ignacio g. galán
[ igg - office for architecture ]

New York / Madrid
igg@ignaciogalan.com
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A Suburban Celebration! Gallery

Longitudinal Section

Floorplan first (bottom) and second floor (top)

[construction images coming soon]

Single family house in the outskirts of a big city. With SOF-T / TallerDe2 (Arantza Ozaeta and Alvaro Martin Fidalgo)

Madrid (Spain)/ 2017-18 (under construction)

Suburban ideals can be packed quite tightly in order to be combined with the advantages of city life, including access to mass transit and a dense network of services at a walking distance. “A suburban celebration!” builds on a diverse set of suburban imaginations—reaching from repurposed factory spaces to pool parties—and hybridizes their characteristic typologies for this small plot, as a prototype for a new form of development in the fringes of Madrid’s urban networks.

The house’s particular profile builds on those imaginaries while it provides a more compact response to suburban habitation than the detached houses surrounding the intervention, which systematically maximize the built envelope within the limits provided by the regulations (in an understanding of the house as a real estate operation). Rather than operating through stacking formally similar and programmatically disconnected floors, this house exploits the opportunities of different orientations, programmatic associations, and specific imaginations and allows for more complex patterns of appropriation. With that, it seeks to open the suburbs to the openness, complexities and hybridations characteristic of urban social articulations. 

[image gallery]

Ignacio G. Galán [igg – office for architecture] + SOF-T / TallerDE2 (Arantza Ozaeta and Alvaro Martin Fidalgo).

Collaborators: Ana Herreros, Pablo Sainz del Río, Jorge Sedano.

Acordeón Office Sidebar

  • About Open or Close

    [igg - office for architecture] is a design and research office based in New York City and led by Ignacio G. Galán, PhD. Our work focuses on architecture's role in the articulation of society through design projects, research, and pedagogical endeavors. The designs of the office have been awarded in competitions including the First Prize for the New Velodrome in Medellín and are part of the permanent collection of the Pompidou Center. The office was a finalist to the 2014 Iakov Chernikhov Prize as a result of its contributions to design culture. 

    We operate through diverse media and platforms and are continuously informed by different kinds of conversations and collaborations. Galán's research has led to the production of several publications and exhibitions including the installation Cinecittá Occupata for the 2014 Venice Biennale by invitation of the general curator Rem Koolhaas. Together with the After Belonging Agency, Galán was the Chief Curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale (Graham Foundation Grant 2015). He has also collaborated in the research project Radical Pedagogies and has co-curated its exhibition at the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale and at the 2014 Venice Biennale, where it was awarded a Special Mention of the jury. He is currently one of the editors of the homonymous volume, forthcoming in 2020 by Sternberg Press (Graham Foundation Grant 2019).

    Galán studied Architecture at ETSAMadrid and TUDelft, he graduated with Distinction from the MArchII program at Harvard GSD, and has a PhD in Architecture History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton. He has been a Fellow at the Spanish Academy in Rome and a Fulbright Scholar. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Barnard+Columbia Colleges and has taught studios and seminars at Columbia GSAPP and PennDesign among others.

  • Statement Open or Close

    We understand architecture as a key agent participating in the articulation of society. 

    We explore the ways in which architecture contributes to the definition of new ways of being together.

    We are concerned with architecture's relation to cultural transfers, material networks, and diverse forms of population transience in a global context. The relation of these forms of circulation challenge our understanding of architecture (conventionally associated with control, enclosure, permanence, and stability), requires new imaginations for our ways of being together and consequently remains a realm for further inquiry and intervention.

    We are additionally interested in the objects, media technologies, and institutions transforming architecture's individual occupations, its collective operations, and its diverse types of mobilization. 

    These emphases lead the work of the office and continuously challenge our methods of analysis and our design practice.