You were born in Argentina and have been residing in Zurich, Switzerland since the end of the 1970s. How does the Latino personality mix with the Germanic one?
Alfredo Häberli (AH): At the beginning it was more suffering than a marriage of the two. But I have to say that I work a lot thinking about my childhood and the positive years that I experienced in Argentina, and a little with the rationality I learned in Switzerland and in my studies as an industrial designer. All of these have been good for me today. So I have both: the poetry and sense of intuition I got from Argentina and the rational, slightly more orderly side from Switzerland.

You say your studio “nourishes your soul.” We picture a place full of books, models, materials and curiosities. Is your studio anything like this? Do you find inspiration in your studio? Is it where your creativity is given full rein?
AH: Yes. I’ve always thought that observation is the loveliest form of thinking. I started collecting all kinds of objects that I find or which are given to me. I have loads of books which probably extend for 50 metres and I’ve read nearly all of them. I have a very strong visual memory and when I begin a project I think of objects, pages, photographs, things I know, and I start putting them together to create something new. I like being in my studio; that’s where I find my inspiration. I also find it in my everyday life. For example, yesterday when I arrived in Madrid I went for a walk. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, but I see things that in that moment help me to develop my projects.

You have an impressive career and you’ve earned lots of recognition from around the world. You’ve worked with lots of prestigious brands, including Camper, BMW and Vitra, among many others. What would you say is your secret to success?
AH: Being consistent, believing in the vision I have and doing something I’m passionate about. If you realise that you’re passionate about something, something that you really like doing (in my case, it’s design), you have to believe it and follow it. I think that’s success: being honest with yourself. Thank goodness I can make a living of my hobby, which is being a designer.

At the beginning of 2019, during the furniture trade show in Cologne, you presented a project called Sense & Sensuality, a stunning vision of the kitchen of the future. Your project considers how and for what purpose we’ll be using our kitchens in the future. Practically speaking, what does this kitchen of the future translate into?
AH: That’s a very interesting question: to think about the future. Over the last few years I’ve been offered lots of projects heading in that direction. There’s a lot of insecurity right now in the automobile, architecture, design and even fashion industries. What will the future be like? What do we have to develop? When it comes to kitchens, I was commissioned by the Cologne Trade Show (Koelnmesse) to think about the future. I told them that it’s a not-too-distant future so that it didn’t come across as excessively avant-garde. So I divided it into three levels: one is the architecture, the flooring; another is the furniture, the interior design; and the third is the virtual kitchen. And I made it a bit virtual to give myself some more freedom because I’ve already designed lots of kitchens. Creating that virtual world gave me the freedom to envisage a kitchen that today’s technology is not capable of making a reality, although it points in the direction where we are probably headed.

Cutting-edge technology and a vision which maximises how we use natural resources, food, energy and water. Will we see this kitchen in our homes in the distant future, or in a future that’s just around the corner?
AH: There are ideas which can become a reality in 5 years and others which will become a reality in 10. It’s precisely that which was interesting when I worked with companies like Samsung or Cosentino. It’s when you realise, OK, I’m exaggerating a bit! But it’s heading in the right direction. And now it needs to be developed with the companies.

In your purist vision of the kitchen area, anything superfluous disappears and you only keep the most basic and functional aspects. Do you believe in less is more?
AH: Yes. I think we have too many technological items in the kitchen today, just like in so many other sectors too. Again, in the car or also in computers or on our smartphones. We have too many possibilities we do not use and I think that in the kitchen we are going to have to think about which electronic and technological items we really need. And well, that’s also going to be a decision that we’ll have to make, the items themselves will be a little smarter and will help keep our food fresher. We’ll see what happens…

You prefer using high-quality, sustainable and long-lasting materials in your kitchens. Does the ultra-compact Dekton® surface meet your expectations when used as a countertop?
AH: Yes, absolutely. That’s something else I find interesting. Because, for example, in fashion the most interesting developments were the technological materials. It’s the same when it comes to architecture. The traditional materials we use such as wood or stone will always exist because wood, for example, always grows back. Although it does also have its limits. And I think that’s the interesting thing about the industry: finding new materials with qualities that traditional materials do not have. And that is a new and interesting thing that can be developed very well, together with designers and architects. I think there’s still a lot to be discovered.

What’s your favourite thing about Dekton?
AH: What I like most about Dekton is its function—the fact that it’s scratch-resistant and is very hard. It’s something I like a lot when it comes to kitchens and bathrooms. But for me as a designer, what I like the most is the thickness. The fact that Dekton now has a thickness of 4 millimetres is amazing. You can achieve a super thin and super refined look. Again, I’m interested in finding the limits of that material with that level of thickness and taking it to its extremes. I’d love that.

At Cosentino, our corporate purpose is to inspire people through innovative spaces. Is it safe to say that this futuristic kitchen will be a space to inspire people?
AH: I hope so. I hope that the kitchen I created makes people think and inspires them too. But of course, since I made the third level virtual, you can also see the limitations we have with this technology. I also learned a lot there. In five years, we’ll be laughing at what I presented, how I presented it and the way it was displayed. In this sense we’re developing at a very fast pace and well, I think that my grey hair is a result of thinking so much.

Being a Spanish company, we have to make the following question. Do you like Spain? What do you like the most?
AH: I love the weather. And the people. I’m addicted to people and Spaniards are very open people. I love the warmth of the Spanish people.
 

How did this collaboration with Cosentino come to life?
Benjamin Hubert (BJ): Cosentino came to visit us, came to the studio to see our work, to see our process.  And then, we visited Cosentino to see the factory, to see the production, to see the materials, to see the process… And the meeting of our process and Cosentino’s process came to a conversation where we were talking about: How do we highlight the potential of Dekton®?

What was your initial vision for the collaboration?
BJ: The material that Cosentino produces is incredible. Dekton® is a result of a lot of pressure, short amount of time, a lot of natural materials, to create a very hard-wearing and highly compact material. And we saw this material and thought it could be used for architectural applications. Its size and gravitas should be exploited, and we liked the idea of a relationship to nature. So, thinking about the world around us, how nature interplays with architecture and particularly water. So, if you walk past a building next to water you get reflexions and caustics from water reflecting across the material, and what that does is it makes you look at the material with fresh eyes, and we liked the idea of taking this idea of water and architecture and creating an installation.

Following your visit at Cosentino’s factory, how did the making process of Dekton® further influence and inspire your vision for Raytrace?
BJ: What Cosentino is doing is pretty advanced, is pretty technological, and we like the idea to capture that. And the material is produced in a huge slab, so it created this idea of exploiting a canvas. Of taking a material, lots of different finishes of materials and creating a canvas to play with. And how light plays with that canvas became really important.

Connecting back to nature and the natural world is a big trend, how does your concept connect back to the natural elements?
BJ: As a designer you are always trying to capture some of the natural beauty around us. I think for this it was important to think about, first to think about Dekton® and its relationship to water. The fact that all the water is removed from the material in the process. And we thought it would be poetic and beautiful to bring back the water to the material. So really taking this idea of creating a droplet of water and thinking about the way light moves through it and how it plays on the surface, became the spark to think about how to bring nature back to the project.

How do you see the relationship between nature/natural architecture and the material of Dekton®?
BJ: When you walk through a city, may be Madrid, may be London, and you look at the buildings, what brings them to life is two things in my mind. One is what the material that the façade is made from, and two how does the light interplay with that material. And I think Dekton® has such huge potential and a great application for architecture that it became a very natural process and choice to think about really building the relationship between light and the material. The material pattern, the material texture, the material strength, the material size, and then really thinking about lights.  You know, people when they see sunlight into a building or the way they see light move through a swimming pool and see the bottom of it and the patterns, the way they see shadows interplay, it sparks the imagination, and imagination and excitement and delights are all the kinds of emotions we want to bring to this project.

How has your initial vision changed/ developed overtime and after experimentation?
BJ: One of the exciting things about working with Dekton® was how thin the material is. So where possible we are using material down to the smallest 4 mm. This material allows us to create shapes, to create more surprising relationships between shapes, and this material has really allowed us to do things we wouldn’t normally be able to do with a solid surface like a composite. So, I mean, Dekton® has opened opportunities for us.
What would you like visitors to experience and feel when entering the installation?
BJ: We are lucky enough to be creating this installation for Milan Design Week. As any visitor to Milan Design Week knows it’s a busy, quite chaotic, condensed week, where you don’t really have so much time, patience sometimes, and a vision for this installation is that it will be a moment for the ability to stop, to think, to reflect, to smile and just stay in one place for a little while, and think about something that is gentle, and reflective, and perhaps meditative, and something that brings out the emotions that are separate to the busy day to day of what it’s like to be in the Milan Furniture Fair.

You enhance the exploration and world of possibilities with Dekton®. How do you think it will impact the future of design?
BJ: Our passion with materials is something that goes beyond shape and styling it. It naturally has more substance. We think about the substance that projects are made from very early in our process. We are not stylists, we don’t just believe in shape and just creating a new form factor because that’s very contemporary. What we believe in is long lasting sustainable hard-wearing designs and inevitably and inherently Raytrace installation uses Dekton® which has all those characteristics. And for us if people can use a material that lasts 10, 20, 30, may be more years, than the things that are happening in the world at the moment, particularly with sustainability and the issue with natural resources, hard-wearing long-lasting designs and materials are fundamentally important.

Getting back to you … your work has been recognised by the world’s most prestigious design bodies. What is it that makes Layer and your design proposals stand out?
BJ: Layer is quite an unusual studio. Firstly we span the spectrum between the very soft lifestyle driven long lasting furniture oriented projects, but we also do the other end, that sort of harder and sometimes more complex into design, so strategy, really hard core industrial design, highly engineered projects, and this band-width and the tension it creates, leaves us in a very special place in the middle where you bring together the lifestyle qualities of a project and how people interact with products over a long period of time, but also the sensibilities of how to create a really intelligent product, so something that resonates with a brand and elevates a brand but also thinks about the world around the product. And Layer really is the epicentre of these two thought processes and it gives us the ability to think differently about creating new pieces of design.
 

At Cosentino we aim to inspire people through innovative spaces … in this context I’d like to ask you a last question related to inspiration.

For you what would be an inspiring space? 
BJ: An inspiring space is a memorable space. Inspiration can be very different, you hope that inspiration is interesting and delightful, but it doesn’t always have to be. I am really interested in making people feel something, and we have such complex emotions, that we can feel many different things. A successful piece of design, or a successful installation just makes you feel, and it makes you think, and it makes you remember that experience. And we know that the world is full of stuff, and there are many things we see every day, we see a lot online and often we don’t see things in reality and in the flesh, but when we do, we want, and I expect, really visceral feedback and visceral emotions and a strong sense of place, and that’s what we hope to achieve with Raytrace.

The following is an excerpt of a conversation that took place in Madrid, on the occasion of the Museo ICO exhibition, between Francis Kéré and the Indian architect Anupama Kundoo, whose work expresses a sensitivity much akin to the African’s.

Anupama Kundoo: There is something I never asked you before. You and I have done things that point to a certain grouping or commonality. But one of the differences between us is this: I studied architecture in India and I started working there with the education I had received. I come from a very populated area in Bombay but I moved to a rural zone, where, out of necessity, I explored low-tech ways of building, respecting the resources the locals have. Later I went to Germany, taught with the head of the department, and decided to do my PhD. You, in contrast, studied in Germany, so there has to be a German influence on the African imprint you carry inside. I see your underlying emotions and roots clearly, also in the way you try to help the community you came from. I know the Burkina part, but what would you say is the German part?

Francis Kéré: Education-wise for sure I am a German-trained architect, but I came to Berlin just to do vocational training. I came to Germany as a carpenter, and I was to be trained so that I could go back to become a development activist. But Burkina is very dry. There is no wood and carpentry is until now very primitive. Because there is no wood, there is no furniture made of wood, no one can afford quality. So I wanted to learn more, and being already in Germany, I started to think of how I could study architecture. This was 1989, just before the Wall collapsed. I was 18. I did what in Germany they call Abitur, a high school degree, and that took me five years, going to night school every day.

AK: That’s very impressive. I imagine also your struggle in a different system.

FK: Oh yes. Books and books, but also the personal struggle. In Burkina, my family was expecting me to return with bags full of German money – which I didn’t have – or with presents, but what I wanted was to gain more knowledge. In fact I started working while at school and many of my teachers wondered why I was fighting like that, working during the day, at school at night, always with Africa on my mind. Later, when I was already at architecture school, I started this project to build a school in my own country. You have to know that this school was the first project to support me financially. This is how things started.

AK: But was it your intention to go back?

FK: My intention was always to go home. I was just using Germany as a platform from which to raise money and collect ideas. I didn’t want to do any work in Europe, I just wanted to return to Burkina.

AK: It’s interesting because when we met and were colleagues in the department at the university of Berlin, we didn’t know how our futures would unfold, so I didn’t think about your mixed identity. I have similar issues because I have children who are half-Indian, half-Spanish, and yours are half-German, half-Burkinabe. So in both our cases, the next generation is mixed, and we each have to think about our own identity. I’m just kind of putting some landmarks in our parallel journeys. I grew up in a really busy and crowded megacity, Bombay. I studied in a very regular way, in fact I finished architecture very quickly and set up an office immediately. By 1990 I had already moved out of Bombay. It was not very common in the Indian world for a woman to go off on her own and all the rest of it, like going on a motorbike, whatever. So I did things which looked bold to people there, but I never cared much about social opinions because I was very free-spirited. I felt that no matter what I did, no matter how small the thing, such as smoke a cigarette, I would be criticized just the same, so it really didn’t matter what I did. I knew what I was doing for self-development, I wanted to serve society, and everything would follow, I didn’t have to be in a hurry to be popular, I would be free from that trap.

FK: I started building while still a student. I didn’t have to wait. By the time I graduated, I was already an architect.

AK: I remember you as a very simple Francis in the pre-Aga Khan period. How did the award affect you? I mean to get so much attention is something like a test, no? And also a challenge because along with all the recognition comes something you have to carry. How do you feel about this?

FK: If I look back, I think it was for me very important to win the Aga Khan. Some people may say that prizes bring nothing, but that’s not true in my case. It created an awareness, people began to know of my work. That’s how, for example, I know Luis Fernández-Galiano, curator of this exhibition. But later it became a responsibility, because all these great people would tell me that if I kept pushing, I would be the first person in history to really deal with people. But I just stayed focused and said to myself: okay, what are they telling me? What they tell me is nice to know, but what’s important is that something in my work may be of interest, so just keep going, don’t wait, don’t stop. I kept going, I kept pushing. So the Aga Khan was important because it was a push.

AK: When did you decide to live in Germany instead of going back?

FK: No, I never decided. I still go back and forth. I stay in Ouagadougou, at the place of a brother of mine where my mother is living. He takes care of my mother because my father passed away. In the village it’s not easy to feed old people if the family situation is not traditional. By tradition I would have had to stay home and have a lot of kids, and take care of my mother in lieu of my father. I have brothers and sisters but they have their own families to care for. And the food situation is not all that good and of course I don’t want my mother to suffer. In Ouagadougou I see her for half an hour, very intense, then I am in Burkina already. Upon arrival, that is what I need. Then I go for the project. And every night I am back.

AK: My case is quite similar. Few people know this, but while I was working, my mother was paralyzed and she was not well. This went on for many years and that’s why my own children, my own family, came much later. In our societies we are at some point the nurturers of our parents. It was very natural. So for many years I had that commitment, and I did not travel much. I was fully dedicated to my mother, who needed to be moved around in a wheelchair. I brought my parents to stay with me, so for years I had everything revolving around them. Let me tell you something about my house, the Wall House, which became so well-known – in fact the MoMA has acquired the drawings and models. Well, I have a photograph of a horse that used to come. It was the highlight of my mother’s day. A horse could actually enter the house and go to her bedside because I had made the space so open, to animals and everything.

FK: I love that story. I was wondering, are you still bringing students to India? And how are you financing your projects?

AK: That’s a really good question. Actually my projects were not often funded like yours. I’m doing many social projects, but I’m not the only one responsible for financing them, whereas I think you bear a lot of that responsibility yourself. If the funds come together, we do it. I like to take students with me. In fact there is a demand. Students are always demanding, they love to go to India, and they benefit… What kind of projects are you doing right now?

FK: We’re working on many, including in the USA. We also have a sort of African pavilion in Edmonton, Canada. And some potentially good projects might be coming in from Munich, including a Waldorf school. And two potentially major projects – one for the university, and another one I can’t say because we have to wait for elections. It’s for the Kunstareal…

The Mondadori Editorial Office, built between 1968 and 1975 by Oscar Niemeyer, holds the conversation between the architects Ángela García de Paredes and Ignacio García Pedrosa and the historian Francesco Dal Co, director of Casabella magazine and great connoisseur of their work.

Francesco Dal Co: You both studied at the Madrid School of Architecture, during what years?

Ángela García de Paredes: Yes, we started in 1975, a crucial year in Spain. Franco died in November, so the School was closed until January. We met because our last names went together on the class list. We were destined by alphabetical order. 

FDC: What were the most interesting experiences during this period and what teachers influenced you the most?

Ignacio García Pedrosa: We were lucky to be students when three critical professors were still teaching: Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza, Javier Carvajal, and Antonio Fernández Alba. Three personalities that created around them three parallel schools within the ETSAM, so anyone who studied in their departments followed that branch throughout. Ángela and I coincided at Oiza’s course, with many other classmates with whom we have stayed friends.

AGP: Besides he gave us class himself, and directed my graduation project. Before him, Antonio  Fernández Alba, who taught Composition Elements, was also a big influence. He was a crucial figure for me. First because of the theoretical reflection he added to projects (he gave long theory lessons of over an hour, without images, incomprehensible to me then, but that now come back to me all the time), and secondly because many exercises were about architectures of the past.

IGP: We did a very comprehensive study on the Alhambra, not only of the drawings, but a research on the relationship between the volumes and the interiors. This generates a very specific form of approximation to architecture: through the drawing and sizing of the spaces, very important in an architect’s training.

AGP: I would add that Fernández Alba, curiously very attentive to modernity, instilled in us the need to learn about the architecture of the past, and Oiza awoke our interest in the context of the project: the place, the people that live there, its function… Always relating it to literature and poetry. The continuous relationship with other disciplines was the most important thing in Oiza.

FDC: Did these professors also show examples of contemporary architecture? 

IGP: Oiza mostly. But rather than showing examples of architecture of that time, he talked about modern architects: Wright, Le Corbusier… He understood that learning about architecture involved knowing what the modern masters had proposed. 

FDC: Did they by any chance talk about the great Spanish architects of the 1930s?

IGP: It was rather an outward gaze. The introspective view began later when Rafael Moneo joined the School, and he rescued Spanish tradition without setting aside what was happening in the world.

AGP: We had the opportunity to meet the pre-war architects thanks to my father, José María García de Paredes, architect and friends with many of them. Outside the School we were close to José Luis Sert, who always encouraged us and taught us many things parallel to architecture – painting, music… Through Sert we met Miró, for example.

FDC: You graduated in 1982, but the office was set up in 1990. What happened during those years?

IGP: We started working with Ángela’s father, an architect at the height of his professional maturity. He had a small studio with a lot of prestige among colleagues. After studying in Madrid and his stay in Rome, where he met Carvajal, he began a brilliant career, with very interesting projects that earned him the National Architecture Award. He had always wanted to keep control of his work, so he was never really interested in expanding his office. When we had just completed our studies he received several important public commissions, this was right after opening the Manuel de Falla Auditorium in Granada – the first concert hall built in Spain after Barcelona’s Palau de la Música of 1908. The  building had a major repercussion because it focused on the relationship with the place and with the constructive tradition of the materials. As a result he was commissioned to build the National  Auditorium, and that is when we joined his studio. The collaboration lasted ten years and ended not by choice but by fate, with José María’s premature passing. We found ourselves in a strange situation: it was our moral and professional duty to finish his work, so we launched our own career later. We started out entering competitions. The first one was Europan, which we won; and that is when our independent work began.

FDC: Your Europan project is very specific. As young architects I think you drew inspiration from Alvar Aalto.

IGP: He is a constant in our work. There is a continuous presence of references that arise, not deliberately, but they’re there. In the case of the two housing developments, there is a clear relationship with Aalto’s project, but not a direct reference to him. There we extended the streets establishing an undulatory mechanism that gave the city the continuity we think it needs. Aalto’s project, however, is not an urban project but a landscaping one. Interestingly, landscaping is used to address an urban continuity issue.

FDC: When looking at works like the Valdemaqueda Town Hall, I think about Aalto and about your relationship with the Iberian world. Perhaps Aalto’s influence comes through Siza and Moneo.

IGP: I think we can talk about a special relationship between north and south. The relationship between the north and the Mediterranean is almost a matter of symmetry. Peripheral countries like the Nordic ones are drawn towards peripheral countries like Spain and Portugal and vice versa. Apparently there are no points of contact: not in terms of climate, not social, not even of cultural tradition. Perhaps that’s the reason for such strong attraction. However, Nordic and Mediterranean architectures do have something in common: the interest in the domestic and in comfort. Siza and Aalto’s houses are comfortable, in contrast to British or Central European ones where other values prevail over comfort, or even the relationship with nature.

AGP: We won quite early in our career the Valdemaqueda competition. We gained a lot of on-site and project management experience in the construction of large buildings. Our situation was the opposite of that of other young architects: without works of our own but with experience in developing and building projects at a studio. We knew how to build auditoriums and  cultural buildings, but not town halls. We took a trip to northern Europe, traveling through Denmark and Finland mostly, to become familiar with Nordic town hall buildings. We almost did a PhD on town halls. I am glad to hear you notice that resemblance because it is surprising to see how such a small building can concentrate everything we took in during that trip.

FDC: Why the Nordic countries?

IGP: Probably because of the opportunity, and also because of Ángela’s personal history. When García de Paredes and Carvajal were in Rome in 1958, one of the conditions for residents was that they had to go on a journey through Europe. They went to Finland in a Seat 600 to see ordicarchitecture first-hand. Ángela says that the first time she went to Villa Mairea was before she was born, because her mother was pregnant during that visit. We wanted to see the house up close. I like it because it comes across as a livedin house. The Farnsworth or Villa Savoye are almost monuments of modernity. Villa Mairea is a house.

FDC: The interior of the auditorium of the Congress Center of Peñíscola seems to draw on Aalto, is this so? 

IGP: No. Aalto never left reinforced concrete unpainted. In Valdemaqueda it is completely naked, as in Le Corbusier. Aalto didn’t make a concrete ceiling with such forms either; he did so with wood in Viipuri, but not in concrete. Utzon however did use concrete. There is a Utzonian, rather than Aaltian, reference. In Peñíscola it had a structural explanation: we couldn’t go higher than twelve meters, and there wasn’t room for the metallic structure and wood ceiling, so we proposed building a concrete slab that was both structure and acoustic ceiling.

FDC: The continuity of the skin, which is very often what characterizes buildings, is very important in your work. The formal expression of the structure becomes secondary, and the skin takes on a prominent role, dressing the building on one hand, and on the other revealing the activity inside.

IGP: Not long after the completion of the Centre Pompidou, which shows the structure and the installations, Oiza asked us: “And the skin? Where is the skin? We have skin to cover veins and bones.” Part of this probably still echoes in our minds. We think that structural clarity is necessary, but it shouldn’t play the main role. 

What is the first material, the first spark to start designing a product? What path do you follow in your creative process?
Nika Zupanc (NZ): For me it is very important who I am working for, because I am of course an industrial designer, so the product is always a combination of your philosophy and philosophy of the company. So the initial brief always comes from the company. Then it depends whether the company has its own material that it works with, if this is the case, then you concentrate on that material, and you work with that material. Then you have companies that don’t have their own technology, and in cases like that you start from different points. But it’s always combination of the material, for me the innovation in the material is very important, so is how to use the existing techniques in a new way. And then of course it is just the combination of the function, the appearance, the colours, etc. But it really depends on each product, always it’s different.



The objects you design transport the end user into a kind of theatrical stage. Is there a theatre or film influence in the way you approach design? What influenced you most to define your designs?
NZ: I think today design has a very strong language. So of course, design has to be smart, it has to be functional; it has to be smart in the sense of the use of the technology. But then again it has a very strong story value, so you can tell things through the design and this is something that I am very interested in. So, I wouldn’t say, of course I love theatre, I love books, I love many different things, but I am not directly influenced by these things. I am actually influenced by everyday life, by the things that happen around me, maybe by things that other people wouldn’t notice, because they are ugly or not attractive enough. But all of this I somehow try to translate into giving new meaning through design, through an object. And this is where I would say sort of a drama happens, when you are really designing and you try to bring some sort of attention or some sort of a story to a certain object.

How do you achieve that many of your pieces at the same time look vintage and contemporary? ¿How do you establish that dialogue between past and future and achieve that both are represented?
NZ: It’s hard to show, but for sure this is one of the things that I am really interested in and I always say, I am interested in timeless elegance, so I want to do pieces that don’t seem to belong to a certain era, but could be from the past or from the future, or pieces that could be inherited. So, I don’t really believe in style or in fashion or, you know, what’s hot right now. I try to find sort of timeless elements, materials, colours, relationships between all of these things in order to create objects that don’t belong to any special period of time, but which are new at the same time. So it’s quite tricky, it’s not that easy.

Tell us about the Lolita lamp you produced for Mooi, was it the first object you designed?
NZ: Well it was one of the first objects, but for sure it was the first object that was mass-produced, so it was really important for me. And there is also a beautiful story behind it because it was a starting point in my career, and I was sending my projects, my renderings to different companies, I also knew about Mooi and I always felt that my objects would work very well in their collection, but I somehow didn’t want to send the objects, so I just sent an invitation to Marcel Wanders, I didn’t even have his email address, so I invented the email, I didn’t know him, and I sent him an invitation to my exhibition in SaloneSatellite in Milano, and there was an image of a chair on this invitation, and he liked the chair, so he replied to me to this invitation that wasn’t, you know, intended just for him, and this is how we started and he was interested in my work and I already had Lolita drawn and I sent it to him and it was a beautiful start of a beautiful relationship. I learnt a lot from Mooi, because I think Mooi is a wonderful company, in the sense of how on one hand, it shook the design scene in Italy a little bit, and on the other hand I think Mooi was, and still is, a very important platform for young designers, to give them the opportunity to carry out and to show off their work.

You introduce feminine aesthetic codes in your designs, and make strong statements with them. How relevant is this femininity to your work and what is your intention with it? Women pride?
NZ: It’s a very interesting topic and also hard to answer very shortly, but for sure and may be very interesting, I try not to use the word femininity when it comes to my objects … (both laugh – I was avoiding feminism on purpose trying to introduce the subject softer) Yeah… I was very soft for a certain time, but in the last few years I actually really started to speak about it, it’s not about femininity, it’s about feminism. And all those gestures like Lolita lamp and the ribbon chair they all look very lovely and very beautiful, but this was not the intention. The intention was to ask questions and for example when we did Lolita lamp with Mooi in 2007, the Lolita was introduced in pink, today or two years ago, pink was one of the most used colours in Milan. Ten years ago it was a risk to use that colour, like will this be taken seriously? Does it have too many meanings which we don’t like or we don’t take seriously? Also in the catalogue there was a headline “who’s afraid of pink?” So we were trying to ask questions. And today when I see that pink is somehow liberated, it’s not connected with a certain meaning anymore, it’s genderless, I am somehow happy; because I see that I contributed to this movement. 
Then again also the ribbon chair, it was like a gesture, because there are certain elements which are like a taboo, certain aesthetic elements. And I sometimes, not always, like to play with these elements, so I like to take them out of the ghetto; it is sort of a ghetto, and to use them in such a way that you give them a new meaning. And of course design it’s a ‘boys club’ and the rules in contemporary design were written in modernism, and it’s very stiff still, so as I said before I think design has a very strong language and in certain projects, not in all, I try to address some of these themes, and on the other hand I wouldn’t say they are more feminine, I would say they are more poetic. I think this is just an empty space waiting in the design for the people, but it does not matter whether they are young or old or female or male. For sure Lolita and the ribbon chair I can say they are feminist statements, really because they were done out of provocation, out of asking questions, out of trying to change certain perspectives.

You just mentioned design is very much a “boys club”. This year in Milan there was a big controversy due to the lack of women at the opening image of the Milan Design Week… and the organizers apologized afterwards…
NZ: Just man in suits… yes it was really nice because designers like Patricia Urquiola and Paola Navone they all published this image… Yeah, I mean in a way it’s hard to speak about that, because I think if you are good at what you do then it really doesn’t matter, but of course I would say not the designers, the production companies are still very much the boys club and these are many times older generations that are ruling these companies, which are more rigid to new ideas to new ways. And it is sometimes interesting because now I see it’s much easier to work with younger companies or with younger man. There you don’t have this kind of problems, they are more open. So I think it’s a question of time, and I think it is getting better and more open and that the gender is not an issue anymore in the design profession. 

You have collaborated with very impressive names in the design scene. This past Milan Design Week you participated in Rossana Orlandi’s exhibition Guiltless plastic. How did you approach the plastic and the lack of guilt?
NZ: I was really happy that Rossana made this project. I think this is now the most important theme in the design. It’s something that we should all be trying to answer; it’s a very complex question. Basically, I think there are two ways, one is to really try to stop bring virgin plastics to the world, and the other one is to try to recycle or reuse what we have, but of course it’s quite complex. 
In this project I tried to use materials from recycled plastic, but not in a way that you see on a first glance that it’s about recycled materials. Because recycled materials sometimes are connected with a certain type of aesthetics and a certain type of emotions and we not necessarily all like them or need them all the time. So I think it will be very important in the future to use these recycled materials also in an aesthetical way where you don’t see that it is about recycling and used materials. Because I think this is also the question of guilt. We don’t need to feel guilty all the time, of course we need to act responsible, but it doesn’t need to be present all the time, so in the case of my project which was a clock I decided to use a fabric which was made out of recycled plastic bottles and it was embroidered with a thread that was also from the recycled plastic bottles, and the appearance was very rich, very baroque, but it was all done out of these recycled plastic bottles.

Do you find many differences when you work free for your own, versus when you work under an assignment from a company?
NZ: It’s completely different but I like, I prefer to work for the companies because I am really challenged when I need to work inside a lot of restrictions, so inside of a small box. So when you work with a company, you know it’s predetermined, the financials, the use of the materials, so a lot of things and when you manage to be creative with all these borders and you do something good, it’s really intriguing.  It is a little bit easier if you work for yourself, you can do whatever you want, nobody says no, so there is no struggle, and I think there sometimes this struggle is creative.

The same way Cosentino has a worldwide presence, from a small part of Andalusia, your work has international projection from the capital of Slovenia. Is in Ljubljana, where you find your inspiration?
NZ: Yes, it is an interesting comparison. Ljubljana is really a convenient city for me to live, because I need a lot of nature to be creative. I love big cities, but like for fourteen days, for three weeks, then I need to go back. Ljubljana is a small city, but connected with nature, and it has a very interesting location, because in a radius of 500 km, you have Milano, you have Belgrade, you have Vienna, you have Mediterranean, you have the Alps, so you have this diversity, all these different influences, and I think for me it’s really important. So there were times when I was thinking whether I should move, it’s better to be in Milano, but in the end I think I am trapped, and I will stay there but of course work worldwide. And on the other side, we are neighbouring Italy and Italy is still the most important country when it comes to the production, and I can do everything with the car. I a way I am really hidden but really close by and I like this situation. 

Architect of tenacious theoretical interests, Peter Eisenman was born into a family of European origin, completed his intellectual training in Europe and had as mentors, successively, the British critic Colin Rowe, the Italian historian Manfredo Ta- furi, and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Bridging the young architecture of the East Coast of the United States and the new currents of the Old Continent, his cultural activism through magazines, encounters, and research groups like the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies turned him into a representative of a new professional attitude, expressed also in a series of highly influential domestic proj- ects. After taking part in several European competitions where he explored the dialogue between geometric abstraction and urban topography, he completed his first important works in the the state of Ohio – the Wexner, the Aronoff, and the Columbus Convention centers –, all expressions of the disjointed volumes of the deconstructivist aesthetic. However, his most ambitious and prominent projects would be completed at the turn of the century, and both are in Europe: the Jewish Memorial in Berlin, a tragic and lyrical field of concrete stellae that recalls the Holocaust in the heart of Germany; and the City of Culture of Galicia, a colossal complex of topographically modelled buildings that hasn’t been completed yet.

Peter Eisenman: Things are very different in Spain now. When we won the competition for the City of Culture in Santiago, many really believed that I was Fraga’s pet, and that the project was his mausoleum. Some very negative stories, which to me were unfounded, were published. Fraga had a vision, a really interesting vision for Santiago. He wanted Galicia to become a vibrant place to young people, to keep them from moving to other capitals and large cities every year, and not to have a negative economy. He wanted a place where they could have film, theater, and art festivals. These were all Fraga’s ideas, not mine. I was just fol- lowing what he saw as something really important for Galicia.

The reason why there were so many problems is that in A Coruña they were upset that this investment was going to Santiago, and that is how I got involved with the Deportivo de La Coruña. The then Councillor for Culture of Galicia, Jesús Pérez Varela, who was friends with Lendoiro, the club’s president, commissioned a new stadium project. We signed a contract of some 100,000 euros, that were never paid, and produced two or three very interesting proposals. We made a nice model, a beautiful scheme that brought the watefront up to the edge of the stadium, so that you could be on the beach watching a soccer game at the same time. I think it was a really nice project, but it never went ahead.
 

Cynthia Davidson: The scheme was very nice, and doing architecture with a football stadium is not easy. For us it has always been football, it has always been our favorite sport, but what we really like is American football. We have the drawing you did in 1942 with an airplane flying over the stadium… and when you were in the competition for the stadium of the Arizona Cardinals we thought that was the ultimate commission for a football fan. And yet you have never wanted to do one since.

CD: The architecture becomes the facade. In Arizona you did those strange interstitial spaces that emerged when you wrapped the stadium with those elements that put the vertical circulations outside the facade. But Santiago and Berlin are your most signifi- cant works, maybe also the Wexner Center for the Arts, from the early mid-eighties. Santiago breaks my heart. To be there and see the activity that I saw, and the people who are working there, and the number of cars in the parking lot, and to be shown the statistic that 50,000 people a month are visiting the museum alone, just the museum, is very exciting. But to think that those signs are not enough to push the project back on track in some way… Not that it has to go back on track this year or the next year, but there should be that kind of thinking of “we are going to finish this,” because it would be really important for this place and this people. For me what has happened is the result of a typical political attitude.

Berlin is something else altogether, but it also faces risks. There was a politician recently who ran a campaign that promised to demolish the memorial, because there are Germans who hate the project because it is valuable real estate. At the same time, we got respective e-mails, from a Chinese student and a young architect from Bahrein, who had just been to the memorial and thought it was the most incredible thing they had ever seen or experienced. This is what is very interesting of your work, you don’t build for experience, you build for the concept and hope your works will make people think about it. At the memorial both things come together in a very interesting way.

PE: One of the things that I like about that project which is not phenomenological – because this building is clearly a phenomenological work, even though I don’t really do projects like that, but it was a different kind of client, this was for dead people – is that I have always been interested in the possibility of feeling lost in the space.

And it happens all the time in the memorial. If a mother is with a young child, and the child runs away and she starts looking for the child there is a moment when the child is totally lost, because even if there is screaming, if both people are moving you can never get together. For example, I can never remember, everytime I go, where my favorite spot is, because you do sometimes feel lost in space. Phenomenologically you can’t get lost, but psychologically you can. And this is the whole concept of the idea: that woman in New Jersey who was sepa- rated from her mother at one of the Ausch- witz camps, and she survived but never saw her mother again.

Alberto Campo Baeza is the latest recipient of the National Architecture Award given by the Spanish Association of Architecture Institutes. Almost at the same time, the National Geographic organization named Andalusia’s Museum of Memory —along with the Guggenheim of Bilbao— one of the “ten modern wonders of the world,” an accolade which Campo Baeza, naturally modest and restrained, disagrees with. He receives us in his studio in Madrid’s Justicia neighborhood, dressed in a blue-striped shirt that was his father’s, and leads us into his office, a corner at the back where a painting by him hangs beside a Chillida print. We start to converse around a table on which there is a card-board model of his latest house project and a prototype of a delicate lamp he has designed in three lines: a trihedron of steel expressing the essence and exactitude that governs his work in general.

Begoña Marín Calle: Why don’t you agree with National Geographic’s recognition of your museum?
Alberto Campo Baeza: Well, these are media gimmicks, as when they declare a city the most beautiful in the world ,with the exception of Cádiz, proclaimed as such last year by The New York Times, because Cádiz truly is the world’s loveliest city. Actually, architecture rarely makes news. Only when someone does something outlandish or when something falls or something tremendous happens, as with Nôtre Dame. Any second-rate painter or sculptor does something and makes headlines. Just think of ARCO. But the media pays no attention to architecture ,or very little, or only very sporadically. Anyway, back to the museum, I suggest you go there for a meal. There’s an excellent restaurant upstairs run by Arriaga. I’d never eaten there before. I’d done the building, that’s all, but when I last went to Granada I passed by there and the feeling of having a meal afloat is wonderful. It’s transparent on both sides and you feel you’re hovering over Granada.
 

Armando Valenzuela Moyano: Given architecture’s lack of a presence in the media, photography —the image of architecture— becomes fundamental.

ACB: A bad architecture with a good photographer is a hypocrite, but a good architecture with a bad photographer is an imbecile. I am fortunate to have a splendid photographer, Javier Callejas, who is an architect but who appeared on the scene when he had not yet graduated. The photographer is the key link in the transmission of the message. The first one I worked with was Hisao Suzuki, he took the photos of the Gaspar House. I remember we traveled down to Cádiz and he made me get up at five in the morning to go to the house. We sat on the floor, everything was still dark, and after ten minutes it began to brighten up. At this point he stood up and in silence took the marvelous photographs you all know. Those photos perfectly captured the beauty of the house.

AVM: You say that photographers are free to shoot your works as they please, that there are no directives in terms of what you want shown or conveyed. 
ACB: I give them freedom, especially with Javier Callejas, who is an architect and has the mind and eyes of one. In the daycare center for Benetton in Venice, for example, Suzuki did the photos, but not all were to my liking. I had taken some during visits to the site and saw that some images were missing. Hisao could not return to Venice at that moment and the pictures we published were taken by a Benetton photographer.

AVM: Interesting for its didactic worth is that your books show images that reference works of other architects. I think for instance of the interior shot, taken during the construction of Owen Williams’s Daily Mirror Building, that in some of your monographs accompanies pictures of the construction of your Caja Granada, or the penguins drawn on the ramp of Andalusia’s Museum of Memory, in clear allusion to Berthold Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool. Is this about the evocative power of images as a way to present a project? About the copy as a design tool in the terms put forward by Antonio Miranda, a starting point to exceed and improve on?
ACB: In this I am not of the same opinion. It’s true that for pedagogical purposes, as often happens in class, examples and images are given, all perfectly valid, to help people understand something via comparison. But I prefer to talk about memory. Memory is an instrument not only for us architects, but also for writers, for creators, for inventors. The first tool of an architect is reason, aided by imagination. In Fernando de Terán’s office at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which he directs and I am a member of, is a Goya etching titled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. But the Prado Museum possesses a text on that print where Goya says: Reason, helped by imagination… Once again the etching is very clear, pedagogiclly, but there are second parts, and the text explains what the image cannot. Reason and imagination are essential to the creative process. And the third ingredient is memory, an architect without memory is like a needle without thread. Both Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier have a photograph taken in front of the Parthenon, the most modern architects posing with the most ancient architecture. I will sooner speak of memory than of copy.

AVM: And what of the image as reference or evocation in Caja Granada?
ACB: Well, you’ve already mentioned Owen Williams, but one thing I discovered to my tremendous satisfaction is that the four pillars in the Caja’s central space are as tall as, and equal in diameter to, the columns of Granada Cathedral, and have the same distance between them. This cathedral is the world’s most gorgeous and it has been restored with a lot of delicacy, I don’t know by whom, but whoever did it has done a very good job. I was there the other day and sunlight was streaming in through the high stained glass windows, in diagonal trajectories full of drama and beauty. And something similar happens in my building. I realized this later, but it can’t be by chance. At play is the memory of light, the memory of space.
BMC: Juan Herreros speaks of this space as a hypostyle space. It’s a lay cathedral, you enter and see the light, and look up. There are videos and images that show the building as it really is, and when you visit, you are amazed at how everything you have seen on a screen is real, there is no post-production.
ACB: At this point I should acknowledge that Suzuki’s images are marvelous, that they present the Caja as it really is, and help people get to know it. But nothing beats actually being in a building. Some time ago I wrote an essay about memory and spoke of recognizing spaces. It happens to architects in particular. We are trained to understand buildings through plans, as with the Pantheon, for example. But one day you enter it and what you see is sublime, and that experience of the space cannot be replaced by knowledge of it through drawings. Eduardo Chillida wrote a beautiful piece describing his feelings stepping into the Pantheon and embracing the column of light shining in from above.

AVM: You keep talking about light. What’s your relationship with it?
ACB: In the same way that I say that memory is the first instrument, I say that light is the first material. It’s free and yet the most luxurious material that architects work with. Right now I’m doing a house in Madrid, in Montecarmelo. It’s very simple and on top is a glass box, and the ceiling has an oculus. The other day I arrived at the site and blew my top (which I don’t do much) because they had put a small bib around the skylight to wetproof the root terrace, blocking the view of the sky. The site manager, a very smart guy, climbed up and removed a brick of the bib, in such a way that, from down below, we could see the sky where he had removed the piece, but only the masonry where he had not. It was a very emotive moment. A pedagogical comparison would be with poetry: a word here says nothing, but you change it and the new word says everything.
BMC: Oteiza used to recount how, as a child, he would make holes in the sand and insert himself inside in order to observe the world from that perspective. That’s a very architectural attitude. Remove in order to make space. There’s something of this in your architecture.
ACB: There’s an American artist, Michael Heizer, who has a work in the museum of the Dia Art Foundation (Dia:Beacon), consisting of four holes in the floor, painted black inside. A while ago we were talking about copies. In the travertine platform of the House of the Infinite there are three excavations, and to explain it I use an image of the Michael Heizer. The excavations are: the swimming pool, one at the entrance to the house, and a small amphitheater. Emptying brings out the power of the project. 

AVM: As a student at ETSAM I learned a lot of architecture studying your houses, where the clarity of the concepts has a very direct pedagogical effect. Questions like the light defining a space, the interior flowing to the exterior or the exterior penetrating the interior, the tectonic and the stereotomic, have a straighforward presence. Nevertheless, what for students is a longed-for learning process can be difficult for the private client. Is the didactic experience possible with clients? How do you engage with them to obtain architecture as you conceive it?
ACB: Clients have to be taught and convinced, with a lot of tact and deftness but firmly. It can be a long hard process. The commission for the House of the Infinite, for example, came from an architect married to a very charming Belgian. It’s a simple story: in the vicinity of the Playa de Bolonia (Bolonia Beach) is a Belgian community, and close by is the Playa de los Alemanes (Beach of the Germans). There they bought a piece of land, the best, where a German had, right by the sea and the dune, built a house in the late 1950s, before that was prohibited. The house was in ruins and had to be demolished, but this made room for a new construction that could stretch all the way to the dune. The clients called me in to design a home for them, thinking I would build them a white house like others I had done in the area, but I came up with something different: a podium fused with the earth and which the wind and sand would erode until it looked like a ruin. They took my proposal with some reticence at first. Meanwhile, they came across the Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen, who uses a lot of pietra serena, a greenish gray stone, at which point they gave me the go-ahead, on the condition that I use that stone for cladding. I had proposed a travertine with onyx stains, onyx travertine, for a more toasted tone that would blend with the color of the sand on the beach. After some months of fierce battle with the clients, and plenty of adroitness, I won with conviction. Now they’re delighted. But this is not easy. People probably think I turn down lots of clients but what really happens is that my specialty is scaring them away, and some reappear eventually. Others don’t.
That said, there’s a second part, and we should talk about it too: we should see to it that people don’t take our schemes as impositions. Architects propose a framework for people to be happy in and live as they please. You can’t go to a house and remove the furniture they’ve put. I did some projects with Julio Cano, among them the PPO Iturrondo professional training center in Pamplona. Last year (2018) it was included in the Iberian DOCOMOMO, a program aimed at protecting contemporary architecture, and in February this year (2019) I was there to give a talk.
The building had been much altered and was to be repurposed for administration functions. The restoration job was assigned to Maite Apezteguia, a fine architect who was worried about having applied white paint to the originally orange honeycombed beams. I enter the building and Maite, very worried, asks me what I think, and I tell her it’s fine, perfect. She says, Alberto, doesn’t it bother you? Not at all, I reply, it’s great. You can’t enslave people with your works. Carvajal explained this very well through the example of the case and the box. If you have a case for a fork, you can’t try to put a knife in it, but if you have a box, you can put in a knife, a spoon, and a fork. It’s better to make a box in which everything fits. Melnikov said that he had only made boxes in his life, big and small.

BMC: The Caja Granada, precisely, may be the clearest example of a box.
ACB: Yes, and the Caja Granada, is a stereotomic box set the other way around, against the floor, in an effort to trap air with a heavy artifact. Later I perforate it so that solid light comes in, as into a trap. Because of its dimensions (72 x 72 x 36 m), I put four columns at the center to solve the gravitational problem.
AVM: We talk about your white houses and the House of the Infinite, but you have also built social and low-cost housing developments. Are these different registers?
ACB: No. True, I did the House of the Infinite for one of Belgium’s richest families, and that enabled me to do whatever I wanted, but I have also built economical dwellings, such as the Gaspar House, which went up on a budget of 2 million pesetas then, but with the same intensity that goes into all my projects. Or the complex at La Viña, in Entrevías, the best social housing I have ever done. I like to build good and economical architecture for everyone. And for this, we don’t need large spaces. We’re now in a competition for quasi-social dwellings, and they’re going to be very radical. I live in a single, 25-square-meter space. I have a retractable bed, lots of shelves full of books, and everything within reach. That’s all I need.

BMC: You were born in Valladolid but consider yourself from Cádiz. You love the city and its light.
ACB: Around 49 BC, when he was not yet emperor, Caesar Augustus went to the Tower of Hercules in Cádiz to have the priests of that famous sanctuary interpret a dream he’d had, before crossing the Rubicon and taking up arms against the senatorial government. The oracle said he would one day be emperor of the whole world. When this came true, Caesar Augustus remembered the prophecy, and in gratitude declared all Cádiz citizens Romans by birth, pleno iure. This is something that most people in Cádiz don’t give importance to, but I do. I defend my Roman and gaditano citizenships.
My father, for a number of reasons, was ‘banished’ to Cádiz. And that was the best thing that could have happened to us. We lived very happily. I can’t describe how wonderful it was to live on the edge of La Caleta. I attended the Marianistas school of Cádiz, did high school there, and its church was the Oratory of San Felipe Neri Oratory, which was where the first Spanish Constitution was passed. Those were very enjoyable years for me. And discovering the light of Cádiz was fundamental.
My father died at 104 and was always studying. At medical school in Valladolid he received 19 distinctions. He spent his whole life studying. As children we would ask him why he kept studying if already knew everything. When he passed away, my sisters sorted out his papers and found three sheets on which his teacher, instead of “matrícula de honor,” had written “admirable.” He sat examinations for the military, as a safety net, and passed them, and in May 1936 he came to Madrid to do the required adaptation course. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War found him in Madrid. After the war he was labeled “hostile to the regime” and sent to Cádiz. A punishment that made us very happy.

BMC: You’ve mentioned Goya, Rome, Greece, Agrippa’s Pantheon. How important is Antiquity, the classical world, in your training and in your architecture?
ACB: Very important. Let’s go back to Caja Granada, for example. The project is a large stereotomic box where, in the maniera of the Pantheon of Rome, there is a clear continuity of vertical and horizontal planes.
What in the Pantheon is a grand dome thanks to the constructional continuity of a material that only works by compression, is in Granada a linteled box thanks to the horizontality made possible by a new material, steel, and with it, reinforced concrete, which works well in a linteled system of large structural spans. What in the Pantheon is masterfully executed in the only system possible then, the cupula, is in Granada resolved with the modern lintel system that lies within our reach.
And if the Pantheon, logically, brings in light at the culminating point of its constructional system, through the divine oculus, Caja Granada perforates its upper horizontal linteled plane, to receive the light needed in what we have called “impluvium of light.”
Some years ago I wrote a piece about one of my obsessions: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I own 66 editions in different languages. In Spanish, in English, in Portuguese, in French, even in Croatian. The original was in Greek. On one of my trips to New York I found a very cheap Penguin pocket edition. The translation by Maxwell Staniforth is unbeatable. I have looked for Spanish versions and none has the precision and exactitude of this one. One day, surfing the Internet for a good Spanish translation, I bungled and stumbled upon an establishment in Málaga that makes bronze reproductions of classical sculptures. And that’s how I found this equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Piazza del Campidoglio. So you see, always Rome. [The small sculpture presides the table in his studio, amid books and projects.]

AVM: When talking about knowledge transfer you have mentioned photography, but you have quite a large output of writings and your website is among the most beautiful, clear, and pedagogical I have ever seen.
ACB: My website has almost 6 million visitors. How can that be? I don’t know. It was designed by Massimo Vignelli, one of the creators of the Helvetica typeface, and was a gift from some New York clients, but what’s important is that anyone in New York or Tokyo or here has access to all the information, anytime. This has changed the world of research. Some days ago, at the Royal Academy, we were talking about doing an exhibition of Goya prints, and I said we should digitalize his entire oeuvre. I myself have digitalized all my drawings, scanned all the plans, notebooks, everything, and I’ve donated it all to ETSAM, the Madrid School of Architecture, my alma mater. Anybody can now look at my work directly and easily. The digital has huge advantages because, among other things, it lets you make corrections. My latest project is a book to be titled Rewriting. I am going to get texts I’ve written and correct them all I can. Rewriting is a great exercise, like being born again. And this is possible thanks to Word, where it’s easy to correct.
BMC: I have to ask you to describe your architecture, which maintains a register in such a way that while seeming to stay the same, it is always surprisingly different.
ACB: It’s radical. Last year I wrote a book on Alejandro de la Sota and titled it Laconic Sota. My architecture can be exactly that: laconic, radical, sober, and logical, with common sense.

BMC: When Sara de la Mata and Enrique Sobejano interviewed Julio Cano Lasso, the latter said that if he had dedicated his life to a discipline other than architecture, he would have persevered in his studio and the dedication would have been equally gratifying. For him, dedication to work was the important thing. Can you picture yourself doing something other than architecture?
ACB: No, and in fact at architecture school I had Alejandro de la Sota as teacher, and when I met him, I thought “I want to be like him.” Every day, I learn something new. At the Prado Museum is a pencil drawing by an octogenarian Goya. It shows an old man walking with two canes, luminous, as if coming out of darkness. In the upper right corner Goya wrote: “I am still learning.” I consider myself lucky and keep thanking God for my life. I go swimming twice a week and I walk up five floors to my apartment (there is no elevator), and like Goya, I’m still learning.

We leave his studio feeling we’ve just been in a place removed from fashions and contemporary pressures, almost like the atelier of a Renaissance man, a workshop where the most modern architecture is born out of reflecting about humankind, about place, about light. In Alberto’s atelier reigns silence, and time for thinking. It’s an aspirational studio, of the kind one wants to return to, to find the peace radiated by a man who has taken in the world from the angle of a personal story that has brought him from Cádiz to an orb without borders, and who imparts it through his writings, his teachings, and his architecture.