46 DIGS.NET
| 11.4.22
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its current use, served as an ammunition
dump during the Spanish Civil War and
was then cast off). "Finding this excavated
space in the guts of the earth and reinvent-
ing its use implies writing a new story that
can rescue it from its abandonment."
That story begins when García-Abril and
Mesa, natives of Spain who are currently
based in Boston, stumbled upon the site.
Taken with its material qualities, the duo
let their famously radical and avant-garde
imaginations run wild, then later acquired
the quarry for their architectural explora-
tions. Their work at the site is never done,
it seems, but that really isn't the point. C'an
Terra is a continual place of discovery. A
laboratory for architects who are, at heart,
N CONVERTING THE ruins of a deserted
rock quarry into a minimal subterra-
nean dwelling in the scrubby Bale-
aric landscape, Ensamble Studio
has given fascinating new meaning
to living with nature. Which is to say raw,
among the elements, and nearly completely
in situ. When it comes to innovating new
architecture and novel ways to dwell, it is
not an exaggeration to say that the AD100
Madrid-based architecture office went to
the ends of the earth to find out.
To understand the project, one must first
excavate its true nature. "C'an Terra is
the house of the earth: first just that, earth;
after, quarried with industrial logic, voided
and abandoned, to be rediscovered
one hundred years later and come to be
architecture," say Ensamble Studio's prin-
cipals and partners Antón García-Abril and
Débora Mesa of the site (one that, prior to
