Ca’n Terra

Ensamble Studio (Menorca, Spain, 2019)

Ca’n Terra is the house of the earth. The fruit that nature gives us, as a found space; which requires tillage and cultivation to imbue the received offering with domesticity. If the history of civilization has greatly evolved transforming ideas into built work, in Ca’n Terra, the process is inverted and history interpreted to transform it into architecture. The transfer from drawing to built mass gives way to the translation of given matter to digital data through the architectural reading of a geological discovery. The discovered space has industrial logic as a former Mares stone quarry, artistic potential as sublime cavern carved by hand, and mineral nature as extract of the stony landscape on the island of Menorca. Finding this excavated space in the guts of the earth and reinventing its use implies writing a new story that can rescue it from its abandonment. As first contact we enter the space like explorers would do, equipped with the technology that expands our vision in the dark; throwing millions of laser points on the wrinkles of the continuous stone surface we register with millimetric precision the solid structure that was built for us and is now ready to be polished and inhabited. Behind the scan, the architect’s eye, directing, interpreting, creating the space again. That’s why the discovery is considered a new work, destined this time to become a room to contemplate nature. In lieu of an imposing action that many times architecture exerts on the environment, we propose a trip to the interior being of matter, and recognize the freedom with which it gives us spaces to live.

Project Credits: Ensamble Studio: Antón García-Abril, Débora Mesa, Javier Cuesta (building engineer), Borja Soriano (project manager), Claudia Armas, Alvaro Catalan, Massimo Loia, Marco Antrodicchia, Sebastián Zapata, Arianna Sebastiani, Ekam Sahni, Yu-Ting Li, Joel Kim, Gonzalo Peña, Barbara Doroszuk, Yvonne Asiimwe, Mónica Acosta.