Caved In

"The choice felt appropriate: The Balearic island is dotted with remnants of the Talayotic civilization, whose settlements took the form of caves and beehive-like stone domes. At the moment, architecture is contending more directly with human prehistory-from Amin Taha's 15 Clerkenwell Close in London, its limestone blocks layered with fossil shells, to Anne Holtrop's buildings in Bahrain, cast from eroded ground."

"Can Terra is not a cave in the natural sense, with the irregular contours of a grotto, but an abandoned quarry for marés sandstone. Its geometry features sharp orthogonal cuts, the legacy of machines that once sliced away massive cubes of stone. The result is a stereometric, modernist ruin in reverse-a structure built through subtraction. To enter the cave is to encounter a cathedral of absence, evoking the monolithic churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia or the underground dwellings of Sanmenxia in China."

"In 2018, the Spanish architects Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa bought Can Terra and began converting it into a private environmental research center and retreat space. It reflects their collaborative ethos not only in the sense of teamwork (the pair are married and operate the joint studio Ensamble), but also through the entanglement of nature and artifice. Once you step past the entrance you are already inside the rock, moving through a sequence of large chambers carved straight out of sandstone."

Can Terra occupies an abandoned marés sandstone quarry on Menorca and converts carved voids into a private environmental research center and retreat. The quarry's orthogonal cuts reflect machine extraction, producing a stereometric, modernist ruin created by subtraction. The space evokes prehistoric and monolithic architectures, connecting to Talayotic caves, Lalibela churches, and Sanmenxia dwellings. Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa adapted the chambers into continuous interior volumes without doors or partitions. Fabric lengths modulate rural light while carved chambers and the absence of conventional domestic rooms prioritize collective, material, and geological presence over typical household organization.

Read at Artforum