Ábalos & Herreros, pavilion-gym in El Retiro: Nature and Artifice, equal to equal

Abstract

Today, 20 years after its construction, the importance of the pavilion-gym in El Retiro (Madrid, Ábalos and Herreros, 2002), not sufficiently valued in its day, deserves to be highlighted due to, among other reasons, its premonitory empathy with the relationship between nature and artifice that characterizes today's society. Faced with a history of architecture in which reciprocal exclusions between the natural and the artificial have prevailed -in which when the inclusion of the natural has prevailed, it has done so from organicism- the 21st century simultaneously vindicates nature and artifice, elevating and making them compatible in a symbiotic equal to equal interaction. The article identifies and argues the previous thesis contextualizing the pavilion at its time, associated with the change of millennium, and relating it to previous, contemporary and parallel European works to end by highlighting an architecture that handles with wisdom and success notions of history and architectural composition.