensamble Studio has already completed some of the Landscape Structures (Domo, Beartooth Portal and Inverted Portal) of the group of eleven that were designed for the Tippet Rise Art Center, a place where a series of large-scale sculptures of artists and architects are hidden and that aims to blur the boundaries between art, nature and architecture.
 

Description of the project by Ensamble Studio

Located at the edge of Yellowstone Park in Montana, Tippet Rise Art Center with an extension over eleven thousand acres of wildernessis born as a new destination for the arts, in which music performances and largescale outdoor sculptures play a major role.

How the current local fauna and ranching activity can coexist with the added artistic and architectural interventions is a challenge that the project needs to embrace. This challenge has fueled the research that started with our early experiences in the quarry and continued with experiments like The Truffle, advancing the knowledge and appreciation of what preexisting natural conditions can bring to us, as architects and as users of architecture.

Once again we go back to primary elements to configure sitespecific architectures in harmony with nature. Working with earth, with rocks, and learning from their formation logic, different techniques and processes are developed to manipulate the structural, acoustical and thermal properties of these local materials at different scales; and geological transformation processes –sedimentation, erosion, weathering, crystallization, compaction, metamorphism-reinterpreted to cultivate structures made of landscape, from landscape. Structures that stir existing matter and reinforce it, using highly engineered processes while welcoming unpredictable results. The forms obtained have been twinned with those taken from the land that previously contained and supported them when in state of rest, from which they retain memory and imprint and to which they introduce new meaning and tension. They are structures of landscape because they are born from it and give it order, transforming matter into inhabitable space and unfolding a new constellation of programs among the plateaus, ridges, canyons and hills of brutal beauty that compose the site.

Structures of Landscape enable habitation without exploitation, and intimate relationships with the environment. They resonate with the immensity, the roughness, the silence and the magic loneliness of the place amplifying its values, and situate our actions in an ambiguous position between nature, architecture and art; they can be one and all, or a completely different category that only makes sense where it was born.

Read more
Read less

More information

Label
Architects
Text
Ensamble Studio. Antón García‐Abril & Debora Mesa
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Projects
Text
Fontana, Tabula, Baldacchino, Lapis Auspicatum, Midnight Rostra, Ponte, Reticula, Tempietto.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Venue
Text
Tippet Rise Art Center, 96 South Grove Creek Road, Fishtail, MT 59028, USA.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Dates
Text
Design 2015-2016, Construction 2016.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Project team
Text
Javier Cuesta (Construction Master), Ricardo Sanz (Project Director), Artemio Fochs (Media Director), Massimo Loia, Borja Soriano, Walter Cuccuru, Giorgia Pisano, Simone Cavallo.
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Structural engineers
Text
Jesús Huerga ; Beaudette Consulting Engineers
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
General Contractor
Text
OSM
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Collaborator Companies
Text
Davis and Sons; CMG; Mountain West Steel
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Label
Program
Text
Art Center
+ + copy Created with Sketch.
- + copy Created with Sketch.
Ensamble Studio is a cross-functional team founded in 2000 and led by architects Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa.

Balancing education, research and practice, the office explores innovative approaches to architectural and urban spaces, and the technologies that build them.

Among the studio’s most relevant completed works are Hemeroscopium House and Reader’s House in Madrid (Spain), Music Studies Center and SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela (Spain), The Truffle in Costa da Morte (Spain), Cervantes Theater in Mexico City and, more recently, Cyclopean House in Brookline (USA) and Structures of Landscape for Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana (USA). Currently, bigger scale projects are being developed like Zip Tower, Plot Tower and Big Bang Tower, high-rise systems for residential and mix-use programs.

Their work has been extensively published in both printed and digital media, exhibited world-wide -MOMA NY 2015, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2015, Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Architecture 2013 in Shenzhen, GA International Exhibitions 2014-2010 in Tokyo, Venice Architecture Biennale 2010, etc.-  and awarded with international prizes -Austrian State Award for Architecture 2014, Iakov Chernikhov Prize 2012, Rice Design Alliance Prize 2009 to emerging architects, Architectural Record Design Vanguard Prize 2005, among others.

Beside their professional career, both principals keep a very active research and academic agenda, have been invited professors and lecturers at numerous universities and architecture forums, were curators of Spainlab -Spanish Pavilion at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia- in 2012 and founded that same year the POPlab (Prototypes of Prefabrication Research Laboratory) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), that they continue to direct.
Read more
Published on: September 15, 2016
Cite: "Landscape Structures in Tippet Rise by Ensamble Studio [II]" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/landscape-structures-tippet-rise-ensamble-studio-ii> ISSN 1139-6415
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...