One of the aspects that catches the eye when one approaches your work is to see how large-scale projects are developed by small groups of collaborators. Despite the huge number of commissions and competitions undertaken by your office, you appear to resist changing the medium scale of your studio.

—The main advantage there is in working with no more than a dozen architects or students in the office is a control of the issues one addresses when one makes architecture. But it’s misleading to say that the studio is a small group of collaborators. What we have is a quite organized infrastructure that allows us to work on a wide range of scales in accordance with decentralizing what isn’t purely architectonic, and we call “purely architectonic”, to put it in the most reductive possible way, everything that has form and physical presence in space. This doesn’t mean that the structural or energy aspects seem secondary to us, quite the opposite in fact. What interests us is making use of the best specialists when it comes to controlling those aspects, and in order to do this we’ve taken our time until finding people with whom we’ve developed a common vocabulary enabling us to work in a team without having to explain what our preferences are each time, what are our visions of how to implement projects with different components or parallel researches.

You started off speaking of “technique” in relation to the “project” when probably nobody, or hardly anybody, was interested in such things, and now you’ve extended your remark to other references.
How does one arrive at this amplification without forgoing the consistency of the idea? What is your relationship to “technique” now?

-When we began speaking of technique, what we meant is that without an adequate knowledge -not a specialist knowledge- of the possibilities of the media that are on the market, it’s hard for us to find a coherent outlet for all that our fantasy -to put it in the simplest possible way- can conceive. There’s a direct relationship between fantasy and technical knowledge, at least when one speaks of such a pragmatic issue as architecture; maybe other disciplines are more open.
This notion is still exactly the same as when we began speaking of technique and when we wrote the book Técnica y Arquitectura [Technique and Architecture]. The most obvious difference is that for us technical issues, at the time, were almost exclusively applied to the materiality of building architecture, and now we see that its field of action is wider, firstly in relation to many other material practices that have links with the discipline of architecture and can be incorporated within it, and secondly to what the process is of building the project. That’s to say, that the techniques of how to build the project -what we call the project of the project- has become one of the moments we consider to be decisive. Basically, what we’ve been doing is expanding this notion, not negating or contradicting it, but expanding it, making it more open from the disciplinary point of view, and also making it more linked to our own subjectivity.

Recently, during a paper you gave at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you redefined yourselves as pragmatic architects. Some fifteen years after having founded your practice you still feel comfortable in this category.

What do you see in it? How do you use it?

- The encounter with pragmatism -with philosophical neo-pragmatism, to put it another way- is a rapprochement that has gradually come about over the last ten or twelve years; it’s a slow process. What we found early on were words that coincided between the ideas that Richard Rorty, more than anyone else, explained in his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and our own methods. This meant, especially at the beginning, two words we took to be crucial: one was the idea of re-description, of how newness came about; rather than as a kind of inspiration that would emerge in some strange place, as a change of vocabularies and a different way of combining references, of addressing our present time, and not some historical time. Pragmatism doesn’t seek truth, but credible descriptions or re-descriptions of reality, and in that sense our own technique of conversation -this is the other Rorty word- is the technical basis of work. In our studio we’re sitting, one opposite the other, talking between ourselves and with our collaborators, trying to establish the essential features of the project, the rules of the game. It’s a process in which there are also many hours of silence, of reading and of drawing, in which abundant references participate that are put on the table: of sometimes modern, sometimes contemporary, sometimes historical buildings; of paintings, exhibitions, artistic activities, material practices, advertising. With these materials we construct a system that seeks to identify the best way of intervening on each occasion. It’s via these conversations or re-descriptions that we’ve gradually resolved our projects.
Starting out from these two coincidences or encounters between what Richard Rorty was proposing and what the culture medium was that was bubbling away in our studio, we came to realize that it’s no accident if, historically, pragmatism was born to provide a certain explanation -which wasn’t positivist in kind- of the instrumental ability man had acquired at the end of the 19th century, especially in the United States, when in a very short space of time an ability emerges for transforming the territory, one which lacks a theoretical model that would give it meaning, a human meaning for such changes. Neither is it an accident that an interest in pragmatism reappears at the precise moment technique is changing from a primitive or archaic model -as is the first wave of industrialization- to the current evolved model based more on telecommunications and the flows of information than on the fabrication of weighty objects. If we are witnessing a technological revolution which lacks formal references, at least we ought to have some ideological referents that enable us to address the issues confronting today’s architecture. We grasped that what interested us about pragmatism was, then, something more profound: its attention towards certain procedural aspects, the way of doing things, as a place of reflection more fertile than the things in themselves, and this is a central question through which we’ve integrated other methods, scales and work issues.

Bound up somehow with pragmatism, you’ve utilized recycling and the juxtaposing of interdisciplinary references to enrich your schemes.
How do you use it as a creative system?

—Recycling consists in giving new life to something whose life-historical cycle is over. This is produced through transformations, manipulations, physical or chemical re-combinations that allow artificial life to be breathed into what was already dead, and thus to destine it for new contexts. For us recycling, and in concrete terms recycling “Modernism” [modernidad] as that period which forms part of our tradition -the locus, the space in which we were born and have developed as human beings-, presupposes two things: one, recognizing that its cycle is dead, that “Modernism” ceased to exist some time ago; two, it presupposes that it’s a material we can breathe new life into, and in that sense it’s necessary to think of it as a material that can be submitted to processes of transformation that are often distanced from the purely disciplinary.
This notion of recycling is also linked to other, more biographical, aspects: as we’ve been completing various works, we’ve been seeing that the way in which they were perceived wasn’t purely technical. If when we began we had a relatively autistic discourse -we thought that things didn’t speak, that constructed buildings had a self-referential discourse, and that a theoretical corpus could therefore be created around them that only took the technical aspects of the discipline into account-, once these objects were built and placed in the real world, with time, we understood that it isn’t like that, that they have presence and appearance, that they represent something, that they have character, that they’re positioned in relation to people, creating an environment like the city -a cultural environment- by emitting meaning, having a rapport with the context, modifying it; that, finally, they have all the attributes of cultural objects. And as soon as we were aware of that reality we thought it was necessary to incorporate and control those aspects as an essential part of the techniques of the project. From that point on, and also due to our fondness for art -because despite having had a technicist discourse, we’ve never had an anti-artistic discourse-, we’ve been opening up everything that, early on, formed part of the interests, tastes and activities we were developing outside the studio, integrating these with a certain naturalness within our projectural mechanics, to the point of finding that the manipulation and recombination of decontextualized elements can produce coherent systems with enormous performative capacity.

-We’ve said many times that our architecture isn’t functionalist, that function doesn’t interest us much - which is not to say that the buildings don’t function well, that’s all part of the job- . Nevertheless our procedures for conceiving projects mark a certain distance with regard to function and are based more on the relations of creating meaning. These procedures for creating meaning give way to certain recurring forms that are abstract and non-scalar in themselves, and are applied in very different fields and contexts. In fact we think that this way of operating, based on a non-functionalist starting point, is contextualist, although it’s often said that working with abstract formal models is just the opposite of contextualism; nevertheless the formal, spatial or organizational schemas we use have different fields of actuation, they have versatility in order to adapt to different climactic, technical and cultural circumstances and contexts. There are merely first-degree operations that are coherent in themselves and that have a high capacity of abstraction -an example of efficiency, simplicity and economy is the practically universal typology of skyscrapers with an inner core-, and other, “second-degree” ones that define themselves according to cultural or climactic contexts by adopting differentiated skins, depths or systems of qualification. These “second-degree” features, which serve to specifically characterize each project, have as much value as the first; we place as much confidence in them as in the primary formal decisions.

Uno de los aspectos que ahora mencionaban era “la abstracción”. En su arquitectura ésta parece estar cargada de cierta ambigüedad, de un “sí y no”, del “no pero sí” que enriquece su obra…
… ¿Cómo entienden esta ambigüedad? ¿Qué buscan en ella?

—Worringer diferenciaba dos formas de desarrollo del proyecto moderno que tenían precedentes en la historia: por un lado, aquellas arquitecturas que buscaban los esquemas esenciales, una esencialización de la forma en busca de procesos de abstracción, y, por otro, las que pretendían proyectar la subjetividad - como las corrientes expresionistas y figurativas-. Ambas darían lugar a dos sistemas diferentes de abordar las cuestiones formales: una búsqueda de esquemas generales o una especie de proyección sentimental que afecta a la materialidad, que afecta al ornamento, al carácter o a la representación de la arquitectura. Para nosotros, la contraposición de estos dos modelos, el de “abstracción” y el de “proyección sentimental”, es un resto de modernidad que es conveniente eliminar. Si algo diferencia la actividad del arquitecto contemporáneo respecto del moderno es el descreimiento en tales oposiciones que en realidad tienen detrás un modelo ético maniqueo de “lo bueno” y “lo malo”. Esta eliminación sólo recientemente se está dando en la arquitectura, ha sido precedida por el
í mpetu con que lo acometieron hace años el resto de las prácticas artísticas contemporáneas. En este sentido, abolir esas dicotomías en un trabajo pendiente para consumar la reinserción de la arquitectura en las corrientes culturales más activas y es con esa intención que utilizamos de una forma intencionada y positiva la ambigüedad.

One of the aspects you were mentioning just now was “abstraction”. In your architecture this is seemingly imbued with a certain ambiguity, of a “yes and no”, of the “no but yes” that enriches your work.
How do you understand this ambiguity? What do you look for in it?

—Worringer differentiated between two forms of development of the modern project with precedents in history: on the one hand, those architectures that look towards essential schemes, an essentializing of form in search of processes of abstraction, and on the other, those that seek to project subjectivity -such as Expressionist and figurative trends-. Both would give rise to two different systems for tackling formal questions: a search for general schemes or a kind of empathy (or “emotional projection”) that affects the outward appearance, that affects the ornamentation, character or representation of architecture. For us, the contrasting of these two models, that of “abstraction” and that of “empathy”, is a leftover from Modernism which is best eliminated. If there’s something that differentiates the contemporary from the modern architect it’s the lack of belief in such oppositions, oppositions that in fact have behind them a Manichean ethical model of “the good” and “the bad”. This elimination isn’t just occurring in architecture, it can even be argued that it’s been more emphatic in other contemporary artistic practices than in the architectural one. In that sense, for us there’s an interesting task to be undertaken in architecture, which is precisely to do away with those dichotomies, and it’s here that you can say that we use ambiguity in a positive manner.

Some of your projects would be inexplicable without the landscape they’re located in: the recycling plant as one more mountain in the plateau to the southeast of Madrid, the abstract and chameleonic Retiro Gymnastics Pavilion, or the environmental education center in Tenerife planted on the horizon like the Osborne bull. In that sense, these are all objects in the landscape, objects with the landscape...

... Eco-monuments, then?

-For us entering into a dialogue with the landscape has been one of the most important qualitative leaps in our way of making architecture. It’s when we’ve thought about the relationship our architecture establishes with nature -and for nature, read “natural nature” and “artificial nature”, something indistinct right now-, that we’ve become aware that this model of oppositions between “the abstract” and “empathy” lacks meaning. There are architectures that define their links or dialogues with the environment around them better, with the context in the widest sense, via processes of abstraction and contrast. There’s also a huge area, not of mimetic or organic integration, but of dialogue between supposedly artificial and supposedly natural elements, leading to hybridization effects being created in which it would be hard to delineate the boundary where the architecture ends and the landscape begins. These effects are interesting because they presuppose a transcending of that basic aesthetic model of Modernism: the figure/ground relationship. It’s when we’re working with relationships whose main aim is to abolish that kind of contrast, that we think we’re closer to arriving at a redefinition of the monumental in architecture, something we’ve called “Eco-monumentality”, to use a sufficiently violent and provocative word, yet one whose aim is to demonstrate the urgent need to find an aesthetic definition that might integrate the values of contemporary society within the architecture, and do this by distancing itself from modern aesthetic principles.

You were speaking of “natural nature” and “artificial nature”...
What’s the contemporary idea of Nature as far as you’re concerned?

-The idea of Nature is, and always has been, a cultural construct, something that’s continually mutating, an idea that’s constructed and that each culture perceives in a different way. Once again painting reflects this in exemplary form through the evolution of genres, be they “still lives” (natures mortes) or landscapes. To each era, to each vision and to each projection of culture on nature there corresponds an aesthetic model and a different compositional system. Right now there’s a greater involvement of the subject over and above the idea of Nature than the one that existed in Modernism; the hygienist meaning which, for instance, The Athens Letter gave to nature concealed a moral model of a simplicity that today is insulting. Thus, if this vision survives, it does so by revising its ethical content, now based on environmental awareness and protective policies than weren’t around twenty years ago, even. But there are other ways of thinking the interaction between the categories of the natural and the artificial that interest us more, categories based on the way of perceiving the physical environment we’ve inherited as well as on the ways of using it. The projection of the subject in nature is today an expansion of this subject’s particular notion of a city. Nature is coming back more and more the public space characteristic of the city, of this contemporary city that is expanding throughout the globe, making everything equal. On the other hand, this Nature we spoke of is made up of different materials, and if we dispense with one of them we’ll be speaking of a nature that isn’t the one we know, that of our own time, but rather a nature received through history.
In that respect, we work on three different levels: the first is based precisely on the natural materials that have been handed down to us, and which continue to exist. The rivers, fields, woods, skies, caverns and volcanoes are constructed of them. Another, second, Nature exists, the one produced by human activity via agriculture and industrialization, which has modified the territory. In the Modernist imaginary these two activities used to appear as oppositions, nature and machine. Today they form a single landscape, the landscape of the modernity we’ve inherited. Lastly, there exists that other invisible nature of flows of information, which render the form in which we can now perceive the natural environment completely different. These three elements constitute an amalgam of different densities and intensities which is the material with which contemporary architecture must find self-expression and be capable of creating poetic objects. This amalgam is precisely the one that goes to form those hybrid materials we speak of, and the latter form the basis of many of the projects we’ve called “eco-monumental”.


You spoke of the idea of Nature in relation to public space, and you’ve created different proposals to do with this space.
How do you see contemporary public space?

-Contemporary public space is constructed in very different ways: there’s a public space that’s physically experienced, of course, but there also exists another mediated kind that’s undoubtedly interested many companies and politicians more than the first. Of these two aspects, the first is an object of the architect’s work and the other would be, instead, an object of his thinking, something linked to design processes and which offers clues to understanding how the notion of the public sphere is organized within contemporary culture. If we consider the physical, non-mediated, experience of the public sphere, we observe that it constitutes almost the only recourse that remains to us for experiencing that so classic, and today so embattled, notion that is individual freedom. It’s in this sense that, for some time now, we’ve been using the phrase “areas of impunity,” a phrase that attempts to express the changes in the practices of socialization. These consist in both the rebuffing -speaking colloquially- of a traditional public space that’s hierarchicized and institutional, and in the growing regard for barely defined situations in which the presence goes unnoticed of any instrument of collective regulation that seeks to be self-representative. For this reason, natural enclaves -everything that’s related to what has hitherto been called a “park”, and which is increasingly more diffuse-, posit a territory of expansion to the contemporary subject for his or her capacities of subjectivization and socialization.
This could be a definition of what public space seeks to be today: a place for individual use in which the non-punitive expression of subjectivity serves precisely as a socializing instrument. To the degree in which this is achieved, public space exists, independently of whether it’s been constructed or not. A patch of empty ground in the outskirts, a beach or a little footpath that goes up to a mountain two hours away from a city are areas in which increasing numbers of people, alone or in company, strive to have a genuine emotional experience. It may seem contradictory, but we think that this experience, even if it’s intimate and particular, is the best manifestation of the public sphere. The public sphere in a hyper-connected society also resides, and increasingly so, in respecting the right to solitude and to nothingness, in making the enormous collective effort of preserving spaces without program, without the hallmarks of consumerist logic. And observe that this doesn’t exist in a mediated context: this, too, is significant.

There are certain recurring themes within your theoretical researches; one of these is undoubtedly “The Skyscraper”. You undertook a wide-ranging investigation of these, and of their influence on the city, which resulted in the book Técnica y Arquitectura en la ciudad Contemporánea, and its American version Tower and Office, which is to be published by the MIT Press in conjunction with Columbia University...
How did this investigation influence the projects of the Algeciras Tower and later the skyscraper in Las Palmas? What opportunities does the development of the contemporary skyscraper offer?

-The skyscraper is a conquest of Modernism that demands to be recycled. The simple and powerful idea of raising man and his things to heights hitherto only imagined in pictorial or literary fantasies was suddenly converted into reality, as also was flight.
Furthermore, through the perfecting of air-conditioning systems from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s another revolution has come about, which is that of detaching man from the facade plane. We are faced, then, with built depths and heights once considered to be non-viable, and which are at the disposition of architects for housing most of the activities that are typical of urban life today. This means that we are faced with the possibility of building in three dimensions, with almost no limits to the imagination, which presupposes that we have completely different ways of relating ourselves to the overall environment and of generating, in turn, the artificial environment.
The towers in Algeciras and Las Palmas there are, as is usually the case, huge limitations as to size and program, but both share a common characteristic: that of understanding the large-scale as the possibility of proceeding towards a complete re-description of the city and of the topographical location in which they are inserted. If the skyscraper in the modern city was related to the purely urban tissue and was situated, in principle, in the centers of cities, skyscrapers or more protuberant buildings today have the function of dialoguing with that new, hybrid environment which is the sum of the built and the location in which it is framed, creating a rapport with both the urban fabric and the topography, its bays and gateways, the geographical variations of its landscape, with the volcanic system of Gran Canaria and the Straits of Gibraltar; with, in short, all the elements that right now make up the “City” idea in our imaginary.

Another of the recurring themes in your researches is “the beach” and “the artificial landscape.”
Have you had a chance to explore these in the coastal park in Barcelona?

-Yes. Before, when speaking of public space, we mentioned remote footpaths and perhaps this sounded too romantic, but maybe now it’s good to go back to another of the public spaces in which these dichotomies between the natural and the artificial seem completely irrelevant, especially when they can be constructed artificially, as is the case of the beach, which is one of the projects we’re currently involved in. The urban beach is a space in which the search for solitude would be chimerical, and what there is is a collective celebration of the body in relation to the climate and the sea. The beach is one of the places where the notion of the public sphere in contemporary society is best developed, a notion linked to that hedonist rapport with the sun and the water, and to the nakedness of bodies, the fragility of all those individuals rendered equal by a nudity that causes them to enter into an osmotic relationship with the natural environment. On urban beaches one comes across, without a shadow of doubt, one of the most interesting spaces of socialization that exists in the contemporary city: just think of Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo or San Sebastián. This involves, then, a privileged object of observation for any investigation in architecture that concerns itself with the notion of the public sphere. If we add to this that Spain is a country whose main industry is tourism, whose raw material is a wide coastal fringe facing three different seas, we’ll understand that this interest is also contextualized for our environment and its marketing. The park is also a highly artificial construct in which the buildings and amenities that have to be created play as important a role as the natural species, the paths or the topography, with which they often overlap. Working simultaneously with the landscape and the architecture is how one understands the complementariness of scales and the interest of a hybrid conception of the architect’s work better. And the results are undoubtedly richer, because it’s precisely this hybridization one of the most important aspects of the moment we’re living through.

One of the more important aspects of the coastal project and a recurring theme in your recent schemes is the handling of the ground surfaces, the paving...
...What is the genuine potential of these for you two?

-One of the more overlooked issues within theoretical discourses about architecture is that of the identity of the near at hand, of the tools and kinds of knowledge that render us capable of distinguishing and stimulating these subject/object links from an exploration of the qualities of the near at hand. On that score the issue of ground surfaces in public space is crucial, since the inclusion of quality does not reside in just utilizing expensive or fine materials -which in many instances you can’t-, but in being capable of lending character to these through that other resource architecture has had throughout its history, and which has been fundamental, namely ornament, pattern and texture, everything the Modernist model of abstraction tried to do away with or reduce to a minimum, and which, once such dichotomies are forgotten, offer a fantastic field of expansion for contemporary architecture. If we intervene in such strong and aggressive environments as those of Rio or Barcelona, it seems to us that constructing delicate carpets with local references is an invitation to use and to perceive those spaces as landscapes worthy of being contemplated, an invitation to construct a new gaze.

In both the Barcelona and the Rio project, and in the Las Palmas one, you’ve invited the artist Albert Oehlen to collaborate with you; plus you invited Cristina Iglesias in the FG villa and Peter Halley in the Usera Public Library...
...How does this collaboration work out? What’s the end result in the architectural scheme?

-.In every instance we’ve tried to collaborate with those artists who most interested us and who were closest to our planning needs: the revision of abstraction that Peter Halley undertakes seems interesting to us and extremely close to our own; the revision of Expressionist clichés in Oehlen brings us close to that idea of “empathy” cited above; and the phenomenological and subject/object aspects in Cristina Iglesias have a certain closeness to our own interests in these aspects
Similar mention could be made of the photographers whose take on things we see as relating to what we produce. None of them work, in principle, under any pressure to publish their work in a given way, but by doing it as part of their ongoing activity, of the construction of their oeuvre or their biography.
The collaboration is based on the same model of conversation we use for any other technician or specialist we work with, an issue we always mention when we begin these collaborations: we try and define the problem, specify what are the expectations we have of their work, and we attempt to go beyond these by establishing a dialogue based on the replies they give us. In all these cases we’ve proceeded from the premise of breaking with any differentiation between their work and ours. This involves fabricating a product that is genuinely architectonic, which blends with the architecture, not an object for contemplating autonomously. Depending on the extent to which they’re open to this technique, the result is more complete and more attractive; depending on the extent to which they’re more closed, the results are always more meager, whether they be artists, photographers or engineers.

You were speaking just now of similarities between your work and that of these artists.
What can the architect learn from the contemporary artist in that respect?

-The architect has tended, and goes on doing so, to understand art in an historicist way, as a canon that is almost systematically identified with the modern masters. Only recently -and the work of Herzog & De Meuron is one of the more interesting examples- has a relationship been proposed that isn’t of this order, in which there’s a dialogue that can only come about through transposing the attitudes and the ways of understanding the work of the contemporary artist to architecture. Canonic attitudes led to collaborations that until very recently were based exclusively on the figure/ground contrast, on the major autonomy of art and architecture, each one in its own place and with its own function. If we say that it’s necessary to abolish those figure/ground relationships when we apply different techniques to the project, or to be capable of questioning the techniques of each project according to the interests the latter puts forward, what we’re saying is that vis-à-vis contemporary art it’s opportune to understand how the model of the artist which is being consolidated right now affects the model of the architect that we’ve inherited. In that sense, one of the more useful influences is in relation to the statutory change of the figure of the architect, to the attempt to establish an architect more open to different forms, to different techniques of expression, to different problems that no longer function as a fixed casuistry to which one remains faithful, but in perpetual motion, helping to shape the particular interests of each person at each moment, and which in each case have a different expression: formal, spatial or technical.

Finally, I’d like to return to the initial theme, to methods. You’ve spoken of the architect as a creator of methods, of systems. Your system appears to have the virtue of working in different areas of architectonic production, from theory and practice to teaching and the spreading of architectural culture.
What constitutes the AH system? What’s is made of? What binds it together?

-The AH system consists of a basic interest in sustaining architecture, firstly as an activity linked to artistic practices, as one of the fine arts in itself, and secondly as a discipline that has the responsibility to give form to notions of the public and the private sphere in contemporary society. This would be the connecting thread that is then diversified in many ramifications, but if we had to define two themes that were central to our work in any of its manifestations, if we had to reduce it to only two elements, we would speak of these. Perhaps it’s contradictory not to mention here the issue of techniques, although for us it’s perfectly coherent that in order to propose the artistic nature of architecture we’ve reflected on contemporary technique so much.
From the years of our training up until the present we’ve witnessed successive ways of attacking this highly classical posture, architecture as one of the fine arts, and we’ve always considered that if we didn’t have this motivation to create a new notion of beauty we wouldn’t be architects; we’d have abandoned architecture or shifted to other fields in which this idea can be developed with fewer problems. For that reason we defend it to the death. We believe that the architect is basically condemned to seek a redefinition of the idea of beauty at each historical moment -if he wants to be an architect- without cutting himself off from a certain political position, in the widest sense of the term, in that etymological sense in which the polis is at one with the city. Any notion of beauty that might be developed today would necessarily have to be linked to a certain conception of what the city and the freest form of life of the people in it is. In that respect, these are the motives that have most attracted us and which also explain our interest in teaching, research and many other branches in which architecture is materialized, perhaps with less consistency than in built physical spaces, but in any event with perseverance and intensity.
One could ask oneself a final question in relation to this position: the question of what beauty is for. And we’d only know how to respond with a phrase of Juan Muñoz’s, to which we wholeheartedly subscribe: “for expanding the limits of the world.”

 

 Interview by Eduardo Cadaval