Fran Silvestre Architects

Architects Spain. The first thing one might notice about the houses and other projects of Fran Silvestre and his studio of architects in Spain is their particular atmosphere of extravagantly understated elegance and luxury, which is as recognizable in its own right as the work of, say, John Lautner or John Pawson. While this first impression may seem rather superficial, it points us towards a difficult-to-define quality in the works, what we might call an overall “geist” or “gestalt”, that runs very deep, and that is far more complex and interesting than a mere question of “style” or “branding”. One approach to this depth and complexity begins with the evident tension in these works between formal and practical questions. Silvestre’s designs are not simply solutions to given design problems, though he tends to present them as such. They absorb and distill the myriad issues of program, site and context, structure, building technologies and so on, subsuming them into the play of space and form that could be understood as the true subject of his architecture.