AMP arquitectos

Architecture Firm Santa Cruz de Tenerife / Spain

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AMP arquitectos 5
AMP arquitectos
The architecture of AMP draws on a number of sources related to the local context of Tenerife and the Canary Islands. The abrupt volcanic landscape is itself a point of departure, with its suggestion of rugged forms in the making, as is the example of local architectural masters of the 1960’s, particularly in their use of textured concrete and forceful compositions. In works such as the Presidency Building in Santa Cruz, AMP have discovered new levels of formal expressiveness and experimentation in the manipulation of concrete. They also frequently recur to salvage, which perhaps arises from the “Robinson Crusoe” perspective of an island isolated from mainland resources, and which results in a compositional technique of collage or juxtaposition that relates directly to surrealism (offering another local reference, to the automatic methods of local artist Oscar Domínguez). Thus their Cultural Center in Santa Cruz, an obsolete oil storage tank, discovering the unsuspected spatial drama of its interior; their incorporation of the 17th century Hamilton Patio in the Presidency, or their re-use of a Berlin coal barge as a floating swimming pool. The techniques of salvage and experimentation with construction form part of an approach to architecture in which thinking is done more with the hands, in the making of things, than on the drawing board or from a theoretical perspective, an approach we can also relate to the island’s labor-intensive, low-tech building industry. An interesting image of this method is their tidal swimming pool in San Miguel, Tenerife, where the architects poured and molded the curving wall of concrete at the intervals permitted by the tides, an “action” closer to some of the procedures of contemporary art. But underlying these innovations, their architecture is firmly grounded in the principles and canon of the Modern Movement. Despite its unusual density, for example, the Presidency Building takes its sectional parti from the Villa Savoye, and we can find reflections of Chandigarh in the Magma Arts and Congress Center. Nevertheless, the essential materiality of AMP’s work contrasts with current tendencies elsewhere to pursue the greatest lightness and transparency. While the latter would seek to dissolve form into the ethereal immateriality of the visual media that dominate contemporary consciousness, AMP offer an architecture resistant to this erosion, an architecture which returns us to a material, existential world of experience and being.
AMP arquitectos
AMP arquitectos
  • Address C/ Bethencourt Alfonso, 2, ático, 38002 Santa Cruz de Tenerife | Spain
  • Tel +34922245149
  • Tel +34672223094
  • Fax +34922247173
  • amptfe

The architecture of AMP draws on a number of sources related to the local context of Tenerife and the Canary Islands. The abrupt volcanic landscape is itself a point of departure, with its suggestion of rugged forms in the making, as is the example of local architectural masters of the 1960’s, particularly in their use of textured concrete and forceful compositions. In works such as the Presidency Building in Santa Cruz, AMP have discovered new levels of formal expressiveness and...

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