Town Hall and Cultural Center

Abalos & Herreros worked together from 1984 to 2006. His projects can be understood as a continuum of ideas that overlapped over time. Their early designs in the 1980s focused on tectonic materiality extracted from prefabricated catalogs, which served as a base for the work developed in the 1990s that started to have a formal approach. Their work in the 2000s, before they parted ways and opened independent offices, started to show the difficulty of combining the formal and the tectonic. While the work of Juan Herreros seems to have followed a tectonic architecture, Iñaki Ábalos have continued the formal approach based on environmental principles and thermal analysis. Ábalos & Herreros trabajaron juntos desde 1984 hasta 2006. Sus proyectos pueden verse como un continuo de ideas que se fueron superponiendo a lo largo del tiempo. Sus primeros edificios en la década de 1980, centrados en la materialidad tectónica extraída de los catálogos de prefabricación, sirvió de base para los proyectos que empezarían a desarrollar en los 90, con un enfoque más formal. Los proyectos de la década del 2000, antes de separarse, empezaban a mostrar una incompatibilidad para combinar lo formal con lo tectónico. Una vez de forma independiente, el trabajo de Juan Herreros pareció seguir ese interés en la técnica y los detalles, mientras que Iñaki Ábalos ha continuado el enfoque formalista basado en principios medioambientales y análisis térmico. It is difficult to trace a clear division in the transformation of their interests through their career. The evolution from one project to another had subtle differences and only indicated new parameters that seemed to bloom in later buildings. This perspective in their work reflects why they influenced the Spanish architecture sphere during the 1990s and 2000s: Their importance was based on the form they understood how to design buildings rather than their buildings per se.