EL Croquis 231: Selgascano (2014–2025) Loose Parts Play -9788412823462

Selgascano began their journey in 1992 in Madrid, established a physical location in 1996, and moved to their current space, called “Office in the Woods,” in 2006—curiously, the most visited project on Archdaily of all time. The studio is a small workshop and intends to remain that way forever.

José Selgas and Lucía Cano tend to avoid giving lectures and talks in order to concentrate on their projects, understanding each as a distinct complexity and a distinct personality: in each of them, history, memory, economy, perception, and nature are the distinct elements that irrevocably shape the final result. This final definition is realized through the total involvement of architecture in the construction process, treating it as a continuous listening session of the greatest number of elements involved from manufacturing to installation, always with a parallel investigation into the possibility of modifying these more typical solutions to simplify their application in architecture.

The studio has always avoided using games and mechanisms that reflect personal disciplinary concerns, limiting itself to seeking beauty understandable to any human being. In any project, and increasingly so, the studio finds it essential that architecture yield as much ground as possible to nature, and that the presence of the built environment always be as minimal as possible or reduced to that architecture that, using artificial means and applying technologies borrowed from other fields that rarely intertwine with architecture, allows for the emergence of future natures.

Biography in PDF