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Von Vegesack & Schwartz-Clauss

Von Vegesack & Schwartz-Clauss

In dialogue
Various

The Domaine de Boisbuchet founder, Alexander von Vegesack, and its director, Mathias Schwartz-Clauss, sit down for a conversation at the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid.

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Photos: © Miguel Fernández-Galiano

Alexander von Vegesack never thought to go in for design, but he was a collector from early on. He founded the Vitra Design Museum, and worked with Vitra for much of his career. His life, marked by a postwar German childhood, was always bound to the values of living and working together, so it is not surprising to see them crystallized in Domaine de Boisbuchet: a castle in the southwest of France that each year gathers artists, designers, and

architects in multidisciplinary workshops. Internationally renowned not only for the attendees, but also for the caliber of the lecturers, these workshops are only part of an experience that involves close cohabitation and intimate engagement with nature. Mathias Schwartz-Clauss has directed the workshops since 2013, and in the following interview helps us trace the origins of this ambitious project.

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Mathias Schwartz-Clauss: I would like to begin the conversation with the future instead of with the past. Do you worry about your legacy? About what will happen to Boisbuchet in ten or twenty years? And are you happy with what we have achieved so far?

Alexander von Vegesack: I think neither of the past nor of the future, I prefer to think of the present. I’m very much interested in what I can do now to secure Boisbuchet’s future. But its future development will be taken care of by younger people, like yourself, and others following up, and will keep changing, the only constant in life is change.

MSC: Alright, but if you look to the future and simultaneously to the past, back to your childhood, what would you say were the most important steps that led to this project? I feel that it would be a kind of summary of your work.

AVV: I was always very curious, and indignant when people would not allow me to follow my curiosity, so I learned to pursue my interests, and although in this I was not always successful (mainly for economic reasons), I learned an enormous amount from the different activities I did, and exposed myself to many experiences, for which people then appraised me. But if we focus on the period of the Vitra Design Museum, I would say that it was from my period in Hamburg that I really learned a lot. We organized a theater and many social experiments that would be of great help in my first Vitra exhibitions. So I would say that this ongoing curiosity has been the red thread of my life, and that the experiences derived from it are the foundation of what we are doing today.

“Ongoing curiosity has been the red thread of my life, and is the foundation of what we are doing today”

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MSC: It’s interesting that you mention the social experiments, and it seems to me that the way you lived and worked in the Hamburg factory became an important part of how we do things at Boisbuchet, which gradually became a community.

AVV: In my view, community was the small family in the beginning, and continued when I was in boarding school. Sixteen people in the same room doing everything together created a system I relate to even today. All the projects that came my way were done with friends, living together, working together, taking risks together…

MSC: At some point in your childhood you also began to take an interest in objects. At that time, these were not objects of ‘design,’ the word ‘design’ did not exist in your world, so how would you say this admiration for objects came about?

AVV: I was born in the last two months of the war and we were living in Düsseldorf, surrounded by houses in ruins. Like all children, we liked to go through the ruins to see if we could find something, like gold diggers. Once we found mosaic in what had been a church. I didn’t know about mosaic floors, but was fascinated by those small pieces. It was part of the curiosity that has stayed with me all my life.

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MSC: Düsseldorf is an example of your work, in general, which is ultimately the telling of a story through an object, contextualizing it to create a bigger picture. Sometimes you invent part of the narrative to create a new reality for these things.

AVV: That’s true, but I haven’t finished: years later, it was in flea markets that I continued my search for objects. You could find just about anything, and most interesting were the stories people told about them. You might come across an identical object 50 meters further down the alley, and the dealer would tell you quite a different spiel. I continued doing this in the Netherlands and later in France… and always tried to learn something not just about the object, but also about the people, who they were and how they tried to go about their business. They often made up stories, but there was always some truth to them. I think that part of it rubbed off on me.

But the serious collecting started with the Thonet pieces, when we needed furniture for the theater. I remember finding a lot of pieces, some damaged, some broken… but we would use spare parts to complete and repair others. One day a guy came by and told me about the technology of the chairs, and I was fascinated. So much so that I traveled to Czechoslovakia to visit factory places and learn more. In those days it was strictly forbidden to go into the factories if you were a foreigner, as there was a lot of industrial espionage going on, but eventually I managed to get in, and found lots of catalogs and information. To cut a long story short, this led me to do several exhibitions, many of them in the United States. During one of my trips there I read that William Wyler had died, and I thought it was Billy Wilder. I knew that the film director Billy Wilder had a large collection of pieces of bent wood, so I contacted his family to see if I could buy some.

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“I always tried to learn not just about the object, but also about the people behind it”

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MSC: So you called the family.

AVV: Exactly. I called and the man who answered was very astonished. I expressed my condolences and proceeded to explain who I was and what I wanted, but he interrupted me saying he was Billy Wilder and that, no, he wasn’t dead. He asked if I had paper and a pencil to write with, and gave me an address. That’s how we met, and we became good friends. One of the first things he did was introduce me to Ray Eames, who was a big help in the beginnings of Boisbuchet because, among many other things, it was she who put me in touch with Rolf Fehlbaum, Vitra’s director, with whom I would work for many years.

MSC: I remember that at the time we met you were working in the creation of the Vitra Design Museum, and I – aspiring to help out in the project as an intern without knowing a thing about design – was fascinated by the passion with which you spoke not only about the future Vitra project, but also about Boisbuchet, which then was just a bunch of farming sheds. But at what point exactly did you, an expert in creating collections for museums and organizing exhibitions, decide to shift your focus to workshops?

AVV: It’s closely connected to my origins. I had always wanted to keep up the groupwork I had started in Hamburg, and I wanted to share the experience, an experience which gave form to my life, with others, so that many more people could live it too. So here, again, we link the past to the future.

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The Year of the Virus

The Year of the Virus

Luis Fernández-Galiano
Various

Luis Fernández-Galiano meditates about 2020, the pandemic and C:Architecture and Everything Else in its latest issue: C18.

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2020 will remain in our memory as the year of the virus. This is already the given title of a crop of chronicles and reviews of a health crisis that has also devastated the economic fabric and caused dramatic social damage. The emergency has put us to the test, placing institutions, businesses, and individuals before an unprecedented challenge, which has brought out the best in us while at the same time exposing our handicaps. Today we are more aware of the fragility of our communities and our lives, but also of the close ties that connect us in a tight web of communication, solidarity, and affection. Despite all this, these provisional accounts are still so close to the events unleashed by the ongoing pandemic that they inevitably lack perspective. The best testimony of the plague London suffered in 1665 – A Journal of the Plague Year – was published by Daniel Defoe in 1722, and it might be a while before the most timeless narrative of our year of the virus appears. In the meantime, covid-19 has left us the task of closing the gaps and healing the wounds of this tragic year, attentive more to the regeneration of social structures, collective projects, and personal expectations than to the intellectual and artistic record of a time of pain, abnegation, and uncertainty. The Ecclesiastes reminds us that for everything there is a season, and ours is not a time to tell but a time to cure.

In 2014 Cosentino embraced with Arquitectura Viva the challenge of drawing attention to the “innovations, designs, and projects that contribute to making the world more sustainable and beautiful”, and this joint effort, under the title C: architecture and everything else, has materialized in 15 issues of which both parties feel legitimately proud. As with many other cultural initiatives, the pandemic hit the pause button in our printed communication with readers, and as much Arquitectura Viva as C went through a period of remote editing and digital publishing. However, a commitment to continuity has made it possible for both magazines to offer the print version of their digital issues, and this is precisely the purpose of this volume, which gathers the already distributed C16 and C17 with the contents of the new C18, presenting under one cover the publications of this ‘year of the virus’, a period we will be unable to forget, and which we can hardly consider history when the pandemic still disrupts everyday life in territories and cities. But this is not a time to tell but a time to cure, and to heal the editorial wounds of a magazine engaged with the planet’s health, with technical innovation, and with aesthetic excellence: these are the strands that weave together this testimony of a year whose somber threat we have faced with tenacity and humility.

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Pinós & Chinchilla

Pinós & Chinchilla

In dialogue
Various

Architects Carme Pinós (1954) and Izaskun Chinchilla (1975) meet at the offices of the Madrid-based magazine Arquitectura Viva to talk about the role of women in history and in architecture.

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Photos: © Miguel Fernández-Galiano

Carme Pinós and Izaskun Chinchilla broach issues like architecture, the ecological crisis and the future exhibition on the work of Pinós at the Museo ICO, but in their conversation the gender issue comes up insistently, and that is the part we are recording here.

Izaskun Chinchilla: To start, and if you agree, let’s reflect together on how the gender factor affects architecture. I am asking first because not everyone feels comfortable discussing this issue.

Carme Pinós: Yes, I have things to say, and for several reasons, because the more you delve into history, the more you realize that it is told from a very male point of view.

IC: It’s true: history has been violence and strength, but many of the other things that have happened are not part of the official history, right?

CP: Yes of course. I think we have made great progress and, in this sense, I believe that when humans became sedentary, divinity – previously represented by the mother goddess – went on to become the god of war, and this gave birth to the concept of heritage, of patriarchy. The system was turned around: matriarchy gave way to a system based on the succession of heritage conquered through violence, and this was so despite the fact that, ultimately only the woman knew for certain who her son’s father was. As women were left out of war, of a world sustained by force, our gender was relegated, and the foreseeable result is that the history of humanity is written by men.

When I say that, in spite of this starting point, we have improved a lot, I refer to the fact that now war, violence, and the use of force that have traditionally sustained patriarchy do not occupy the absolute position they had before. Different aspects of women’s emancipation have contributed to this, such as sexual freedom, birth control or the rise of women to prominent social positions. This is a big step, but it is only the first. Other actions must be taken, like making men get more involved so that women can step fully into world management, or simply acknowledging that this world needs women. The world needs women because we are less arrogant, we have developed a greater capacity for listening and empathy, probably because we have spent thousands of years taking care of others, something that men have a hard time doing. In traditional societies, a woman listened without being able to act; she tried to understand; if a son became a murderer, the father disinherited him, rejected him as son, but a woman would still consider that son her flesh and blood.
The world consists of many things, many contaminated things, and that attitude imposed by patriarchy, and which women had to accept, has its positive side. In my architecture, for instance, I always try to make sure there is a dialogue between two or three elements, and not just one imposed discourse. I am sure that this attitude has to do, in part, with my being a woman. I work with men, and at the studio there are more men than women, but fortunately women are occupying stronger positions at my office, and are gaining more strength in the field. In any case, the most important thing is to favor dialogue and avoid impositions.

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“In my architecture, I try to make sure there is a dialogue, and not just one imposed discourse“

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IC: You have said several things. The first is the vision of official history as masculine. I would put it differently. I think that male history is the official one, the history you find in books, in museums… But throughout this whole ‘official’ time there were changes in food and gastronomy, in people’s way of dressing, sexual habits and hygiene changed, the idea of medicine also changed… and I think that in these aspects of private life women were extremely important. From writing letters to creating a comfortable home, women have played a leading role in the greatest events in the history of humanity, although the official history hasn’t paid attention to them. In my view, there is a reassessment of the roles of gender in architecture, an acknowledgement of those aspects in the heritage of humanity that seem minor details in the discourse of major academies or museums, but which are essential to social progress. Those who went to war were able to go because someone had taken care of them when they were little, had provided them health, an education… In all those tasks women have played a prominent role.

That is why I think that perhaps another perspective of art and of history could make us see that we do have a female heritage.

CP: The relationship between architecture and feminity offers interesting examples. A Victorian house can seem very feminine, in the sense that it is very legible, filled as it is with human traces, footprints: you can immediately figure out where the reading, smoking, and cooking took place. It was the product, all of it, of an ethic of detail that followed a discourse, which could be linked, at the same time, to the female universe. Later on the house became more abstract: with Le Corbusier the dwelling became a ‘machine à habiter,’ but after that it was not even ‘for living,’ but simply a pragmatic way of tackling a program erasing all discourse. I would say the world has gradually given in to abstraction because the market has set more abstract guidelines and less connected to women’s traditional universe, which is more specific and has to do more with caregiving.

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IC: Yes, I think the market is perhaps accountable for that shift towards the abstract, but also towards the epic: that situation in which only the great possession, the great feat, the great emblem, the great achievement seem to count, and less attention is paid to the details, to the elements of everyday life. As you were saying, the Victorian house is an example, and leaves traces everywhere of its daily activities. And that is what modernity has eliminated completely. I’d say the market has managed to make the most of that trend, but this has happened in complicity with the academy, culture, and architects in the sense that we still think about Ornament is Crime: we still deny that those everyday aspects are relevant.

CP: Sometimes I ask myself why the architectures I dislike deny their ties with people and things: buildings that, not by coincidence, are photographed without people. That’s why I always say that I look for a contaminated architecture, I want to photograph architecture that is alive, which reflects how people move, how they feel inside it. What’s sad is that these architectures that exclude the human are incredibly successful, also among everyday people, which makes me think that perhaps people are in need of that epic you are talking about.

IC: I have the feeling that precisely that praise of the more epic aspects, that denial of the importance of details and of everyday life, is somehow the origin of that separation between civil society and architecture as a profession. There is a temporary factor – we’re in an economic crisis, a crisis of the production model, an ecological crisis – and maybe the way in which women have been educated, their culture and their way of acting is part of the solution. This is not a call for protection, but a call for an opportunity and a strategy. I always say there is a first and a second feminism that advocate equal rights for women and for men: the right to vote, the right to take on public posts or the right to have a political role in society. And, next, the right to be part of an executive committee or of company management: the possibility of being part of the decision-making groups in society, but trying to make sure that equal rights involve equal roles, that is, making the woman perform like a man. We are in a situation in which there should be a revision of feminism associated to the idea that the environment and nature put us, as human species, in our place: a more vulnerable place where we might not want to be men. Perhaps I have no interest in being president of a political party or of a company if that means I won’t be able to balance my private life and my public life, if that means I’ll have to give up maternity…

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“The way in which women have been educated, their culture and their manner of acting, is part of the solution“

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CP: But society too, and not just men, maintains the traditional gender roles. Today we know what type of feminism we need to defend, but I don’t want anything given to me, so to speak. I don’t want to be chosen for a post just because I’m a woman. I consider myself a better architect than many other architects. I have a vision of the world that is complemented by other visions of the world. History, culture, genetics, or biology have led us to perceive things in different ways. In this context, women must claim the essential and active role of the female condition. I don’t want to be given half of something: I forgo charity and don’t want to be labelled or pigeonholed. I see life as a whole, and in life there are aspects that respond to a male vision and others that come from a female vision. So when you say you wouldn’t want to be a company director because you would have to give up many things in life, I think no one who steps into that role should be expected to give up certain things. That’s why I say that, in the end, the market is the winner in all this: the only thing that counts is productivity, short-term benefits which demand huge sacrifices… This is what we should fight for: a fuller life with multiple and complementary visions.

IC: Joining messages, I think that the transition of women into the labor market is a collective advantage, not for women, but for society as a whole. It’s a matter of vindicating, reasserting the value, and placing at the service of society a series of tools – which have been acquired and naturalized – for work and for dialogue, as well as a cultural heritage which up to now haven’t been part of the conversations about public life. Do we give immigrants permission just to live in our country or do we let them change the rules? Because maybe the right thing is not only letting them live like we do, but letting them change some of our rules so that society can evolve towards greater cosmpolitanism.

CP: Every time there has been a rise in knowledge, diversity, cross-cultural contamination, it has brought moments of peace and also of prosperity. But cultural exchange has always needed mutual involvement, otherwise the result is isolation, and, when you close yourself to the world and to others, prosperity ends. That’s why I think exclusionary nationalisms only lead to conflict.

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{{Interview with architect Walter Schelle: “Dekton, aesthetic and functional”}}

Interview with architect Walter Schelle: “Dekton, aesthetic and functional”

Kap West
Tyskland

How façade expert Friedrich Scharl reduced weight and costs with Dekton on KAP WEST in Munich

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The façade of the new office complex at the Hirschgarten in Munich has a modern, urban look. The original plans using concrete or artificial stone, however, would have made it difficult to meet the tight schedule and to keep within budget. Façade expert, Friedrich Scharl, found an alternative which impressed the architects and developers: the ultra-compact surface Dekton by Cosentino.

Mr. Scharl, you did the technical designs for the façade on KAP West. What was wrong with the original plans?

FS: The weight and the costs. The building was designed with a ventilated curtain façade. The parts of the façade with triple glazing and stone-covered pilasters would have been completely preassembled before delivery to the site and put into place – it’s a typical process that requires a lot of planning and efficiency. The original plans envisaged the pilasters to be covered by 30 mm-thick, fibre-reinforced concrete or artificial stone. This would have meant that each part of the façade would have weighed approximately 1.5 tonnes. With so much weight, handling becomes difficult and the risk of damage increases. In addition, you need an elaborate substructure. In our case, this would have put the time frame and budget at risk.

So you started looking for a lighter façade covering?

FS: Correct, we needed a material with a high-quality stone look, but one that was thinner, and therefore lighter – and all things considered, at a lower cost. And finding a reliable supplier is not as easy as it sounds. Then we discovered Dekton. This ultra-compact surface is extremely stable and at 12 mm thick, weighing 32 kg/sqm, comparatively light. Even thinner material would have been available too. However, we needed this thickness to insert an undercut anchor on the back. With this it is possible to secure the plates firmly and invisibly on the façade.

What was most convincing material wise?

FS: As well as our chosen design options we also needed approval for the façade. Dekton is certified in accordance with ETA 14/0413 and CE 1220‐CPR‐1459. During tests it was proven that the material can even withstand a scale 7 earthquake. The fire protection class is A2. What was perfect for our project was: If a plate cracks, an integrated glass fibre net ensures that the broken piece is held in place. Thanks to its ultra-compact structure, the material takes in very little water. This means extra protection against weathering such as cold, heat and thermoshock as well as increased shape stability which allows for very close tolerance gaps of just +/-0.5 mm each. As well as the quality of the material, the quality of the supplier was also important to us. Would they be able to delivery 13,000 sqm “in time and quality”?

What impressed you about Cosentino as a supplier?

FS: We went there, together with the developers, the architects and those building the façades, as well as the people from Cosentino in Germany. The production facilities in Spain particularly impressed me. Dekon is produced there at a size of 3,200 mm x 1,440 mm in a continuous process, which means that the plates of one batch have the same quality, texture and colouring. Then follows the individual cutting and post-production work, which in our case means working the edges, mitre cuts, setting the undercut anchors and the clasps. The pre-assembled parts were then stored and delivered to those building the façade piece by piece – this was extremely reliable and in the correct order, which when working with 400 different elements and approximately 15,000 covering parts is a true piece of logistical mastery.

What effect did using Dekton have on the façade?

FS: Dekton looks aesthetically pleasing and is very good functionally. With the low weight of the façade covering, even the subconstruction could be made more simply and lighter compared to the original plans. It is now self-supporting. Using the façade building app in Germany, the aluminium profiles from Wicona were planned with the glazing and insulation, the sun screens and the electrics. Finally, the prefabricated Dekton plates were hung and secured. Each part of the façade is now about one-third lighter than at the beginning of planning. Instead of 1,500 kg, the weight is just 1,000 kg, which made transport and assembly much easier.

Were you able to keep to schedule and within budget?

FS: We had two teams on site, each with three employees. They worked parallel on different parts of the building and crane-operated, placed and assembled the elements in 20-minute intervals – 2,000 elements for about 12,600 sqm of façade in just seven months. It was just like clockwork. In addition, by using Dekton instead of concrete or artificial stone, we were able to reduce the cost by about 20 percent per square metre. The developer is happy since by doing this we kept to budget and schedule.

Mr Scharl, in which situations would you advise planners to take Dekton by Cosentino into consideration in particular?

FS: Dekton should always be considered since it offers a large range of design possibilities and is lighter than stone or concrete. The ultra-compact material is also more resistant and sustainable than glass or sheet metal. What really impressed me was the ability of the company to produce around 13,000 sqm of material with the same quality, colour and texture in less than a week. Not only the production, but also the technical and logistical coordination, as well as the communication with those building the façade and us as the technicians and the architects, was very good and reliable. This is extremely important on a big project like KAP WEST, where planning security in a short time frame makes all the difference and helped all involved do a super job.

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Ingels & Thorsen

Ingels & Thorsen
In Dialogue
Various
The Danish architect Bjarke Ingels (1974), founder of BIG, and the Norwegian Kjetil Thorsen (1958), co-founder of Snøhetta, talk in Pamplona about the importance of landscape in design and architecture.
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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…
 

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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. 
 

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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. 

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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. 

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Álvaro Siza & Vicente Verdú

Álvaro Siza & Vicente Verdú
In Dialogue
Pamplona, España
In the Baluarte Congress Center of Pamplona, the renowned journalist of the newspaper El País, Vicente Verdú, interviews one of the main referents of contemporary architecture: the Portuguese Álvaro Siza.

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.

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©Miguel Galiano

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_

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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…

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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_

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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.

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©Miguel Galiano
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Perrault & Mangado

Perrault & Mangado
In Dialogue
Pamplona, España
Perrault, author of the National Library of France and Madrid’s Caja Mágica, and Mangado, architect of the Spanish Pavilion at Expo Zaragoza 2008, talk at the equestrian center of Ultzama, designed by the latter.

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_

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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_

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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_

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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_

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Jacques Herzog & Emilio Tuñón

Jacques Herzog & Emilio Tuñón
In Dialogue
Caceres, España
The Swiss Pritzker laureate Jacques Herzog talks with the Spanish architect Emilio Tuñón, winner of the Mies van der Rohe Award and author of the Atrio hotel in Cáceres, where the meeting takes place.

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.

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Jacques Herzog & Emilio Tuñón. © Miguel Galiano

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.

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Emilio Tuñón. © Miguel Galiano
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Jacques Herzog. © Miguel Galiano

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_

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Jacques Herzog. © Miguel Galiano
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Jacques Herzog. © Miguel GalianoEmilio Tuñón. © Miguel Galiano

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_

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Jacques Herzog & Emilio Tuñón. © Miguel Galiano
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Jacques Herzog. © Miguel Galiano

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_

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Jacques Herzog & Emilio Tuñón. © Miguel Galiano
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Libeskind & Nieto Sobejano

Libeskind & Nieto Sobejano
In Dialogue
Frankfurt, Alemania
Coinciding with the installation organized by Cosentino, the Alt Oper of Frankfurt was the scene of a dialogue between the Madrid partners Nieto & Sobejano and the Polish-American Libeskind.

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.

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©Miguel Galiano

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!

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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_

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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_

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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.

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Iñaqui Carnicero & Carlos Quintans

Iñaqui Carnicero & Carlos Quintans
In Dialogue
Venecia, Italia
Wrapped by the mighty brick shell of the Spanish Pavilion, the contained and intuitive installation of steel frames, photos, and axonometric drawings provides the backdrop for the conversation.

The Spanish Pavilion, curated by Iñaqui Carnicero (Madrid, 1973) and Carlos Quintáns (Muxía, 1962), has won the Golden Lion to the Best National Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Its title, ‘Unfinished,’ and its central theme, architecture after the crisis, seemed to announce another critical, if not masochistic, analysis of Spanish architecture today, but fortunantely it hasn’t been so. On a shoestring budget Carnicero and Quintáns have managed to highlight the general theme of the Biennale directed by the latest Pritzker Prize laureate Alejandro Aravena – with his emphasis on modest projects, his defense of the social role of architects, and an inevitable focus on Latin America –, but most importantly, they have managed to spread a positive message about Spain, and make it get through: the idea that beyond the critique of excess, architects have adapted to the at first glance unrewarding context of small refurbishments, adaptations, or grafts, without giving up the quality that once seemed to be exclusive to large public buildings.
_x005F_x000D_ Optimism has in this way made its way into the Spanish exhibition, a sober and attractive installation featuring fifty works carried out with a tight budget and an evolutionary purpose, grouped into nine categories that take stock of the recent architectural scene in our country. With the pavilion as backdrop, and still showing undisguised joy after winning the golden statuette, Carnicero and Quintáns talk about the purpose of their exhibition, and about the challenges they had to face to convey an at once critical and hopeful message without falling back on the clichés associated with the crisis.

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Carlos Quintáns (CQ): The truth is that coming to Venice is a beautiful adventure. Of the three biennials Spain takes part in (the Spanish one, the Ibero American one and the Venice Biennale), I think this one is the most intense and stimulating, because it allows to convey the message beyond local frontiers. In this particular edition we were fortunate to have a general coordinator for the three biennials, one who has made the effort of arranging the contents, trying to find the way of offering an original and complementary message in each one of them. _x005F_x000D_
Iñaqui Carnicero (IC): Pachi Mangado has managed to construct a fitting argument for three very different biennials, and we must also mention the role of the Biennale’s director, Alejandro Aravena, who has chosen to share rather than to display his own work, and has invited us all to do the same. Thanks to this we have been able to hear about the problems in each country over the past years, learning a lot in the process. The collective has prevailed over the individual in this exhibition. In all areas. _x005F_x000D_

CQ: The primary focus was to show a collective project, to transform all those sad years into a ray of optimism. This is, I think, what has drawn more attention in our installation: how it shows the potential of so many Spanish architects, of so many works. We wanted the world to discover buildings that we know well, all works of high quality, which in Spain we take for granted. The Venice Biennale had to be a showcase of this effort. _x005F_x000D_ This showcase is a simple structure of galvanized steel frames that take up the space provided by the powerful architecture of the existing pavilion, creating a grid where photographs and plans are placed (one photograph and one axonometric drawing per work). The result is a sort of chaotic cartography that bombards visitors, but also captures their attention. _x005F_x000D_
IC: Many people didn’t understand it at first. They thought we were criticizing the situation, when it was quite the opposite. The selection of photographs, aside from documenting a harsh reality, is filled with optimisim and highly suggestive visions. The images call to action, they are innovative proposals that have managed to discover revealing actions in these architectures._x005F_x000D_

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CQ: At first we feared that handling so many works and projects could produce a complete cacophony with no sense of unity. The challenge was to convey a sense of unity. _x005F_x000D_
IC: Yes, this was the most complicated thing. I remember that the first thing we did was to visit the pavilion in order to establish a dialogue with the existing and a balance between the amount of architecture we had to produce and what was already there. What people understand after visiting the pavilion is that it is a very good building, a space that works as it should, and also, that the exhibition is carried out with very few means. _x005F_x000D_
CQ: It was surprising to hear someone comment that this exhibition had managed to give the building, or the perception of the building, a dignity that in other exhibitions had remained hidden. In our view it was the best container possible for this exhibition. _x005F_x000D_
IC: It is fantastic because it is very versatile. I remember when we decided that we didn’t want a static exhibition, so we brought in the idea of movement in some components, and added the small motor that lifts the whole structure of the photographs. Today, the exhibitions hall is transformed into an impromptu assembly room for debates, talks or roundtables, favoring the exchange of ideas that this biennial encounter promotes. _x005F_x000D_

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CQ The height of the central space is extraordinary. We were lucky to find it completely bare and have the opportunity to discover its possibilities. _x005F_x000D_
IC: This links up with a subject that comes up often of late: the danger of falling on a povera aesthetic, an aesthetic of ruin, on something more banal. At the beginning we wanted to bare the walls to expose the brick, but now, months later, we feel it would have been a mistake, don’t you think?_x005F_x000D_
CQ It would have been a mistake, and a fiction: jeans are best worn out by use, not by trying to make them look used. _x005F_x000D_ Powerful and intuitive thanks to is synthetic and direct character, the exhibition of photographs and drawings might seem a bit succinct, but in fact the information physically presented in the artistic installation is only the tip of the iceberg, and there is actually a huge amount of data and works gathered after an open selection process that can be explored on the pavilion’s website, so there are several reading levels. _x005F_x000D_
IC: We wanted the message to be read at different speeds: some people want a clear message from the beginning, graspable in less than thirty seconds, but others prefer to delve into the works and learn from them. I am quite pleased with the three levels of perception, which begin at the pavilion and end on the website. _x005F_x000D_
CQ There was a lot of information, that is true, and we had to be very generous with that information. That is why we have to analyze how the website has worked over these days, to understand how the exhibition has worked. _x005F_x000D_
IC: There are controversial and tough subjects, perhaps without a clear answer. While visiting the pavilion Rafael Moneo pondered on an issue that had been very important for us from the beginning: finding a format in which all the works are displayed at the same level. We chose a photograph and an axonometric drawing. He wondered to what extent this information could be enough to understand a project, and we on the other hand had not doubt that overall unity was more important than hierarchy. _x005F_x000D_
CQ Exactly, feeling that there was a shared course of action. _x005F_x000D_
IC: We didn’t want to show a specific architect or school, but to convey a message: a positive message, open to our present time and to the complex future ahead. _x005F_x000D_

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