TC 175- Moneo Brock

This issue traces almost two decades of work by the international firm Moneo Brock, founded in New York in 1993 by Belén Moneo and Jeff Brock, and based in Madrid since 2002. Across 320 pages, the publication presents a selection of works built between 2007 and 2026, ranging from urban infrastructures and educational facilities to leisure spaces, domestic architecture, and object design, with projects realized in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic.

Three critical essays frame the reading of the work. Stan Allen examines the studio's commitment to public space and the collective dimension of architecture, highlighting how each building engages with the ground it stands on and the environment around it. Manuel Blanco surveys the trajectory of Moneo Brock through the Vitruvian concepts of utilitas, firmitas, and venustas, to which he adds a fourth condition — sustainability — as a defining thread of their practice. Marisa Santamaría addresses the studio's object design and the cultural space _2B, a natural extension of the office that for over a decade has functioned as a laboratory for cross-disciplinary exchange.

The architecture of Moneo Brock is distinguished by a sustained attention to materiality, light, and landscape. Lattices, coral stone walls, translucent glass block, and exposed concrete appear in their buildings as elements that structure space and mediate between interior and exterior, between the built and the natural. Their buildings sit firmly on the ground and work with the local climate — from the sharp light of Mallorca to the Caribbean tropical breeze — producing an architecture that reconciles formal abstraction with sensory richness and a strong public vocation.

The careers of Belén Moneo and Jeff Brock — educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, and faculty members at institutions on both sides of the Atlantic — reflect a cosmopolitan practice deeply rooted in Spanish and Ibero-American architectural culture. Their work has been widely published in international media and recognized in numerous professional forums, establishing Moneo Brock as one of the most distinctive and coherent studios of their generation.