Monochrome palette: this studio for visiting artists at the Cesar Manrique Foundation is a glazed pavilion cradled in Lanzarote's tough volcanic landscape.

Characterized by its distinctive black basalt landscape, Lanzarote is the most easterly island in the Canarian archipelago. Here, only the hardiest vegetation thrives in a stark lunar geology studded with extinct volcanoes, but the equable climate lures tourists to its pristine beaches, putting familiar modern pressures on the environment. Lanzarote also attracts artists, drawn by the light and landscape. The Spanish abstract artist and architect Cesar Manrique made his home here in 1968, on the lower slopes of the Tahiche volcano, just north of the island's principal settlement of Arrecife. Up to his death in a car accident in 1992, Manrique was active in movements to conserve Lanzarote's natural and man-made heritage, celebrating the landscape in his powerful paintings and sculptures, and designing several buildings in a modern Canarian vernacular. His eponymous Foundation, now one of the island's most popular cultural attractions, was constructed around his former house, making use of existing lava bubbles to create an interlinked suite of subterranean rooms that has overtones of a Bond villain's lair.

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Recently, the Foundation was extended to provide a new studio space for visiting artists, and the Tenerife-based partnership of Juan Manual Palerm and Leopoldo Tabares, part of a lively emerging generation of Canarian architects, was awarded the commission. The new structure is a delicately transparent single-storey pavilion that plays off the rugged, primeval geology of the volcanic landscape. Placed on the western edge of the main Foundation complex, the pavilion seems simultaneously part of and detached from the its surroundings. Partly sunk into the ground (the site was originally intended for a swimming pool), a long spinal volume, like a glazed corridor, is linked to a more irregularly shaped studio. Glass walls are penetrated at intervals by thick black intrusions of petrified lava, and the long translucent slash of the spinal roof seems to float above the ground. The roof of the studio is more topographic; gently curved, the concrete slab melds and settles into the rugged contours of the landscape.

White wall planes allude to the traditional buildings of the Canaries, but the taut, planar geometry of Palerm Tabares' monochrome architecture has no folkloric frills. This is a simple yet highly evocative language of polar opposites--black and white, light and shade, glass and stone. The studio spaces resemble fragile luminous tents, cradled in a rough, volcanic embrace. Views are framed and filtered through craggy clusters of rock, while around the building retaining walls of shaped black basalt demarcate spaces and changes of level. In some ways, it is hard to distinguish nature from architecture, but given the purpose and context of the new studio, that seems not inappropriate. Cesar Manrique's enduring passion for the island's landscape and buildings has found a powerful contemporary expression.

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