(Spain, 1969 & USA, 1981)
Building a part of nature with your own hands intervening as little as possible on the existing terrain, transforming raw materials into livable space, and mimicking the environment’s processes to intensify its specificities, are the objectives laid out by Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa. At the “Tippet Rise Art Center,” a vast site bordering Yellowstone National Park in the northwest of the United States, they erected three monumental “landscape structures,” Domo, Inverted Portal and Beartooth Portal. The exhibited film, reflects the seamless blending of landscape and sculpture, sculpture and architecture evoking natural excrescences as ruins. Literally made of the landscape, meaning made of earth from “Tippet Rise,” the works have been shaped to echo the profiles of the surrounding mountains without completely imitating them, the human touch only subtly present, visible only in the works complex structure and pleated texture of their surfaces. The four concrete tower models, part of the Towers of Landscape series, are 1:1 scale experiments guided by four types of geological developments: Reticulated, Layered, Melted and Excavated Here the architects envision new processes, aggregates of reinforced concrete and earth, with the goal of intensifying the resonance of building with the magic of the land.
