Biography
Spanish architects Luis Mansilla (1959-2012) and Emilio Tuñón (1959) founded the studio that bears their name in Madrid in 1992. Alongside the studio’s theoretical and practical work, they teach at the Architecture School in Madrid and lecture frequently as visiting professors in Princeton, Harvard, Lausanne, Frankfurt and Barcelona.
Educated in the methodological canons of Rafael Moneo, the architects of studio M+T “work with simple formal structures and compositions of volumes in which fullness tends to prevail over emptiness” (Treccani). As in in Moneo’s work, the combination of theory and practice is indivisible, as demonstrated in publication of the bulletin CIRCO (1993), winner of numerous prizes; careful analysis of the specificity of every single architectural case, always in relation to the environment around it and the existing constructions. M+T add a strong relational component, especially between the traditional and the contemporary, a conceptual rigour that especially emerges in their use of “a single building material, as the ideal presupposition (...) for achieving a decanted synthesis of expression” (Botticini).
Their first prominent project, the Fine Arts Museum in Zamora, introduces one of the fields of action in which M+T came to specialise over the years: museum, cultural and educational facilities, especially in Spain. One outstanding example is MUSAC (Castilla and León Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), “the layout of which is built around the geometric scheme of a chessboard with fields of alternating squares and diamonds”.
A number of their projects have won architectural competitions: the Madrid Regional Cultural Centre (1995), Sanfermines Museum in Pamplona (2001); Cantabria Museum in Santander (2002); the urban plan for Valbuena in Logrono (2004); the Energy Dome in the Environmental City in Soria (2008). The numerous awards M+T have won include the Spanish Architecture Award (2003) and the Mies van der Rohe Award (2007).
Mansilla+Tunón Arquitectos famous works and projects
- Relais & Châteaux Atrio, Cáceres (Spain), 2010
- Helga de Alvear Foundation - Visual Arts Center, Cáceres (Spain), 2010
- Town Hall, Lalin (Spain), 2010
- Twin Houses, Tarifa (Spain), 2009
- Energy Dome in the Environmental City, Soria (Spain), 2008
- Museum of Automotion in Madrid (Spain), 2008
- Museum of Migrations, Algeciras (Spain), 2007
- Pedro Barrié de la Maza Foundation, Vigo (Spain), 2005
- MUSAC - Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Castilla y Leon, Leon (Spagna), 2004
- Museum, Cantabria (Spain), 2002
- Sanfermines Museum, Pamplona (Spain), 2001
- Auditorium, Leon (Spagna), 2001
- Fine Arts Museum, Castellón (Spain), 2000
- San Fernando de Henares Swimming Centre, Madrid (Spain), 1998
- Fine Arts Museum, Zamora, (Spain), 1996
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