EVERY WORK OF ABALOS AND HERREROS IS A SKYSCRAPER.

SANFORD KWINTER: As strange as it might seem, I have thought of Ábalos and Herreros as in some way the most American of architects, firstly because of their fascination with the skyscraper and the universalisation of its principles. We even see this on the Mediterranean coast (Algeciras) and in the middle of Basque country (Vitoria, San Sebastián), where the ethics and technical apparatus of the Chicago and Manhattan skyscraper are raised to a new value. In addition, they have also been known for espousing this most American of philosophies known as pragmatism. I find all of this insane. It made no sense to me whatsoever until we had an accidental meeting in Chicago. We ran into each other at breakfast and they gave me some books, and when I read them I was extremely impressed.
I’m not an American critic, even though some people might think I am. But I’m going to try to be an American critic today so I can really understand this American work. I’m going to work through what I think is the system of Ábalos and Herreros, and why it’s so important. I first discovered and had contact with their work around 1998/99, and I had an immediate feeling of astonishment and attraction. To remind you, ’98 and ’99 were the years of the ascendancy of what we called in America, European neo-modernism. It was generally a derogatory term, at least by those who used it as part of an ideological position taking. But the ascendancy of this school, meaning the brilliance of what was being produced as neo-modernism, was in fact beginning to take on what I sometimes call the American School. Many of you know this as this kind of computer generated, fluid, free form shapes and forms, and the generally biological arguments that support it. The reason this neo-modernism was starting to become a problem in America is that it was beginning to take on a kind of intellectualism that it never had before. That’s to say that it had been conspicuously absent in its first wave, which was mostly Swiss and Dutch in origin. Based on my experiences in Europe, for a long time it represented a stubborn and unjust handicap vis-à-vis the American School. The Americans always seemed intimidating and overly confident to the Europeans, both in the conceptual foundations and in their prolificness, even though the design itself was generally not very persuasive and sometimes even immature. As a theorist there is no doubt that I was a partisan and member of the American School, which was why my attraction to the work of Ábalos and Herreros seemed so strange to me. Their work had the luminous rectalinearity of the mostly European idiom of the time that was much too often associated with the lack of argument and a lack of raison-d’être, other than the sort of fin de siècle atmospherics that were associated with the exuberance of “EU-ness”, new Europe and the new look of the new Europe. In England they called it New Labour. “New” was the big thing in Europe, and this architecture always struck me as having an unfortunate quality of mindless “boosterism”. That’s not the case here, something very intense is happening.

The work of Ábalos and Herreros represents and unapologetic neo-modernism. They speak explicitly of modernism’s second phase. This phase represents both the death of classical early-century modernism, and also its second and truer rising. They even cite Jürgen Habermas’s slogan about the unfinished modern project. They fix the second phase of modernism in the mid-century, more specifically around World War II. I see everything changing around World War II, not because of its political results, but because of the revolution in knowledge that it represents. In many ways their book develops this in a very fresh way. It doesn’t necessarily rely on all these systems of knowledge that developed in the wartime, but in fact a whole set of technical developments that reach back to the late 19th century. They do not distinguish in words, but they strongly distinguish in concepts between historical modernism of the pre-war era and the more foundational historical processes of modernity. The object of architecture, they seem to claim using a technical word from Richard Rorty, the American pragmatist philosopher, is to re-describe contemporary society. But the re-description is basically to see contemporary society as gripped by the processes of modernisation. They don’t use this word, but that’s exactly what they’re talking about continually. This is what they always seem to be trying to encounter and force to the surface in their work. They seem very clear that early century Modernism must die because Modernity is an unfinished project. Its progress destroys everything in its path, even its own products, even the things it invented and brought into the world. This is why what I will still call neo-modernism (even though I hate the term) in their hands becomes a historically rooted concept necessary for work today. Neo-modernism is the re-description of the present as distinct from Modernism and only incidentally continuous with it.
I am aware of a very serious danger especially as an American critic, and the only way to avoid it is to confront it head on. The danger is to conflate neo-modernism with what in America was often called post-modernism. These two concepts have absolutely nothing to do with one another. The platitudinous works to which the term post-modernism refers, represent the decadent phase of early modernism. This is a modernism corrupted by what is sometimes called the inward turn; a modernism degenerated into a self-conscious appraisal and parody of its own apparatus. That’s basically what post-modernism is: a kind of “naval gazing”. It becomes a parade of pure ironies and neurotic retrospection, passing themselves off as critique. None of this is at play in this development I identify as neo-modernism and in the ideology developed by Ábalos and Herreros. Neo-modernism, however, refers to the invisible but unstoppable progress of economic and technical rationality as it perpetually tears through and remakes our world. I use the word rationality because, apart from meaning everything rational, it comes from the sociologist of religions and the greatest thinker about the relationship between technical economic knowledge and the evolution of social life, Max Weber, the German sociologist. This is the optic through which I am able to understand the work of Ábalos and Herreros.
If architecture for Ábalos and Herreros represents a re-description of the present, or rather a re-description of the birth of the present, this explains why the term city lies at the core of every one of their works. They are quite obviously interested less in form, which is a current American obsession, than in structure. In structure they find the entire sociology of contemporary life. All you have to do is to be able to read it, and their book Tower and office is in fact nothing but a sustained argument developing that relationship. I think there is nothing more exciting or romantic than to see architecture as essentially reflecting and telling the whole story of our social life and behaviour.
In society as well as in their work, the skyscraper serves an emblematic case. They seem to say that it is the purist expression of modern social organisation based on the principles of rational administration and regulation. This is essentially what makes modern society modern: everything from our system of laws and codes of behaviour, to the filing system (according to Weber) in which we store and with which we organise the data that we generate. What is singular about their work is the clarity and directness, or complete lack of affectation, with which they are able to relate simple construction logic of a particular building, its technical apparatus, to its status as a piece of social equipment. I like the fact that in their work the bottom line of architecture is that it is a piece of social equipment. The historical and existential status that they give to the skyscraper is totally unprecedented in architecture, surpassing even OMA, MVRDV and even SOM. They say in one of their books that the section of the skyscraper rather than the plan of the city has become the determining element for understanding the contemporary topological condition of the world. The city is not replaced by the section of the skyscraper, but the city has become the section of the skyscraper. The re-effication of this structure, which also has a history, is an excruciatingly beautiful sociological insight, but also an incredible battle cry for doing architecture and design. The key to the work of Ábalos and Herreros is two fold. On one hand it is without any doubt to be found in the historical transition from the mid-century, bureaucratically organised, Taylorist, curtain wall skyscraper (I use the word bureaucratic in the literal sense, in that it has to do with the organisation of bureaus, desks and filing cabinets, and the things we put in them), to the contemporary one dominated by what I would call thermodynamic organisation: the metabolic control of energy, information, machine processes and even nature. It is not the desk that drives organisation, but the scenario. The second key to their work can be related to the idea of the Aufhebung that forms the core of their interpretation of history. By Aufhebung I refer to the Hegelian concept of raising up while cancelling, and the post-war evolution of modernisation processes that destroy modernism while at the same time elevating its logic to a new status. It’s the conflict of Modernism’s emancipation always meeting the limits of rationality. Their work can only be understood in terms of the way it manages this conflict of regimes. In every case in their work I see the management or representation of a drama, the emergence of a new flexibility and free form. These are always shown to be bounded, limited, modified and driven by rationalism. Even though rationalism has taken on some extraordinary new disguises in the current world, we should never be mistaken that it is still rationalisation. I believe this is what they mean both by a new naturalism, which is a confounding concept in this context, and also their concept of pragmatism. In a sense these are two words for the same thing.
I don’t think anyone has ever made such a deep and foundational argument about skyscrapers and modern, contemporary space as they have. It is in this hypertrophic argument that the genius of their work lies. The skyscraper, they argue, remains a quintessential piece of public and social equipment. It is often said that the age of the skyscraper is over, but they say, “No, it has not even begun”. They argue that the skyscraper is our fate. Today it represents less of a figure, however, and more of an environment, less a structure and more a utility, as they are increasingly calling it today in the Anglo-Saxon world and especially in the United States. Utilities like water, for example, are part of an infrastructure that is always there and you depend on them without thinking about them. People like IBM these days are talking about raising information processing to the status where it becomes a utility, which is ubiquitous and available everywhere but utterly invisible. Like a Trojan horse, the skyscraper has begun to smuggle this into the contemporary world. The skyscraper is no longer an autonomous centripetal condenser, but rather a node within a much broader system of social dispersion. In its apparent density, the skyscraper is actually one of the main agents making possible the dispersion of our social world and the structures in which it takes place. The spatial transformation that the skyscraper effectuates still represents the rationalisation of human action in the deepest sense. But now, it supports a new kind of action and a new type of subject. If the advent of modern bureaucratic techniques in the late 19th century could be called the social equivalent of the advent of the machine and controlled combustion in the industrial revolution (the industrial revolution was basically driven by the generalisation and ubiquitisation of the machine, controlled combustion and mobile energy), the skyscraper today represents the purest image that we have of what Weber called “a precision instrument of formal, technical and political rationality”. The late or neo-modern skyscraper is the social counterpart to the advent of numericalisation and automatic processes of activity. Everything is alluded to in a more prosaic way by the information revolution, but it’s important to be more specific and ask ourselves: “What are the new regimes of machines and the relationships between these machines that the skyscraper is organising?” The classic age of the skyscraper is the age of the cooperation. Today’s skyscrapers belong to a regime of machines and environments made possible by the marriage of computing and communications. This is what the American sociologist Daniel Bell back in the early 1960s called “compunications”, in order to merge these two words. They are spatially and technically generic. The new skyscrapers have virtually removed all friction from their organisation. The removal of obstacles literally means the removal of structure and its exportation to the outside, but also the incorporation of these new spatial logics that give pragmatic effectiveness to these new spaces, which seem to have no qualities whatsoever. Ábalos and Herreros seem to argue that the generic quality is their principle virtue, because it makes possible their infinite adaptability and flexibility (here you can see the term of what they call post-Fordism). But they are saturated with a ubiquity of services: everything from air management to data feeds, even to natural parks within these huge buildings. They argue that skyscrapers are not simply mirrors of our city, but are in fact the city.
This is the context within which the work of Ábalos and Herreros must be seen. It’s the only one that allows me to look at some of the ambiguities in their work, especially in relation to contemporary social reality. Every work of Ábalos and Herreros is a skyscraper, consciously and deliberately re-describing a form type, as Le Corbusier called it, as an extension of contemporary space and the contemporary topological condition found and epitomised in the skyscraper. They inject the skyscraper machine into every building. This is a very strange thing to do, and yet it seems to me that they would never deny it. The key to the work is to discover the tension between what Max Weber used to call the Faustian aspect of human beings: the wild, free and spontaneous aspects of nature, human existence and the machinery of rationality that has been put in place to free us in our collective lives. That’s why the relationship with nature is so violent in their work, and so insisted upon, but so apparently at odds with the rationality, clarity and rhetoric of modernism and neo-modernism.
I would like to ask about the studied neutrality in their work as far as position taking is concerned. Is that enough and is that a political, ethical or aesthetic process? How do you understand it?

ÁBALOS: If I could answer in a word I would say that it’s an aesthetic process. For us the notion of pragmatism is just a creative tool. What I like about Richard Rorty’s books, especially the one about contingency irony and solidarity, his most well known and published book, is that he was not obsessed with philosophical coherency or putting his book in a relationship with other books of his colleagues. The main thing for him was to look for a serious relationship between philosophy and literature. This was what captured my attention. The use of the word re-description, which we still use and has been a key word for us,can be understood as a creative process that is based on imitation. What I mean is that if you are re-describing something, you are reusing it in a different context. This means that you are continuously stablising a conversation with the work of others, be it the history of the typology of skyscrapers, or whatever. The important thing, as Rorty pointed out and we tried to focus on, is not which elements you use, but how you re-contextualise them. This is a very interesting way to work as an architect nowadays, because first of all you avoid the necessity to be original. It’s that simple. You don’t compete in this stupid battle about originality.
The second thing is that it relates you very closely with the experience of architecture. All the experiences you have when you visit a city are still in your memory for a long time afterwards. They are instruments that make part of your system. The third thing is that it allows you to go outside the discipline of architecture, as Richard Rorty points out. You can use elements from architecture as you can use elements from newspapers, sociology, artists and so on So re-description for us is a way to maintain a pragmatic condition for architecture and be able to communicate directly with the present, but also with memory and history. Is this connectivity of re-description what has driven to the appearance of nature in our work.

KWINTER:
I noticed yesterday how many times you insisted that the grass we were looking at was totally unnatural. It was critical that I mustn’t mistake it for nature. So your naturalism is an unnatural naturalism.

ÁBALOS: I think the use of natural elements in our architecture is a necessity in establishing more open dialogues. Nature was historically the exact opposite to city. Cultural and political values, and the materials we use, have returned to a social discussion about the construction of the notion of nature in our lives. This discussion allows us to re-describe nature from the point of view of an architect. What is interesting about nature? How can we establish a dialogue that isn’t naïve or as simple as some of the discussions we hear on TV? We are interested in linking these three elements: re-description, history of architecture and nature.

KWINTER: And yet you use the word naturalism, but at the same time you have never stopped insisting that the fundamental problem today for living as well as architecture is to understand what the terms and conditions are of the technical issues of the intrusion in our lives of technics, and that architecture is a way of working this out and even perhaps of redeploying and re-describing them. So the technical aspect is one you never stop insisting on, and yet you seem to talk about a naturalism where you begin to see nature as part of the technical world. This is clearly true when you talk about ecologically advanced organisations, because one important aspect is actually using nature to do work for us. They include it in buildings and landscapes precisely in order to modify and regulate relationships that we couldn’t even do with machines.

ÁBALOS:Modern architects thought of nature and industrial techniques as opposite worlds. Culture and nature in modern times were completely opposite concepts. Nowadays we know that being and becoming natural is probably the most artificial process. When we talk about nature and technique in the same way, it is because we think this is one of the main ways to underline the different conditions we have in respect to modern times and architects. Now we are all aware that the wind, sun and water, every material or immaterial element, is much more important than the module or the structure or all the things that were wonderful for modern architects. This doesn’t mean that we can’t use all the knowledge we have inherited. The history of the skyscraper orthe notion of rationalism are really useful. We are now able to reinterpret them and drive them to other kinds of values and symbols, because it might be said that a monumental condition is hidden in this discussion. The skyscraper always has had a latent idea of monumentality. We can redescribe the notion of monumentality in a close relationship with natural elements, used as part of our techniques, to produce new entities.

KWINTER: If anything is going on in the American scene right now, it’s an attempt to create a new ethic in architecture that is being called pragmatism. Nobody has outlined or made a case for it, but many people are trying to do this, and you’re at the centre of it. What is this all about, and what is at stake? It’s clearly orientated against something. The architects who are advocating it generally used books, writing, thinking and theory to create the positions from which they now work and speak, but they are now also essentially disowning theory. It’s a very primitive pragmatism.
Suddenly, there have been a great number of exchanges taking place in journals and magazines. I find it difficult to understand. Sometimes it seems like a neo-Neanderthalism and sometimes it’s clear that they’re trying to achieve a new synthesis. There is a lot happening in this regard at Harvard, UCLA and Princeton, for example.

ABALOS: Analytical thinking has been dominant for decades in the States. Students of architecture think about how rational and coherent the processes must be forgetting too frequently many other aspects, including the project in itself Coherency has been an incredible obsession. Academics in the States were dominated by these analytical methods and they were loosing contact with society and becoming more and more isolated. I think that people who have been nourished on these methods are reacting and trying to re-establish a kind of conversation with society. That’s why pragmatism is now becoming the thing.

KWINTER: You hypothesise that the active organisation of space around us, or what you call the temporary topological condition, is something that deeply influences our lives, including our creative processes. Architecture offers us a possibility for engaging, perhaps changing and illuminating the character of the forces and processes. Is this still important in your work, or do you assume that it is operating invisibly?

ÁBALOS: It is a passive tool, a reference that is very useful because it can be shared and discussed, a kind of object of knowledge like a file. But it is not invisible When we go to construction material fares, we try to understand what an invention is underlining and what direction it is going in. So for us this is a very important part of our work, and a very visible one but it is not decisive. What has become more interesting is to try to understand what dialogues can be established through the manipulation of this tools with
the irrational part of the design process in order to produce beauty, contemporary beauty

KWINTER: But you have mentioned the idea of beauty. What could be further from the regime of rationalism than that? But you said it was at the centre of your work, and I’ve noticed that it’s a word you’re not really afraid of. We have talked about the different approaches to beauty and the different ways of understanding it. One of these was the physicist’s notion of beauty in simplicity and clarity: the simplest formulation that can explain the greatest amount of reality. So what is beauty for you?

ÁBALOS: When a really simple formula is discovered, it is always described as “elegant.” This is an interesting definition of what beauty can be if you don’t have the mystics of expressionism and you’re seriously concerned with technical evolution. The obsession with finding something synthetic and elegant is probably the main thing driving the way you make decisions. It is a definition of beauty that comes from the technical world more than from the artistic world, and we find interesting to apply it to architecture
The natural attraction to beauty drives directly to the need for collection and the most important thing in a collection is what you don’t include: these two moments are the basis of architecture.

KWINTER: I’m guessing you wouldn’t have said that ten years ago, however.

ÁBALOS: Absolutely not.

KWINTER: What we have here is somebody in his middle phase. It’s an unstable and precarious moment because it is more about a transition. You are in the process of understanding what the vocation of making consists of. On some level you have not completely abandoned your role in the world; it’s not a completely private thing. If we look at the writer Sebald, who has become very popular among architects in the United States, he has a style of writing that has never been seen before. His book Austerlitz is a strange, miscellaneous panorama of fragments and personal seaming together, but what happens is that they begin to accumulate. In virtually his entire book he is walking along the seashore in England seeing and taking photos of things, and in the end what he has produced is incredibly powerful social and political literature. It’s really just an accumulation of personal observations and feelings, and it’s entirely autobiographical and entirely structureless. In the end you have this intense picture of life at the end of the 20th century. It’s obvious to me that you’re in this kind of transitional phase where the directness of the gaze at the social world is no longer as clear as it once was. So in fact these questions have not been very pleasant for you today.

ÁBALOS: Writing a book is a very time consuming activity. Almost everyone who has written something has the same sensation: once you see it published it becomes something that no longer belongs to you. In the case of Tower and Office it has taken more than a decade to return what we were dealing with twenty years ago. It was an interesting exercise, to confront it with our actual position. But even if I find it difficult to find the clarity that we maybe had in the past, all these rational aspects that compose the core of the book are still active in our recent work. Maybe they now have become the infrastructure of our method of work, an infrastructure which determines a certain style.

KWINTER: What are your thoughts today about style? Assuming that you have been categorised for a time as a minimalist and then as a social architect, how do you feel about the style that you continue to work in? What does it mean now that your work has a completely different focus?

ÁBALOS: Style is a forbidden word in architecture, but it doesn’t happen in other activities like literature. I feel very proud every time someone says that I have a ‘style’ writing. It’s a problem where critics of architecture have driven style in architecture. Every project has it’s own grammar and rhythm, which is the same kind of consistency that writing has. It’s very important to define the rules of every project in stylistic terms. Look at this pavilion of Mies in Barcelona, where we are having this discussion, it is just a pure exercise on style. We don’t need more words, don’t you think?