The architecture of AMP draws on a
number of sources related to the local context of Tenerife and the Canary Islands. The abrupt volcanic landscape is itself a
point of departure, with its suggestion of rugged forms in the making, as is
the example of local architectural masters of the 1960's such as Javier Díaz
Llanos and Vicente Saavedra, particularly in their use of textured concrete and
forceful compositions. In works such as the PresidencyBuilding
in Santa Cruz,
AMP have discovered new levels of formal expressiveness and experimentation in
the manipulation of concrete. They also frequently recur to salvage, which
perhaps arises from the "Robinson Crusoe" perspective of an island
isolated from mainland resources, and which results in a compositional
technique of collage or juxtaposition that relates directly to surrealism
(offering another local reference, to the automatic methods of local artist
Oscar Domínguez). Thus their Cultural Centre in Santa Cruz, an obsolete oil
storage tank, discovering the unsuspected spatial drama of its interior; their
incorporation of the 17th century Hamilton Patio in the Presidency,
or their re-use of a Berlin coal barge as a floating swimming pool.
The techniques of salvage and
experimentation with construction form part of an approach to architecture in
which thinking is done more with the hands, in the making of things, than on
the drawing board or from a theoretical perspective, an approach we can also
relate to the island's labour-intensive, low-tech building industry. An
interesting image of this method is their tidal swimming pool in San Miguel,
Tenerife, where the architects poured and moulded the curving wall of concrete
at the intervals permitted by the tides, an "action" closer to some
of the procedures of contemporary art. But underlying these innovations, their
architecture is firmly grounded in the principles and canon of the Modern
Movement. Despite its unusual density, for example, the Presidency Building takes
its sectional part from the Villa Savoye, and we can find reflections of
Chandigarh in the Magma Arts and Congress Centre. Nevertheless, the essential
materiality of AMP's work contrasts with current tendencies elsewhere to pursue
the greatest lightness and transparency. While the latter would seek to
dissolve form into the ethereal immateriality of the visual media that dominate
contemporary consciousness, AMP offer an architecture resistant to this
erosion, an architecture which returns us to a material, existential world of
experience and being.