Husband-and-wife duo SelgasCano’s motto could very well be “Less is more”, just like Mies van der Rohe’s emblematic aphorism, but rather than a minimalist Modernist ethic referring to the German-American master’s efforts to reduce and distill buildings and their components into simple forms, José Selgas and Lucía Cano’s vision of architecture is all about lightweight materials, transparency, openness and respect for nature. The relation and experience with the site – its history, climate and architecture – are also key factors. The Spanish couple hopes to build less to give back more to society. Selgas says, “Our hope for architecture is to build less and less and to give more space to nature in cities, to disappear more and more on behalf of nature. Hopefully, we will see less construction. Scale is super important for us and we don’t understand why buildings have to be as big as they are. If you can make it smaller, it’s always better. The budget is also important, so if we can do something cheaper, we will always do it because it’s sustainable. Sustainability is always related to the budget. Typically, we work with very light materials because they are more sustainable. Transportation, fabrication and energy are related to weight. The heavier it is, the more energy you need to fabricate or move it. We understood many years ago that the lightest things that we can apply to a project are the cheapest in the end.”

In 2017, the couple debuted a large pavilion in the Martell Foundation’s courtyard in Cognac. Their first project in France, it was a site-specific commission that hosted cultural events until summer 2018, when the foundation – dedicated to contemporary creation and savoir-faire in art, design, architecture, craft, fragrance, dance, literature and music – partially reopened prior to the completion of renovations in 2021. True to their philosophy of lightness and cost-effectiveness, they enveloped a twisting and turning steel framework with a high-tech, translucent and undulating material that’s lightweight, strong, easily-available and waterproof developed by French roofing and cladding specialists Onduline to create rippling, flowing, flexible and organic shapes. Recalling traditional Japanese rice paper, this 1-mm thick fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin became a way of playing with paper to make it as rigid as possible. To prevent the paper from blowing away, yellow inflatable cushions filled with water were installed in the gently-vibrating structure, allowing visitors to sit, lean or stretch out in the giant paper forest in which they could get lost. Lightness was also important considering that the pavilion will thereafter be dismantled and reconstructed elsewhere to give it a second life.

Defending the idea that nature must prevail over architecture, SelgasCano’s tunnel-like studio outside Madrid sits on the forest floor, as they attempt to erase the presence of their architecture as much as possible. In harmony with its natural surroundings, their pavilion in summer 2015 for the 15^th anniversary of the Serpentine Galleries’ world-renowned commission – a temporary site for architectural experimentation in Kensington Gardens by the world’s greatest architects – embraced the park while exploring how to use a single material in a structural way. They unveiled an irregular, organically-shaped, double-skinned structure consisting of multicolored, translucent or mirrored fluorine-based polymer (ETFE) ribbons and panels resembling stained-glass windows stretched across a steel frame. The aim was for the design to connect with nature, feel like part of the landscape and allow visitors to experience architecture through simple elements: light, shadow, lightness, transparency, form, color, materials, sensitivity, change and surprise.

A few kilometers east of the Serpentine in Spitalfields, the practice has designed the interiors of Second Home, a revolutionary curated workspace for London’s creative industries, marrying structural hardwood plywood and plasterboard partitions, second-hand designer furniture, and potted plants and hanging foliage. Amidst a relaxed, home-environment vibe with mirrored panels and white corrugated plastic, start-up workers sitting in comfy sofas and mismatched lounge chairs tap away on their laptops enclosed in pods with wavy, see-through acrylic walls. In Lisbon, in an “L” shape wing of the Mercado da Ribeira, a popular 19^th-century landmark with iron-cast trusses in the roof, the architects created a café lounge area and one big open office space with a 100-meter-long table shared by 250 people containing 1,000 plants for privacy and improved air quality for Second Home. To reduce the market building’s energy consumption, they eliminated the air-conditioning and created a radiant floor for cooling and heating to accompany the natural ventilation controlled by motors and conventional greenhouse system parts. SelgasCano has completed another Second Home office in London, this time in Holland Park (formerly the home of Richard Rogers’ first architectural practice), and is now working on an ambitious, sprawling 90,000-sqft co-working campus in Hollywood, Los Angeles, with 60 oval-shaped yellow work pods scattered around a garden, whose transparent curved walls allow 360-degree horizontal views of the 6,500 plants and 400 full-size trees, giving the feeling of working amidst nature.

“It’s fundamental to be super free in every step in architecture,” explains Selgas about his firm’s architectural approach. “The only main constraint that you have is the budget. Freedom is related to the budget. But if you know how to control the budget, you can do whatever you want. We try to be super open to all ideas, possibilities, materials, colors. We’re not trying to use new materials like plastics; we just have the freedom to use whatever material we want. It’s the same with color. We don’t really focus on the color, but we can use whatever color we want. When we suddenly use yellow, we get noticed because it’s unusual. That freedom to be open to everything is the main philosophy of the studio.”

Not one to shy away from low-tech materials, the architects’ buildings are often constructed from cheap, off-the-shelf components, such as extruded plastic sheeting and corrugated metal, and adopt a social and community dimension. Their Konokono Vaccination and Educational Clinic in Turkana, Kenya, for the area’s nomadic and pastoral population scattered across desert territory examined the possibilities of working with scarcity or practically nothing, using whatever few materials were on hand in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa. The goal was to use common materials in innovative ways, and to achieve the maximum with the minimum by creatively reacting to a specific material (or even the lack of material). Designed together with 10 MIT students on a study trip, the small medical center was built in summer 2014 by SelgasCano, the course students and many local inhabitants who were paid for their labor. The client had ruled out the use of indigenous materials such as adobe and thatch as they were too expensive to install and maintain, so they came up with an ingenious lightweight construction that could withstand harsh elements, incorporating cement blocks for the walls of the consultation and vaccination room, a structural system of scaffolding poles held in place by adjustable clamps, warped metal sheeting for the roof and low circular exterior stone walls.

Another socially-focused SelgasCano project was the commission to design the 2015 summer pavilion of Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition. The initial design and materials were funded by the museum, built together with design studio Helloeverything (three of the architects’ former students when they were teaching at MIT in Boston), then dismantled and shipped to Kibera in Kenya, Africa’s largest slum, and reconstructed with the help of local laborers as a building for the existing dilapidated Kibera Hamlets School for children from high-poverty and high-violence backgrounds. Made from universally-available scaffolding components, chipboard and polycarbonate plastic sheets and showing architecture’s imperative for adaptability, the building financed by Second Home has become a landmark for the local community because in addition to a school, it has become a venue for events and attracts donors and charities. “It was also about trying to draw attention to the wasted materials that you see in museums and exhibitions,” notes Selgas. “In places like the slums of Kibera or around the world, there’s no waste. We had some leftover polycarbonate sheets that are strong, light, waterproof and translucent that we gave away, and people used them immediately in their houses. Even the metal sheets from the former school that you thought couldn’t be used anymore as they were completely broken were reused. There’s no waste in these areas.”

Currently working on close to 20 projects, Selgas and Cano keep their studio deliberately small, choosing never to have more than 15 employees in order to be hands-on in every stage of their projects, seeing through the entire process from concept to delivery. Selgas describes how they work together, “There are no defined roles. There’s no kind of leadership in any project. We mix everything on every project. The architects in our studio can move from one project to another very easily, entering at different phases and giving their input. We love that kind of chaos because it’s very useful for us – it gives us always the opportunity to discover new things. We have more possibilities to be open to new ideas and to not repeat ourselves. That flexibility in a project and in a studio is very important. That’s why our studio is small and we want to keep it like that because we believe in close relationships on every project. We also have to be engaged in construction. If you’re a chef, how can you just create a recipe and not cook? You need to cook to see if it’s good or not.”

Both born in Madrid in 1965, the two met and fell in love studying architecture at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid and graduated in 1992. Selgas went on to work for Italian architect Francesco Venezia in Naples, and Cano with her three brothers and father, renowned Spanish architect Julio Cano Lasso. Subsequent to winning the competition for a major development, Badajoz Auditorium and Congress Center in Spain, situated in a former circular bullring inserted into a pentagonal 17^th-century bastion, they decided to establish their own firm in 1998. They have since completed another two vast congress halls in Spain experimenting with reflection and transparency, bulkiness and weightlessness: one resembles an amorphous, cantilevering and translucent crystalline meteor in the rolling hills in Plasencia that tries to preserve as much of the landscape as possible while acting like a lighthouse for the city, the second a light-filled harborfront box through which brightly-colored ramps and staircases zigzag in Cartagena.

When asked which of their schemes best reflect who they are as architects, Selgas replies, “The buildings that we’re working on right now are the ones we’re most excited about because when they’re finished, they’re finished. Typically, we hate to go back to the buildings that we have done because they’re not part of us anymore. We don’t see the projects as belonging to us.” Now they’re collaborating with Philippine real estate developer Robbie Antonio to build Casa A for Revolution Precrafted, which unites over 80 preeminent architects, artists and designers including Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Daniel Libeskind, Christian de Portzamparc, Sou Fujimoto, Kengo Kuma, the Campana Brothers, Marcel Wanders, Tom Dixon, Ron Arad, Lenny Kravitz, Kenneth Cobonpue and Daphne Guinness to create an exclusive series of modern prefabricated, livable spaces ranging from houses and hotels to restaurants and museums that may be installed anywhere in the world. In partnership with Helloeverything, the 45-sqm, highly-versatile transformer house is suitable for warm or cold climates, as it incorporates a series of elevated bays with embedded motion control that opens and closes, expanding and contracting according to its environment, while custom material enclosure elements may be attached to a standard structural system.

Other important projects include a school for a slum in Mathare in Nairobi, Pip House in Hollywood’s Laurel Canyon with a hint of the 1960’s bohemian lifestyle set on a such a steep slope that the top of the dwelling meets the road and the roof garden doubles as a carpark, the renovation of a building for public policy think tank Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, and two edifices consisting of a market hall and workplaces for the new purpose-built, one-hectare Greenwich Peninsula design district for over 1,800 of London’s creatives by developer Knight Dragon, which will answer the call for more affordable workspaces in the capital in one of its largest regeneration projects. SelgasCano was one of the eight architecture studios that were asked to design a pair of buildings independently and blind from each other to create diversity for the fully-pedestrianized district, which will house human-scaled workshops, artist studios and flexible desk space set around a series of courtyards and a central public square when it opens in 2020.