Landscape & Architecture

A monograph which investigates the legacy of the recently-deceased architect Jose Maria Rodriiguez-Pastrana whose designs for buildings on the Canary Islands won many prestigious architectural awards and offered a harmony between the natural landscape and modern building techniques. The reason for his international reputation can be found in his readiness to dignify spaces through a dialogue between landscape, architecture and history. This is the leitmotif of the work undertaken at AMP Arquitectos. In the words of Fernando Menis, one of AMP's founding members upon his return to the Canary Islands after living in Paris and Barcelona, 'due to a lack of contact with everything going on around, this purely rational isolation led to a type of architecture that was always pushing things to the limit, and taking risks. This is closely related to an attempt to understand the place at a time prior to our own; to try and delve into its initial moments. Understanding that place, with those conditioning factors, is a starting point for any project. [...]This filter (using the island) has meant that when we go somewhere else, our solutions are never far away.'