selgascano: José Selgas and Lucía Cano

José Selgas
Born in Madrid in 1965
Architect by the ETSA Madrid 1992
Works with Francesco Venecia in Naples between 1994-95
Scholarship granted by Academia de Bellas Artes de España en Roma 1997-98

Lucía Cano
Born in Madrid in 1965
Architect by the ETSA Madrid 1992
Works with Julio Cano Lasso until 1996
Team member of the Estudio Cano Lasso from 1997 to 2003

selgascano was established in Madrid in 1996. It is a small atelier and intends to remain so. They have worked with a wide variety of projects keeping always nature at the core of the program. Its work is focused on research into the construction process, which is treated as an ongoing process of `listening´ to the largest possible number of elements involved, from manufacture to installation. selgascano avoid the use of games and mechanisms that lead to disciplinary issues, and strive to seek beauty that is comprehensible to any human being.

They tend not to give lectures or classes in order to focus intensely on their projects, although they were involved with the MIT (2013-14) in a short-term extension of the studio´s main concern: an intense search for new outlets for nature using artificial means, applying technologies borrowed from other fields that are rarely mixed with architecture. All of this is linked to the necessary aim of making architecture lose ground to nature once again, minimizing its presence and reducing its role to the creation of opportunities for new types of nature.

In 2015 they were commissioned to build the Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park (London). In the same year they design a school for a real location in Kibera (Nairobi) that was financed and exhibited first at the Louisian Museum in Denmark. During 2016, they designed a pavilion in Cognac and in 2018 they displayed a bathing pavilion for the Triennale of Bruges from May through Sept.

They have exhibited at the MOMA in NY, the Guggenheim in NY, the Venice Biennale, the Chicago Architectural Biennal, the GA Gallery in Tokyo, The MOT (Contemporary art museum of Tokyo), the Design Museum of London, the Akademie der Kunste in Berlín, the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, the Tin Sheds Gallery in Sydney and the MIT in Boston.

In 2013 they have won the Kunstpreis (Art prize) that gives the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin. Also, in the same 2013 they won the “Architects of the Year” prize given by the German Design Council in Munich and in 2019 they were announced as finalists for the Mies Van der Rohe Award.