TC Cuadernos No. 175: Moneo Brock

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

Three critical essays articulate the reading of the work. Stan Allen discusses the studio's commitment to public space and the collective dimension of architecture, underlining how each building engages with the ground it walks on and the environment around it. Manuel Blanco traces Moneo Brock's career through the Vitruvian concepts of utilitas, firmitas and venustas, to which he adds a fourth condition – sustainability – as the backbone of his practice. Marisa Santamaría deals with the dimension of object design and the _2B cultural space, a natural extension of the studio that for more than a decade has functioned as a laboratory for exchange between disciplines.

Moneo Brock's architecture is distinguished by a sustained attention to materiality, light and landscape. Lattices, coral stone walls, translucent glass blocks or exposed concrete appear in his works as elements that structure the space and mediate between the interior and the exterior, between the built and nature. Its buildings sit firmly on the ground and work with the local climate, from the grazing light of Mallorca to the breeze of the Caribbean tropics, giving rise to an architecture that reconciles formal abstraction with sensory richness and public vocation.

The trajectory of Belén Moneo and Jeff Brock —trained at Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, and teachers at institutions on both sides of the Atlantic— reflects a cosmopolitan practice rooted in Spanish and Latin American architectural culture. His work has been widely published in international media and recognized in numerous professional forums, consolidating Moneo Brock as one of the most unique and coherent studios of his generation.