Founders of two of the leading Scandinavian architecture studios, Bjarke Ingels (BIG) and Kjetil Thorsen (Snøhetta), coincided in Pamplona during the IV International Congress of the Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad, held under the motto ‘Change of Climate’. Though their works are readily distinguishable and evidently different, their approach to architecture is practically the same. They both take inspiration from the landscape, the one they have known since their childhood, and that, as in the case of so many Nordic authors, has marked their career and work. 
Bjarke Ingels: Maybe this is a cliché in the concepts of Scandinavia but the fact that you guys do this annual hike to the Snøhetta mountain is very interesting to me. We also go on an expedition every year, but last year there was a terrible snowstorm in which seven people had died, so we had to stay in the valley. It was so shocking though that we haven’t actually planned this year’s trip.
Kjetil Thorsen: But you have to do it. It is like a car crash, you have to go straight back to the car, or you will be always scared of driving. For us it is important because you build many new kinds of relationships. When you get so close to landscape, you are almost having sex with the landscape…
 

BI: I have been thinking that I get so much out of getting into nature. Not just staying in a nice hotel and then seeing a lot of nature, but mostly disappearing into it in a way that is so fully unprogrammed and uncategorized that it is entirely up to you to enjoy or inhabit it. It is a gigantic playground for grown-ups. 
KT: It is also a way of learning about architecture. Skiing, for example, is the best way of describing the section of a landscape, through height and speed. You are following the contour lines of landscape continuously, so you get a really close perception of the abstraction of the landscape when you are skiing. But it is the same with the slowness of climbing. When you are climbing, and you are hanging from the wall, you get the feeling  of being far from everything, but at the same time the wall could not be any closer.
BI: I remember this amazing experience. We were walking up this pass, it was like an 1,800-meter ascent and it was raining non-stop, endless rain for a week. Everything was slippery, so climbing up was super hard. It was beautiful. Up there we were in the clouds, and once in a while they would open and you would have this magnificent view, but right after they would close again, very fast. Finally, when we walked down, we constantly had to lie down, flat on the stomach – we could not do it on our backs, because we had the backpacks – and slide down this kind of greasy mountain. It was a complete surrender to the elements. 
 

KT: We keep drifting in the direction of having sex with the landscape… For me there are only two situations in the world: the mountains or the sea. Everything in between is kind of boring.
BI: I totally agree. 
KT: But I like that. That type of challenge. I have this feeling sometimes, that if we don’t have enough wind I would close the office sort of thing, because you need the forces against to get there. If it is not windy enough, stay home. If you see where our offices are located in Oslo, we are completely exposed to the weather. The location is directly south towards the fjord, twenty meters away from it, and it is this huge warehouse that sits in the outermost peak of Oslo, below the castle. So you are getting all the weather: the winter, the spring, the autumn, the summer… We have all the fisherman in front. It is actually this kind of closeness to these things, as we were   discussing before, that makes you learn from them. To design something you need to be filled with it. You have to be under the skin of things. Landscape does that to you. 
BI: Just to finish this landscape theme, I think that there is something that our work shares, this idea of invitation. You called it generosity. It’s an invitation to something different. One of our first buildings, the VM Houses, has these triangular balconies, 5 meters long. The idea was to get so far out into the air that you could actually turn around and look at your building. When you are standing there, you feel in the air, surrounded only by your neighbors. Obviously also with The Mountain and the Eight House, where you climb up a ski slope. In other words, the idea that each project somehow tries to make available something that would normally be off limits, so that you end up having not an accumulation of private domains, but rather a new kind of man-made landscape. 
KT: We talked about architecture being active. To me it is about prepositions: in, over, through, within… Anything that can relate to many prepositions all of a sudden moves into active positioning in relation to people. If you can walk through, over, in, under, and so forth and so forth, then you are close to the landscape. Because the landscape and our whole language is based on the fact that we develop prepositions to define our position. Where we are in relation to something else. If architecture is only ‘in’ then it is not active, because it only defines one preposition. It has to have a whole range of prepositions in order to be active. This was the discussion we had at the Venice Biennale, and that is why I am no longer happy with the separation between inside and outside in the debates on public space, simply because I believe that it is limiting to the architecture, and to the public space. These are the type of things that I try to follow, and I see in your designs that you are trying to create active buildings too. 
 

BI: Definitely. We normally differentiate when there is a need, “a must have,” or a desire, a “nice to have.” The more “nice to haves” you can add to what the client is asking or to the program, the better. 
KT: For instance, there’s a debate now at the urban city planning offices in Oslo because they don’t know how to represent the Opera House in plans. Is it a building? Do they cut the building below? Or is it outer space? They don’t know! And that’s fantastic.
BI: That is exactly my dream. I have been saying this all the time, in a city map building is yellow, public building is red, park is green… and I have been focusing on this idea that industrial is gray. It is like this cancerous tissue in the city map, but I am curious to see how are they going to label the power plant. It should be green, or maybe red… but definitely not gray, even though it is also gray.  
KT: I agree. These are the kinds of hybrids you learn about by moving back to nature and landscape. Landscape was never only one thing. Unless we accept the complexities of the systems we are dealing with, we will get nowhere. And I think that is something to learn from nature. We cannot copy nature, but whenever we create a new building, it is not an abstract landscape but a new reality. And reality can learn things from how nature operates, hybrid aspects. You have been focusing a lot on that when it comes to your social infrastructures, where you add one function on top the other. It is a fantastic strategy because it is what landscapes do. They provide you with water but you can also ski. They provide you with trees, but you can also walk. 

BI: In my view there are two tendencies. One is an extreme centralization. For instance, global companies (Amazon, Walmart…) have bigger and bigger distribution centers but are more and more centralized, as if they were trying to create a single warehouse for all of America. But there is another process, happening in cities, which is extreme decentralization, or mixing. Roof farming in New York, for example. There is a huge desire for it, almost as an ideology, maybe as a hobby, though most people living in cities are too busy to grow their tomatoes. But I really think that if you get a company to call out warehouse owners and say: “we would like to take possession of your roof, we will install, manage, operate, maintain and you will get 50% of the crops,” everyone would benefit.  
KT: We have also studied it and we calculated the weight of the earth and the productivity of the earth that you could get straight out of the agriculture soil that was already on the ground once its clean. The 30-centimeter layer of agricultural soil is full of embodied energy. To throw it away and not use it as food production is kind of a waste. 
BI: We are doing this power plant in Vancouver, and aside from several sustainable energy systems we are using a fairly commodified Dutch farming system where you don’t have soil. You have these tubes where plants grow out of the tubes, so it consumes much less water. Everything is painted white, the floor is white, the tubes are white, so that no photon is swallowed by light-sucking colors,  everything is bouncing around. A completely effortless roof farming concept. 
KT: That is cool. Also, we have to rely on the future technologies, and their development. So much could happen in the field of industrial design. It is one of the areas where I feel that we have done a lot but at the same time, nothing. The industrial design elements in architecture, for instance, are completely missing, so one of the few things that we are starting to do now is actively moving more into the hardware production line of smaller things in life. Pocket lamps, for instance. A torch is a fantastic invention because you carry the light with you. There was this fiction writer who talked about glass that retains light, and for light to penetrate through the glass it takes about twenty years. So that means that you have this panoramic window, and then you build it into your home. You don’t have a TV, you have a one to one vision to Niagara Falls in New York, because the delay of twenty years actually puts the real image in your living room. Simply through the delay of light penetration. It is science fiction of course, but it is actually beautiful. 

Álvaro Siza (Matosinhos, 1933) wanted to become a sculptor, but his father thought that wasn’t enough. He became an architect instead, but something good always comes out of something bad, and he soon started receiving prizes and honors. He has picked up the Pritzker (1992), the UIA Gold Medal (2011) and dozens of extraordinary distinctions, and has been invited by the best universities in Mexico, Colombia, Switzerland and the United States. Still, when becoming acquainted with him one might think he has just returned from that fishing town near Porto where he was born, but soon, when talking with him, a plentiful source appears, an ocean of wisdom and cordial intelligence. Getting a taste of Siza means, therefore, enjoying the pleasure of his many exquisite works and also meeting someone with a unique quality. The wise, in sciences or in arts, ennoble us every time we come close to them.

Vicente Verdú (VV): I have always liked Álvaro Siza’s buildings –, I would like to remember the first time I met him. I had quit smoking, and he chain-smoked, so I told him: “If you stopped smoking, you would breathe better, you wouldn’t get tired so easily but, above all, you would gain lucidity.” To which he answered: “Even more?” I think this defines his work: that lucidity, or that conscience of lucidity in his work. And this is what I would like to ask you about.
Álvaro Siza (AS): Yes, but I am also conscious of my lack of lucidity, and this brings me many problems…
VV: Indeed, but there is that idea of light, the idea of purity, of cleanliness. Your drawings caught my attention, because they are not so clean. I thought that what Siza built was a replica of the drawings he had done previously, and I see this is not so, and that the drawings are much more tangled…
AS: Of course, because when you are designing your mind is also tangled… Everything is blurry at the beginning, and then little by little it becomes clearer: the geometry is more controlled, and so on. Drawing lets me think. Recently I read Pallasmaa referring to the thinking hand. And it is true that I use it to think. Above all, I don’t want to censure what I do, what my mind thinks. But you have to go through it, because if you don’t a lot is lost. One must go through a certain madness, a certain indiscipline. And then, little by little, the form of the spaces becomes subtler and the drawings become clearer. _x005F_x000D_

VV: I know you wanted to be a sculptor, and that your father finally convinced you to study architecture. In a certain way, both things have come together…
AS: When I just got into the school architecture, there was also painting and sculpture. I got into arguments with my father and wanted to switch careers, but then, when I actually started, it was a very stimulating moment: the School had a new director, a new team of young people, and all of this coincidentally at time when the Regime was opening up. I was enthusiastic. I also devoted some time to painting. Later I married an exceptional painter and, when I looked at her drawings I thought “what’s the point of my painting?”
VV: It happens with painters, who have their own way of painting, and it becomes an identifiable brand. The same thing happens to you: you give your architecture a personal stamp. But sometimes the author needs to do something different, driven by a need for expressive freedom. Have you felt that temptation?
AS: Of suddenly changing? Yes, but I must say that it didn’t come from outside, but from the work circumstances. Usually the work itself makes me want to change. Some time ago I was commissioned to build a house somewhere where there were only three or four ugly houses. A flat site; an area with no history, no geography… The client, who was very nice and open, asked for a solution, but didn’t want anything in particular. Everything was very neutral, and I didn’t know what to do. Then, when I began, I coincidentally visited a work in Vienna by Adolf Loos, whom I wasn’t too interested in I must say. I looked at the photos: a window here, a window there, and thought: “What’s with this confusion?” But I went into his Müller House, and there I realized that the windows were all in place. It wasn’t modulation, proportion, nothing. I saw that the rigor in how these windows were arranged and the secret to their overall unity was that they were born from the interior. And they were born as a complement of an overall project, and therefore, though at the beginning one might not understand it, there was magnetism: it was totally authentic, there were no tricks. It was sublime. When I returned to Porto, I further developed the theme of the windows, and it was Frampton who identified the direct influence. The place is very important, the context. But in many cases it is necessary to go beyond in order to find new things. _x005F_x000D_

VV: But in the pavilion you did in Lisbon, for the International Exposition, you designed a canopy that wasn’t Siza-like.
AS: It’s true that it didn’t look it. And I like that. When I designed the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London with Souto de Moura, a friend of Eduardo told him “this project doesn’t look yours,” and another friend said the same to me. And this happens because the theme is different, and there is something non-recognizable that comes from the different work circumstances, from open stimuli. In the case of the Lisbon project they were asking for something the use of which was unknown (even today I don’t know what it’s for). They wanted a large space to welcome people. I started out with a large slab with columns, many columns, as Niemeyer would do. I sized up a series of options that were nonsense and, then, one day a very good engineer came along, and he didn’t want columns: he wanted to build a large dome. But that didn’t work, it didn’t offer shelter because it was very tall. The curve of the dome had to be upside down. And I thought: “Is this feasible?” Then I thought about a solution using a plastic sheet, though I wanted something hard and heavy. Finally, the engineer tendered a simple solution: braces wrapped in 20 centimeters of concrete and then a series of tubes. Everything was quite prosaic actually.
VV: I had the feeling that it was rather a display of an acrobatic move, and thought that wasn’t something you would do…
AS: There is a fun anecdote. At the pavilion I drew some furniture pieces, and the woman who directed the Expo told me: “Siza, be careful because Coll has to sit on that chair, and he has a very big b…” And then I drew a big chair. But later there was a ceremony and Sampaio?, who was small, sat on it, so his feet were dangling…

VV: It draws my attention that you have taught at different schools: what’s the essence of your teaching? What do you teach with greater enthusiasm?
AS: What interests me the most is what I learned with my master during my first experience at the School: understanding what lies behind the goals, the creation, the intelligence of each student. Now that classes are larger (back then we were fifteen or so, and the professor could talk with each student), it is quite easy to ruin a student’s work. It is a way of annulling his qualities, and not understand his skills. And that’s when I remember when I was a student, when I wanted to become a sculptor and didn’t care for architecture, and when I received the first critique from a teacher (from the director in fact, an extremely intelligent person). He looked at my work, smoked, thought… and then started. And what a way of starting… He said to me: “You can tell perfectly well that you haven’t seen any architecture at all, so I suggest you go to a bookstore and buy some magazines.” So I went and bought four issues of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, which is what we had back then: an issue on Gropius, another on Aalto, another on Neutra and another on hospitals, that I didn’t even read. But Aalto was a shock, Aalto above all. Instead of making me feel I was a disgrace, my teacher let me think that, with more information in my hands, I could change the results. And that’s a good thing. _x005F_x000D_ I would say young architects to fight while energy lasts, and to not accept those negative trends. We are in time. We have to fight in a more constant manner, with long-term objectives. But the essential conquest is the pleasure that practicing architecture gives… If we don’t get there, the profession is unbearable. _x005F_x000D_

Siza’s last phrases could sound like a doctrinal claim, a rousing speech, but he himself is the best example of why we should listen to his words. The determination, focus on work and pursuit of style have turned Álvaro Siza not only into a professional role model but also into an ethical symbol. And surely it is no coincidence that the purity of his work, white and tuned, matches that rectitude of the firmly asserted spirit. Loving the profession, striving for the well-made work, being attentive to the finishes, taking the measure of a building from the high structure to the details or conquering an idea and a social conscience are the greatest treasure of an artist, and also his personal fortress. The fame of this Portuguese giant isn’t, after all, just the result of his skill and inventiveness, but rather of a professional ethic that in its human condition integrates everything.

Dominique Perrault: The landscape in Ultzama is truly magnificent…_x005F_x000D_
Pachi Mangado: Yes, that is why it is difficult to raise a building here. I was interested in this estate because it had wonderful qualities. In fact, the most complicated part of the project was the discussion with the architect of the regional government on how to maintain it. He wanted me to build a conventional house identical to those in the valley, made of red brick. It took me months to convince him of the fact that one of the main characteristics of the architectural landscape is density, and how to manage it respectfully.
Architecture is part of the landscape and not something imposed, and color is not what’s important; what’s important is the idea of compactness._x005F_x000D_
DP: Yes, I was imagining some kind of underground architecture. There’s the woods, there’s the river… and we must know how to protect the landscape and live in it. That is why I think one can adapt to the landscape and make the most of its topography. Without touching anything. _x005F_x000D_
PM: There is one incredible thing though: here they give the go-ahead to any urban arrangement with small houses, fragmentation, just because they are white and red. That is stupid because it destroys the landscape. The idea is to preserve density and compactness. This building has stables, tracks, the caretaker’s house… if I had compartmentalized all of them it would have been a disaster. _x005F_x000D_

DP: That’s what’s important about large volumes. In a large volume it’s important to share, and that is the key: sharing. It is an ideological and political matter. If you make many small buildings: my small house, my small car…, there’s no sharing. Now, in Paris, we are developing the project to unify the whole region, the Grand Paris. Evidently it will be complicated because there will always be a battle between the richer western areas and the more modest eastern sections of the city. But it is really a good idea. We must invent or find a structure to let twelve million inhabitants coexist. It is a matter of necessity. Everyone used to say “Paris et la banlieu,” and now it is only Paris, or Grand Paris. It is a project that will expose the problems of identity, of exclusion… it is a visionary plan. _x005F_x000D_
PM:: A new Baron Haussmann…_x005F_x000D_
DP: No, we are an army of small Baron Haussmanns. Now we have to see how far these frontiers can stretch, or see if they are necessary at all, because we cannot let the Grand Paris become another closed circuit. In any case, sharing is valid for both city and country. In a large building you go in and out, work, think, rest, cook… That is the concept of multiple function, as in traditional architecture where the grandparents, children and animals were all in one same building. _x005F_x000D_
PM: That’s right, but animals can’t be just anywhere. On our way here we saw lots of horses in the fields. In this area there is a strict relationship between landscape and animals. I can’t imagine the landscape without them. This is why over these six years I have never doubted that this was a space for horses. This landscape is both natural and human. _x005F_x000D_

DP: It is an artificial nature. And we must face a completely contemporary problem: should we or should we not build in natural environments? Architecture is a natural construction and one can think that the walls are trees, the sun is the land, the slabs are the sky. _x005F_x000D_
PM: It is a common error to think that architecture is different from landscape, when they are actually the same thing. The regulations on building in the landscape are often mistaken because their point of departure is not right. _x005F_x000D_
DP: The landscape harbors nature and architecture, not nature or architecture. _x005F_x000D_

PM: The subject of the horses is somewhat similar to that of architecture. We buy the horses when they are two years old and, during eight years they are trained for competition. It is as if you were working on a project: you start out with the idea, you define the project, build it, encounter difficulties… There is a high chance that a project can fail, and the same thing goes for horses. It takes eight years to prepare the movements, the rhythms, the music… you never know if it will be a good investment. Architectural projects, like horses, also become ill. _x005F_x000D_
DP: We are also working on a competition for a racetrack (New Longchamp Racecourse in Paris): the horses are completely different. It is a big project, and we wanted to make the architect’s intervention on the surface disappear. As in this place, our basic goal was to open up to the landscape and bring it into the building, a garden rather than a stadium. It is a very horizontal project, like a shelf where people walk, drink, rest… It has two layers: one professional and one public. The ground level is for animals and, on top, footbridges link the different services. You walk above the horses, but always close to them, which is what’s important really. _x005F_x000D_

Emilio Tuñón: We are sitting in the patio of Atrio, a hotel and restaurant which owns one of the finest wine cellars in Europe, and I cannot help but think about the relationship between architecture and wine._x005F_x000D_
Jacques Herzog: It is interesting to talk about wine and architecture, but we should avoid the lifestyle connotations that are often associated with this kind of comparison. We both share this passion not only because we love the wines but also because we share the carefulness which is necessary to produce such products; carefulness which is also a key condition for architecture. One can see and sense that here, in this wonderful place, the Atrio hotel in Caceres that you have converted into such a great place. Care is all over the place, in your architectural details as well as in how the owners are using the place. Today, more than ever in architecture this care is real, it is natural and it is a real asset in all our lives. Wine is very much associated to this, because wine forces you to sit down at the table and to talk and to be somewhere instead of eating and drinking without becoming aware. So wine forces you into a kind of old fashioned, archaic way of being. _x005F_x000D_
ET: Architecture and wine are related to life. That is why they have a lot of things in common. It is not a problem of luxury, but a problem of how to enjoy life and how to live it. _x005F_x000D_
JH: It is the kind of life that we find important, but not necessarily others. Not only in Asia or America, but also in Europe – even in archaic wine countries like France or Spain – people tend to spend less time eating at the table with their family or friends. Cultural patterns are changing and others are coming up. It is a fundamental difference whether you take eating as a hedonistic and holistic experience or whether it is just about consuming food to survive. It is holistic when it involves all your senses not just the visual one or the one dimensional smell of standardized industrial food. I am not talking in favor of gourmet style eccentric cuisine but rather of basic experiences. Wine is a key to such an experience and of course architecture totally depends on it.

ET: Yes, but we must also take into consideration how architecture relates to the earth, it is very important for architecture to be very close to the ground.
This is important because wine is also related to geography. For example, in your Dominus Winery, the way the geography is working with the building and also working with the wine is very interesting: capturing the spirit of this special part of the earth. _x005F_x000D_
JH: I agree. The earth or the given ground condition, the terroir, was especially important for us as well as for the client. I remember that we had tried different things. We wanted to use glass to associate with the glass of bottles, but the more we worked on the project the more we realized that the heat during the day was very strong; it is in California, so we understood that the mass was very important. We finally found the solution in using the mass we found in the ground of the area, the volcanic stones. It was necessary to have thick walls to protect the inside from the heat, the same walls that at night – the nights are quite cool in this area – free this accumulated heat. This is a very European concept, as the owner was a European winemaker. This way the wine would not be overly extracted and would not have an artificial taste.

ET: You always talk about the qualities of this area of California: the geographical situation in the valley, the different levels of the topography… I love this approach to architecture and I find it very coherent with the subject of the building. Wine is very much related to all these things you deal with: the soil, the terrain…_x005F_x000D_
JH: In a vineyard the smallest change, either in the height of the vines, their position or orientation makes a big difference. If you are not a winemaker, you are not aware of those things because the landscape looks truly similar. They, however, not only have an amazing knowledge and sensibility for small variations in the landscape, but also in the characteristics of each different season. They memorize time, reflected in the difference of every year’s seasonal uniqueness…often over a time span of decades. I was very impressed with Christian Moueix when he taught me about añadas in the past. He knows everything about every year._x005F_x000D_
ET: It is completely incredible that they remember every detail and how these details change the grape and the wine._x005F_x000D_
JH: Whereas we tend to forget so fast… Even architecture, which is not an easy business and shares the physical parameters and the importance of time, lacks these abilities. That is why I have so much respect for the great winemakers. That is also why I can’t understand that wine lovers all of a sudden change the sides and do their own wine, a fashion trend that I find quite absurd. Perhaps with the exception of Rafael Moneo who makes a considerable effort to produce a good wine – ‘la Mejorada’ – in a area and on a piece of land to which he has a lifelong affection and relationship. Winemaking is such a different business and us architects are a kind of professional ‘laymen’, we do so many things for different fields of our society without being real experts in them: museums, laboratories, offices, religious spaces, city planning, furniture… _x005F_x000D_
_x005F_x000D_ I like that generalist side of our profession, it is a great privilege and freedom, but in fact we are quite limited when it comes to really understanding the processes and life components in all our projects… _x005F_x000D_

ET: As you said before, in wine and in architecture time is also important. Yesterday we were drinking a wine from 1964 and it was amazing, but it was a bit too old. It is interesting to compare a wine from different years, or simply different wines from the same year. It is something mental, you need to put together different wines in order to compare them and talk about them. It is a way to start a conversation. I believe in architecture as a kind of conversation about the site, the temperature, the weather… _x005F_x000D_
JH: In wine tastings wines are compared often vertically, e.g. the same wine in different years or simply different wines from different places. For a winemaker such tastings are probably a comparable exercise to architects’s visiting and photographing buildings in order to compare them for the sake of better understanding.
_x005F_x000D_ The wine world guru Robert Parker invented a rating system which gives points up to 100 for the great wines. Parker’s rating system became hugely successful with a strong economic impact on the wine market. This has been leading to a ‘Parkerization’ of many wines, a more uniform style which would ideally please Mr. Parker’s taste whereas other wines, also great, but more subtle ones would get lower scores. I was often wondering when such a rating system would be introduced into the field of architecture…_x005F_x000D_

ET: It is a simplification. If you give points to a wine, or give prizes or awards to a building, you are simplifying the approach of people to them. It is, in my opinion, more interesting to make the effort to understand how the building that you really enjoy is, and how the wine that you really enjoy is._x005F_x000D_ This idea of enjoyment is important. Sometimes a very cheap wine, a simple wine, is very interesting for a particular moment. _x005F_x000D_ Everybody remembers special occasions when they drank a wine that was not very good in terms of punctuation but was amazing for the situation. _x005F_x000D_
JH: Yes, that’s like discovering a detail of a building that fascinates you and catches your attention in an otherwise anonymous or even banal piece of architecture: an unexpected color, a junction of unlikely elements, a sudden smell… Those things can be very rewarding, make you happy for a moment because such moments are yours – only yours. They appear and become real through your own and specific creative energy. _x005F_x000D_
ET: The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset used to divide people into collectors and hunters. I think the position of the owner of Atrio, José Polo, who is making an incredible collection of wine, is interesting. However, I prefer to be a hunter: if there is a good wine, I have to drink it; if there is a good building, I have to enjoy it. In architecture it is similar: there are architects who collect buildings and others who think that every project is a challenge and who try to hunt new perspectives in their way of thinking. _x005F_x000D_
JH: Being a hunter sounds sexier… but I agree that hunting and collecting are two main vectors in human behavior. I also always saw myself as a hunter in contrast to the collecting obsession of my brother who has been piling up old photographs his whole life. Over so many years working as an architect you inevitably collect a lot, maquettes, drawings, plans etc. In other words you can never fully avoid piling up a lot of stuff, a lot of ‘waste.’
Maybe it is not really collecting but you cannot get rid of it, you have to keep it, archive it, prepare it like dead insects in a natural history museum. I prefer my table to be totally empty, with no objects on it, but it fills up again and again.
These are all specific patterns and obsessions everyone has and this will be reflected in the kind of architecture that you do. Architecture is very psychological. It tells so much about who you are, even as an architect. If we walk through your building we can discover a lot about your personality, and you cannot avoid it. _x005F_x000D_
ET: Indeed, but this building is also full of life. It is interesting to see how cooking, collecting wines, architecture… how all these things create their own atmosphere._x005F_x000D_

This discussion took place on a bright summer morning in late June 2015 at the studio of Juan Navarro Baldeweg in Madrid. It was a conversation between two friends who have known one another for more than forty years and whose interests span the worlds of art, architecture, and ideas. As they talked, they moved from room to room among paintings in process.

Juan Navarro Baldeweg (JNB): The way you write is very fluent and easy for the reader. _x005F_x000D_
William Curtis (WC): There is a wonderful passage in one of the essays of George Orwell where he talks about being a writer and says “Good prose is like a window pane, transparent.” You don’t know that you are reading, you go straight to the sense. There is no interference. In the catalogue of my forthcoming exhibition in the Alhambra, ‘Abstraction and Light,’ which is in production now, I have this condensed poem ‘Mental Landscapes’ which defines my reaction to nature, to light, and to the revelation of things. _x005F_x000D_
JNB: The presentation of your book on Le Corbusier was very pleasant and in many ways, rich. You moved from general ideas to specific things, including psychological approaches, and in a fluent exposition. It was very meaningful because it is a transcending vision. You are looking for what is more universal; for the essential aspects of the natural._x005F_x000D_
WC: This is exactly what I aspire to in the exhibition ‘Abstraction and Light’ which includes photographs as well as paintings and drawings referred to as ‘mental landscapes.’ You feel you are dealing with an ancient landscape, which is partly a haunted or inspired landscape. So the framing of the view is particular to a place, and yet, because of the way it is taken, universalizing: it becomes something general. And that is the reason why a part of my exhibition in the Alhambra is called ‘Cosmologies.’ _x005F_x000D_ Something like this happens in the black and white photographs I have taken in the Canary Islands, photographs of lava and clouds in particular. The island of El Hierro is like the beginning of the world. It was a revelation for me. In the autumn of 2001, I also went to La Gomera. I was impressed by the power of these islands with the clouds coming out of the Atlantic and then piling up, and by the volcanoes. Everything is liquid becoming solid or solid becoming liquid. This relation between clouds and solidity recalls calligraphy for me. There is a wonderful statement by Paul Claudel, when he describes Japan as an archipelago of islands resembling ‘solidified clouds.’ These are phenomena observed in a sense, through architecture, but then they metamorphose into something else. For me there is a back and forth between the person who understands or writes about architecture, and the person for whom architecture is a sort of lens through which other things may be understood. _x005F_x000D_

JNB: It is like a travesía or passage to something else. I was recently in Ronchamp, and it is a mystery: Where is Ronchamp? Where is the work of art? Is it between the person and the wall? Where is it? It is a mystery because it is in between. The interior is an individual experience, it is a mediation. When it is full of people, I have to go out and come back later because the experience is completely different. Outside it is the contrary. In your book there is a picture where the exterior, open air chapel is full of people. The extremes: it is this that creates an incredible energy. _x005F_x000D_
WC: It has to do with the spaces, and with the dialogue between the interior and the exterior, and with the horizon that suddenly becomes an interiorized experience. The building is like a high tension membrane. _x005F_x000D_
JNB: It is so present that it is like the shell of an egg: very thin; but in fact it is not thin. Everything is ambiguous. And there are very mature decisions because they are taken at once, not in different stages. _x005F_x000D_
WC: In this precision of thinking in materials and ambiguity in terms of perception and weight, Le Corbusier is a master. In one of the chapters of my book on the genesis of forms I say that we can examine the process, but that we should never forget that many of the key decisions in it are not documented in any form. They are in the mental life of the architect thinking into space and light directly. Beyond the drawing there is another level of space. The thing about Le Corbusier is his great spatial imagination. Even the greatest of his drawings is just an approximation of what is being transmitted from him as an architect into the final thing.
_x005F_x000D_ I discovered that the color of the roof of Ronchamp, for example, which is this wonderful contrapposto in bare concrete sitting on a crack of light, was originally supposed to be white, the same as the walls, right up until the last minute; but then he saw it going up and said: “no, no, no…”. This is an amazing decision because it would have been so much less interesting if it were white. As it is, there is the contrast between this thing which is apparently heavy, and the discovery inside that it is floating on light. I think that this relatively small work sums up almost everything in terms of the perception of light, shade, weight, or flotation. And yet it is not overloaded, it is subtle._x005F_x000D_

JNB: Le Corbusier, also as an artist, had an enormous capacity to shape things. To make forms. Nevertheless we cannot say that this was done in a formalist way. _x005F_x000D_
WC: It is the end of a line of thinking. He kept exploring a meaning, often in a very subliminal way. He knew when something was going wrong, and he would stop the project immediately. I remember talking to Jerzy Soltan, who was very observant of his time in the atelier, in the late 1940s, “Le Corbusier’s eyes would turn inward, but he always knew when it was forced, he stopped” he said. Le Corbusier was always looking for a language, for elements, for types. In the late works, there are auto-referential details done deliberately. This poses a problem at times, almost a kind of mannerism in the late works.
_x005F_x000D_ Le Corbusier moves back and forth in his own oeuvre, especially in the late works. In the Curutchet House at La Plata in Argentina (1947-49), the section is very like the ones in some of the villas of the 1920s; the exterior vocabulary has changed, but the basic structures of spatial thinking are embedded. One of the themes which I explore in the book concerns the way that the internal mental structures of Le Corbusier combine different strata. The more recent ones are in connection with the earlier ones, and sometimes he jumps over two levels, returning and bringing something back in an unconscious process. Equally it is a kind of search, so it is like the layering of volcanic lava: the ones from the beginning are always there. Then he filters them through history, the way he draws ruins for example. Le Corbusier incorporates schemata from diverse sources: from Cubism, from aspects of Surrealism, from cosmic features in the late works._x005F_x000D_

JNB: Do you find a link between the first works and the latest? Because in general, the feeling one has is that at the beginning he was interested in the prototypes, the industrial shapes, and in the late works the types are more cosmological. _x005F_x000D_
WC: In fact, the matter is more complicated than that. It does not concern just architecture: it is also about a way of looking at nature. In his early formation in La Chaux de Fonds, L’Eplattenier encouraged him to observe nature, to abstract it and to make an emblem out of it. Le Corbusier leaves his early regionalism behind but the way of thinking about nature remains with him until the end. So he has this great capacity to look at a shell, or a boat, for example. In the 1930s he transforms such things into a language, and that is in a sense the beginning of Ronchamp. Ronchamp really starts with the drawings of boats and shells years before. So, where is this building in time? There is a drawing in my book, with the boat hull and the shell, the coque and the coquillage. The coque is the boat and the coquillage is the shell. This game of words – and remember, there was Surrealism at the time, but he never adhered directly to Surrealism – he did not need to, because he always thought in this way of ambiguity. In his early texts, from his travels, he talks about basic visual words which do not mean anything, but which have a potential of meaning. They are like a fundamental grammar of shapes, and this is the way he thinks as a painter. _x005F_x000D_

JNB: For me, the work of art is a kind of mediation, like The Mediation of Ornament by Oleg Grabar. I like very much this title, I think it is very profound. Art in general is a mediation. You don’t know where the work is. Very often I say, perhaps as a provocation, that the art is a parasite of the work of art. For instance the purple color comes from the cochinilla, an insect living in the cactus. That is what I feel about a work of art. Where is the work of art? Is it in the cactus? No. It is in the distillation, it is something that happens at the end of the process. Your mind is following this and you achieve a sort of ecstasy when you find the color. And it happens in Ronchamp very often. You are sitting right there, in the benches, and then you feel you walk inside, in a kind of ecstasy, and that is the work of art. It is that moment, and it does not happen very often. Probably one has to go there in solitude, the interior of Ronchamp should be experienced in solitude. _x005F_x000D_
WC: About this argument of mediation: in my text ‘Abstraction and Light: a Vision of the Alhambra,’ I describe when I went there for the first time in 1981, February, in the freezing cold, with Catherine. We had been in Morocco, we came from the south to the north. I already knew Morocco, Syria and Egypt; I was deeply interested in Islamic architecture. It was a last minute decision, we had some extra days, and we decided to cross to Spain. We took the ferry to Málaga and the bus to the Alhambra. It was very, very cold, and no one was there. The Alhambra was less restored then, it was somehow decrepit, it was very beautiful: with the clouds and the freezing winter, one had a kind of epic vision of the place – very strong –, and I was carrying with me the knowledge of previous visits to key Islamic buildings, gardens and landscapes. For me the Alhambra is the north of something, not the south. Many Europeans think that it is the south. For me it is north, and the way I came is the way that one should come. So the Alhambra is like a magnet to me. It has this kind of attraction. It is a force that comes in different times in my life but for different reasons. I remember running into Oleg Grabar in 1978 when I was also teaching at Harvard. It was just after the vacation:
_x005F_x000D_ -Hi Oleg, how are you? Did you have a nice summer?
_x005F_x000D_ -I am in complete panic! He said.
_x005F_x000D_ -What is the matter?
_x005F_x000D_ -I am writing a monograph about the Alhambra, and I am late… and I don’t really know about the Alhambra.
_x005F_x000D_ And he wrote that book: the monograph on the Alhambra. And I reread the book recently. The strong side of Oleg’s vision of the Alhambra is meaning. It is the investigation of meaning: understanding the symbols in relation to the political context, etcetera. The weak side is perception, form, space, and the vibration of the work of art.
_x005F_x000D_ To me the Alhambra is just the visible veil over all kinds of things which are invisible. As a larger atmosphere it is an extraordinary garden, it is a palimpsest. It is in fact many, many things. You cannot say what the Alhambra is exactly, yet everybody can feel its presence. Everybody is moved by it in some way or another. But what I wanted to do is to reveal through the camera lens some of this poetic presence: especially through water, light, transparencies, things dissolving, the depth of shadows, the vibration of forms, the ornament. I thought a lot about the notion of mediation. The other thing which I enjoyed very much in exploring the Alhambra is that everything is a microcosm. In the Palace of the Lions an inscription refers to it as “an infinite ocean.” There are allusions to the great universal images from the Quran, of the heavens, light, water. There is also much ambiguity in the texts and in the reality, because the stone becomes water, the water becomes stone, and both are dissolved in light, and light becomes something else. _x005F_x000D_

JNB: There is a wonderful book which deals with the matters you are talking about: Eye and Mind by Merleau-Ponty. He mentions: “I am looking at the swimming pool and the reflection in the water, but where is the swimming pool? Where is the reflection? It is not in the water, it is not in the swimming pool, where is it? Is it in me?” Phenomenology is very important to me, to clarify all this things._x005F_x000D_
WC: Of course, water is in the center of everything. Water is an inner world, and an outer world. Water in Islamic architecture transforms into the paradise garden, it is revelation, it is purity. In the Quran it is said: “This is what we are made from.” But water was also agriculture, power, and the mirror of the universe; water was in turn about control. The Alhambra was the jewel in the crown of a system of irrigation. In the Nasrid Palaces there is the image of the ocean and of the world, but there is also the control of the waters. The reflecting water surfaces are the perfection of an entire system of irrigation in a whole wider landscape. For me water is one of the keys to the Alhambra.
_x005F_x000D_ So what does all this mean in the end? It has to do with perception. You go into a place and are moved by it. You can do nothing, or else something goes on and you want to record it. But it is not a direct record, it is ‘mediated.’ You do a sketch and years later you do a painting that you are not even aware is related to that experience, but it is indeed. This is important because for me abstraction is a means of compression. It is the opposite of formalism. It is not making shapes to make shapes. It is involved in feeling, in memory, and in the unconscious. Things are what they are, except that they are never what they seem! It is like the swimming pool of Merleau-Ponty, if it is a swimming pool?_x005F_x000D_
JNB: The water clarifies what is painted because the water is liquid and it is a surface. The three-dimensional world is reduced to its two-dimensional shape. Everything is there: the reflections of the sky, of an object… Bringing together all the three dimensional objects, but as a surface. It happens a lot with Cézanne. I do not know if you have read Adrian Stokes. I like his writings very much, especially because he wrote a lot about the process of formation of stones. This is a beautiful idea. This recalls your way of looking at the universal via the concrete thing. _x005F_x000D_
WC: And it is also the interrelation between the image made by the artist and the inner life of the stone. And they are not necessarily in harmony. _x005F_x000D_
JNB: Stokes is not well known in Spain. He wrote beautifully. A little bit like Ruskin. _x005F_x000D_
WC: He spoke of “stone bloom,” as in a flower. Interestingly, in the catalogue of the exhibition, Alvaro Siza has written a very compact text and at the beginning he has a quotation from Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons. It is very interesting that he would know that. It is a description, at the beginning of the book, where the author is in Venice on a boat and he describes looking at the city seeing it reflected and fragmented in the water and then recalling the experience, saying “it is as if it was reconstituted in my mind through layers of rice paper as in an abstract picture.” Siza said, “William, surely that is you!” I loved the way he chose that particular English author. _x005F_x000D_
JNB: Stokes and Ruskin wrote beautifully. And I mentioned Cézanne: Cézanne through the eyes of Stokes. He says that to understand Cézanne you need to have a sense of water. And this is very clarifying._x005F_x000D_
WC: My ‘mental landscape’ drawings are often on cardboard, which to me is a fantastic material. You soak it, and you rip it, and you turn it into something else. And similarly, with the kind of liquids: I often use industrial paints, because they have a kind of density, like the night. And the black and white photographs of the volcanic landscapes are like Chinese paintings done with ink. I don’t intend that, but they are. This is not a deliberated method; it is more a way of seeing. Back to Le Corbusier: he had a way of seeing, and I have learnt from him as an artist that way. The other thing I learned from Le Corbusier, is the importance of metamorphosis through drawing. _x005F_x000D_
JNB: Le Corbusier is like an explorer, he clarifies the mind. _x005F_x000D_
WC: Yes of course, because the sketches come from the mind. When as a young man he draws the houses of Pompeii, or the Parthenon, he is drawing these buildings, but he is also drawing his own mental world of forms. So the drawing is a way of clarifying the inner world through the outer world, and vice versa. This in itself is abstraction of a kind.

Taking advantage of the inauguration of Musical Labyrinth, an installation made of Dekton pieces that is a fruit of the collaboration between Daniel Libeskind and Cosentino, we bring the Polish-American architect and the Spanish partners Nieto and Sobejano together at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt. The conversation revolves around themes close to the hearts of all three. Music, for one. Enrique Sobejano and Fuensanta Nieto are lovers of this art – and recent winners of the competition for a center devoted to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt – and Daniel Libeskind was a virtuoso performer in his youth. Another shared theme is memory, the two practices having coincided in the exhibition ‘Childhood Recollections: Memory in Design’ at the London Design Festival this year.

Enrique Sobejano: Architecture is closely linked to memory, and this not something that is frequently discussed. Memories are in the background of everything we do. When people explain architecture rationally, I think it’s a genuinely useful analysis, but there is always something missing in the explanation, something lying behind which is not always explainable._x005F_x000D_
Daniel Libeskind: We definitely share this view. Without memory, there wouldn’t be any connection made in any kind of work, whether in literature, music, or theater. In music, for example, it would be unimaginable._x005F_x000D_
Fuensanta Nieto: We learned a lot working for Arvo Pärt. You look at his musical notations, which are basically drawings, and you can really see architecture behind them._x005F_x000D_
DL: Absolutely. The connection between music and architecture is not metaphorical. It’s real. Architects also draw._x005F_x000D_
ES: In fact architects and musicians do the same thing: make drawings to be interpreted by others. Speaking of Arvo Pärt, one day he told us: “My music is like white light because white light can only be divided by a prism. And the prism is the spirit of the listener.” What a beautiful comparison!

DL: His music, moreover, is peaceful but also structural, which I think is what architecture shares with music. On the one hand it is tremendously creative, and on the other hand it is scientific, and has to be very precise. An approximation won’t do, it has to be exact, like architecture. It can’t be almost the right tone or height. It’s not negotiable._x005F_x000D_
FN: I know you studied music, and were good at it. Do you still play?_x005F_x000D_
DL: I do not. It’s very hard to be a hobbyist when you’re a professional. At fifteen I was performing with top classical musicians in the big venues of New York. If you read the reviews of that time in The New York Times, for instance, they are hardly mentioned, because I was a phenomenon! I was very short and I had a very large accordion, so large you could hardly see my head and feet. In those days the accordion was considered a folk instrument, not for Baroque pieces of music. It was often associated with gypsies or with poor people, or beggars. But it’s really a highly complex instrument, like a small orchestra. It’s a pity I stopped playing, but I am very grateful I did once play, because if it weren’t for the accordion, I would never have become an architect._x005F_x000D_
ES: That’s interesting. I also studied music: four years of theory, two years of piano. Then I stopped, and forgot everything. I could read notes, but not play them. Now, curiously, it has all come back. This is not to say that I can play again, but when you grow as an architect you start seeing connections and, as you were saying before, they’re not metaphors, but rhythms, spaces, tempos… Which brings me back to Arvo Pärt. He was quiet, very quiet, but his silences expressed so much._x005F_x000D_
FN: When we did his building – in the middle of this Estonian forest, a wonderful environment of huge pine trees – we wanted to be very careful with nature, which forced us to act with precision. I remember being there with Arvo and others from the team, drawing the building on the ground, and as we worked, everyone would look at him, searching for his approval. Then he came to us and said, well, maybe we are too near that house, I would prefer not to see it. We said, okay, don’t worry, we’ll start anew. We moved the building – maybe just five meters – and he came back, I remember well, saying: “Listen, now I understand that we are exactly the same. I never finish my music. I keep wanting to make it more exact. I think it’s the same with your architecture, you’re never finished._x005F_x000D_

ES: What a privilege! Nowadays there aren’t many opportunities to visit a building with the client and change things on the fly._x005F_x000D_
DL: Indeed a privilege. It’s fascinating how in that part of the world, there is such sensitivity toward nature and architecture. I lived in Helsinki for some time and things are very similar there. In a way, it’s very close to the Japanese sensibility – silent, not too many words said. But there’s a certain spirituality in things that we tend to take for granted._x005F_x000D_
ES: I agree. How different from the Mediterranean way of seeing things._x005F_x000D_
FN: There’s something else we have in common. In 1983, we were studying at Columbia and one day found ourselves at Cooper Union for a lecture by someone called Daniel Libeskind, with John Hejduk. This year we were invited to speak there and we were reminded of you. And, talking about memories, I remember the impression I had of the auditorium that first time, including how white it was. Returning there brought me the same feelings._x005F_x000D_

DL: True. People think memories come from the past, but they come from another place, one not necessarily part of the past._x005F_x000D_
ES: Last year we published a monograph titled Memory and Invention, and shortly afterwards I came across a line by John Banville in his book Ancient Light. It goes: “I do not know whether I am telling memories or inventions, if indeed there is any difference at all.” That’s exactly what happens. When you remember something, it’s not just what you experienced, but also what you have been told and what you have read about it… so at some point, memories become inventions._x005F_x000D_
DL: It’s complex, like the brain itself. And there is also memory that’s involuntary, or undesired, which just comes to you, against your will. I think that real experiences are not based on observation. In science, maybe. But I don’t believe anything new comes from observation. It’s there, but not yet molded. The future doesn’t come from the past either, or it wouldn’t be a future. The future has to come from somewhere we know nothing about. That’s why it’s the future._x005F_x000D_
ES: Which is why architecture has such a beautiful word: project. We imagine the future, we project to the future. One could say that this is what everybody does, but in architecture it’s especially clear._x005F_x000D_

DL: It is, and for foundations we have to dig up earth. This is not often talked about, but it’s a very violent act. _x005F_x000D_
FN: You are substantially modifying the place in which you are going to work, modifying the world, and that is a hard thing to do._x005F_x000D_
ES: We have been working a lot underground, also on rooftops. I’m reminded of what Gaston Bachelard said about houses: that they are very vertical objects whose main elements are the basement and the roof, places where children like to play._x005F_x000D_
DL: True. When I proposed, at Ground Zero, to preserve the entire underground, people thought I was crazy because it was very expensive and lucrative, real estate. Maybe this is what you are saying about Bachelard. Being where hardly anybody has ever been, except perhaps construction workers, is an extraordinary experience. It’s important for people to have access to the bedrock of New York because it’s one of the most incredible places. And this has been a very successful intervention because it has to do with going down, in a city where everybody goes upward. It attracts a lot of people. I have been there many times and seen how people are amazed. It’s almost childlike, like a memory. It’s as if it were sacred, a bit like heaven. _x005F_x000D_
FN: A beautiful idea. We often look at the sky and when we only see sky, it’s interesting, like in some of James Turrell’s works._x005F_x000D_
DL: Yes, or like when Albert Camus said that even though you are very poor and have nothing, you have the sky for free._x005F_x000D_
ES: It’s interesting that the sky is free but the earth very expensive; a total division, another way of separating two worlds. I’ve always thought that when you talk about architecture, there’s a constant struggle between earth and sky. The most ancient architectures were bound to the earth, and the most contemporary architecture tries to fly. But I have never thought of it from a money point of view.