ground control

Manipulating the earth and pioneering new ways to build, Débora Mesa and Antón García-Abril of Ensamble Studio redefine the meaning of home—beginning with their own

TEXT BY FRED A. BERNSTEIN

THE husband-and-wife architects Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa are, García-Abril says, “doers, to the extreme.” Not too many years ago, they built a house by piling up bales of hay, casting a room-size concrete boulder around the bales, then letting a calf named Paulina eat the hay for an entire year. That left a cavity in which they installed rudimentary furniture and fixtures, creating a house they named the Truffle. As architects, they didn’t exactly design the building; they let nature determine its final form. “We like to be surprised by our own projects,” García-Abril says. That approach has made Mesa and García-Abril superstars of architecture’s avant-garde. “They are fearless about embracing innovation,” says J. Meejin Yoon, the dean of Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Yoon, who worked with…

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Architectural Digest (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2021

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