Iñaki Ábalos – författare

With his book The Good Life, Iñaki Ábalos takes the reader on a tour of seven iconic 20th-century houses. Some of them were actually built, others merely imagined or film sets: Mies van der Rohe's House with Three Patios, Martin Heidegger's cabin in the Black Forest, the houses from Jacques Tati's movie Mononcle, Picasso's house in Cannes, the New York loft of Andy Warhol and the Factory, the self-build house from Buster Keaton's movie One Week, the house in David Hockney's painting A Bigger Splash.Ábalos's selection represents a variety of concepts for living. It is based on a clear archetypal assignment of a place to a particular modern way of living. He analyses each house from key philosophical points of view. He demonstrates relations between architectural concepts, philosophical schools, and various approaches to planning and designing, constructing, and inhabiting a space. Ábalos offers an intellectual introduction to these icons, rather than a manual for the design of residential architecture. He focuses on the 20th-century's radical pluralism, rather than celebrating modernism as a triumph of positivism.This new and revised edition of this book, first published in 2001 by Gustavo Gili and out of print for many years now, makes the significant contribution to the perennial discourse on concepts of living available again.

In his new book Absolute Beginners, acclaimed Spanish architect Iñaki Ábalos explores forms of innovation in architecture. Drawing on diverse materials elaborated during the 20 years since the publication of his best-known book, The Good Life, Ábalos examines questions centred on how and why architectural creation — at least the kind that arouses the greatest cultural interest — is strongly linked to philosophical thought, especially to the essay and the aphorism. He guides us to an understanding why innovation — as happens in philosophy — is inextricably linked to a reflection on the past and to the emergence of new ways of appropriating old problems.Absolute Beginners is a single essay written with effort and passion, made for the pure pleasure of composing a new and complex work and understanding the source materials as necessary fragments, while remaining open to adjustments, changes, and bridges between them. Ábalos organises his materials like a piece of music into a cohesive composition, to the delight and insight of his readers.

Ábalos+Sentkiewicz, established in 2006 in Madrid and with offices also in Cambridge (USA), and Shanghai, have gained global recognition and acclaim for their original synthesis of technical precision, formal richness, and for the integration of architecture, landscape, and the environment. Through thermodynamic building envelopes and territorial strategies, Ábalos+Sentkiewicz have shaped an environmental culture rooted in precision, rigor, and sensuality. Principals Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz are also distinguished teachers, holding appointments at major schools such as Harvard GSD and ETSA Madrid, combining design practice with academic work.Ábalos+Sentkiewicz: STUFF is the firm’s most comprehensive monograph to date, featuring some 40 realised buildings and projects created since 2006, supplemented with their key texts and manifestos. The scope ranges from residential and public buildings to infrastructure projects, high-rises, and other large-scale developments. Illustrated with more than 1,000 photographs, renderings, and plans, the book showcases 20 years of experimentation across geographical boundaries and at all scales.Text in English and Spanish