APHASIA IMPERTINENT QUESTIONNAIRE
Question. Rossi or Koolhaas?
Both and many more.
Question. Form or function?
Are we still with dichotomies?
Why, if books continue to be published in which the work of important architects is rigorously analyzed, are blogs like this one visited, where architecture is perhaps more agile but also more superficial?
The second part of the question answers the first.
What is a paralex?
The perfect balance between ingenuity and technology.
Would you have a few drinks with Llàtzer Moix?
Of course, why not?
From an economic point of view, the closest thing you know to a black hole are: the shares of a Spanish bank, the preferred shares of that same bank, submitting to an architectural competition?
With regard to contests, the risk is justifiable if its scope is known. In the case of the preferred companies, most of them were a real scam and no one will go to jail for it.
Faemino and Tired or Peter Sloterdijk.?
Peter sloterdijk
Belén Esteban or Zaha Hadid.
Neither of the two.
To spend an unforgettable night, would you choose: Eva Mendes or Kazuyo Sejima?
With Eva Mendes in a house in Sejima.
For the next one, George Clooney or Le Corbusier?
With Le Corbusier at Clooney’s house.
Ad Reinhardt was looking for a notion of aesthetic purity, in a way a total abstraction that would culminate the modern project, in which art was not contaminated by elements external to its field. This is how he came to make his series of black paintings, made up of several modules of shades barely discernible from each other, where the pictorial emotion arose from the ambiguity of those variations, which had their origin exclusively in the plastic field and not in any narrative or functionality. , for example against cubism that generated the same emotion but from reality, from the reconstruction of the broken figures of the tangible world in the field of painting. Does that search tell you something?
That if both paths are done well are valid.
When he suffers from insomnia to fall asleep immediately he takes: the bible, the latest article by Xavier Monteys, the latest book by Kenneth Frampton, the complete collection of aphasia entries?
Nothing beats the teleshopping.
Who has aged worse: Zumthor, Quetglas, Jujol, Sou Fujimoto…?
We don’t know yet. We assume Fujimoto. Jujol sure not.
Were Caruso St John ever young?
The Young and Emerging labels have us fed up.
If cultural works must always seek originality, what are we fleeing from?
No problem.
Did you wear black?
In gray but what does it matter! That people dress as they want.
Would you enter a contest whose members of the jury do not know?
Of course.
Do you ask your friends to let you know when they are chosen for a jury?
Never.
What architect designed Judit Mascó’s house?
No idea
Would you organize a Big Brother of architects?
No.
Would Mercedes Milá present it?
No.
In one of David Cohn’s usual articles on emptiness, which appeared not long ago in El País, he claimed for Spain a tradition that, in the face of Le Corbusier’s modern excesses, had known how to bet on rigor, which inevitably led today to architects who Instead of being carried away by the spectacular, they knew how to solve with extreme competence, for example, orders for public housing. Is the small the most direct method to achieve the unsubstantial?
The insubstantial has no scale. And the small, by itself, does not establish a method; the return to the origins is often incoherent with the knowledge and technology of the present.
If we live in the society of the spectacle, why is everything so boring?
Everyone decides if they are bored or not. Everything is a matter of making an effort to avoid saturation.
Do you like to be asked questions that do not require question marks?
Hmm, we don’t know. Maybe not?
The anti-iconic is, an oriental religion, a complex geometric figure, a perfect Trojan horse to return architecture to its most reactionary condition?
The anti-iconic is a reaction to excess. and in turn the new icon.
Is there architecture more iconic than that practiced by Rossi’s followers?
We assume that Hadid’s followers have it worse.
If you were an unsuccessful architect, would you become a professor of projects, would you dedicate yourself to curating exhibitions, would you found a blog?
It must be said that the idea of success is the greatest deception of contemporary society. He intends to divide it into good and bad, in winners and losers, in those who succeeded and those who did not. Nothing more false and distorting. Regarding the second part of the question: The idea of the architect only as a “successful” designer is reductionist and absurd. If we want a strong and useful profession, we must expand our sphere of influence. Be it as critics, politicians or teachers. We are all equally important.
According to Žižek: “The fashion for stonewashed jeans, for example, imaginatively resolves class antagonisms by offering a type of garment that is available to both those ‘down’ and ‘up’. The upper strata wear this type of pants in order to appear in solidarity with the popular strata, while the members of the popular strata wear them to appear to be members of the upper strata. Thus, when members of the lower social sectors wear these jeans, the apparently direct coincidence between social status (poverty) and clothing (worn, torn pants) masks a double mediation: they are imitating those who imitate the appearance of an imaginary popular working class… ”. Is there behind the continuous calls for austerity of the present the same banality that once made ripped jeans fashionable?
Definitely! What has been said: in search of a new icon but one that is politically correct. The important thing is that it looks cheap and earthly, not that it really is. In any case, this goes by countries or continents if you like. In our case, the fact of working in two contexts at the same time forces us to define ourselves. Do we sign up for one fashion or the other? What if we better try not to sign up for either of the two? Surely someone can argue that we take the worst of the two.
From that point of view, is the small town the latest fashion in architecture?
Villager, neo-rural, artisanal … in a society based on industrialization and with skyrocketing labor prices …
I would prefer not to do it?
Do what?
If union is force, how many newtons does the collective of architects produce?
Many more than architects believe. We help to build the spaces where we live together with many other people. Questioning the profession is essential but giving up your discipline is not only stupid but also an act of pride. What if dentists or waiters quit their profession due to an identity crisis? Who serves you a cane or takes away your toothache? But of course, as architects we are so cool if we do not solve all the world’s problems at once we feel useless.
That Archigram’s visionary theories have resulted in buildings as pragmatic and possibilistic as those recently produced by Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid or Richard Rogers, do you think it is indicative that the only place for utopia is on paper?
Utopia is essential to keep moving forward. That said trying to bring it to reality is not bad. In our opinion, almost every one of the authors mentioned has at least one building almost as visionary as Archigram’s drawings.
Does it tell you something that the vernacular term begins with seeing and ends with ass?
No.
Who was the last Pritzker winner?
Toyo Ito. We assume that the jury did not come to Barcelona.
And the first?
Before looking for it on the internet: Philip Johnson, after… Philip Johnson, huff saved.
Are blogs, compared to traditional media, with their need to favor not so much quality as quantity – since their income depends on the number of entries visited and not on their content – a clear example of the fruit of the society of entertainment ?
Not necessarily.
It puts more the slope of the Malmö cemetery or the oculus of the Pantheon.
The Oculus of the Pantheon
Why?
Because unfortunately the Malmö cemetery we have not visited yet.
A shadow or two straight lines intersecting in a plane?
The shade of a palapa in the Mexican Pacific with a beer in hand.
At a time of the heyday of minimalism, Baumschlager – Eberle stated: “In a translation from German, architect means the one who arranges things together, not the one who invents them. Through this process of putting things together, a new quality is created, but nothing unique is invented. In the end, the architect’s job is to arrange these things ”. And: “In the office I usually comment with our collaborators that I am not interested in lines; Don’t make lines !; lines do not exist in architecture. Everything is built with a specific material, everything has a certain thickness and weight. ” Matter or concept?
The works that we like have both, but if we have to choose one, we are left with a concept. It is better to see a concept badly materialized, than a material without reason.
When the architect acts as a client of large commercial corporations, who have perfectly studied the operation of their businesses – supermarkets, restaurants, offices – and know better than he how they are to be configured, he is practically limited to dealing with the envelope, since it cannot contribute anything to the spatial configuration / organization. Is dealing with competent technicians a good excuse for the architect to give up the configuration of the space?
No. We don’t like the date and we sense where it comes from. Dealing with competent technicians is wonderful. Not only does it not make you give up spatial settings, it gives you more tools to do so.
Does one found an architecture office as a logical consequence of having had the bad luck of having been employed by another architect?
The important thing is to select well who you work for. We do not have a bad drink. We learned an egg, we had a lot of fun. We live in other cities and we did projects that are very difficult to access. Our current job is indebted to all the people who trained us and the offices where we work were one of them.
Hans Scharoun’s library: A has too many corners, B next question, C taking a trippy from time to time is not bad.
The building is wonderful, but it is also always open, you can enter for free and you do not have to wait for the day of the tour to visit it as your neighbor by the same author. The tour of course is at the time your plane leaves! Due to its program it is the most active building in the complex. Not everything is shapes; buildings are important for what they do.
Madrid or Barcelona?
Both. Go, go here there is no beach … just to touch the balls.
Future or past?
Future.
Does the south exist?
Also the east and the west.
If renders suppose an unnecessary return to superficial questions in architecture, a contempt for its conceptual aspect, why have we spent our lives making models?
Exactly for that.
What do you think of someone who does not read Deleuze because he finds his writing difficult?
That he should give him time and admit him again. It should not be demonized. There are many who quote it and have never read it or do not understand it.
Who designed the access door of the project for the Prado Museum Extension made by Rafael Moneo?
Cristina Iglesias.
What did your husband die of?
It doesn’t matter what he died of. Yes the work you did.
Surely no essay reflects better than “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” by Robert Venturi the ideology of current architecture. Why, if Venturi’s theory is so correct, is his work so flawed?
Good question. Maybe Eisenman has the answer.
If when you were studying you had been explained what it means to be an architect, would you have gotten into this mess?
Without a doubt, but we have been lucky. It is difficult to see the current landscape and understand that our students do not have it all with them. It makes you think about many things outside of the cliché of training another type of professional and so on, yes, but in Europe at this time there is no work for the other type of professional, you don’t have to fool people. There are many things about this training that we like and that do not necessarily have to do with the profession.
Would it devastate the center of Paris?
Not a joke. Modern urbanism is very flawed in many respects and yet there are many schools that continue to teach it. Immaculate Saint Le Corbusier does a lot of damage.
Is it necessary to die before turning 50 to be a talented Spanish architect?
Many people’s work proves otherwise. But we have to say that we don’t believe in the word Talent.
It is part of the nature of art to question its own principles, which makes it a discipline with a clear conceptual component. One of the problems of architecture is not constantly questioning what is architecture?
Surely yes.
Thinking is suspicious?
Not at all.
Debord in his formulation of the theory of drift cited Chombart de Lauwe explaining that “he presents in the same work – to show the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives … an extremely small geographical square” the layout of all the routes carried out in a year by a student from the 16th district, which outlines a reduced triangle, without escapes, in whose corners are the School of Political Sciences, the home of the young woman and that of her piano teacher. In what configures an apparently accurate image of boredom. Is that the best criticism that can be made of functionalism?
Everyday life does not necessarily mean boredom, pure functionalism surely does.
Is style the great enemy of architects? When you think about the way in which many firms collapse into maturity based on repeating learned formulas, one wonders if it is better not to know how to do things?
It is difficult to understand why someone who did his job so well stops doing it in order to do it more times. Perhaps it is a problem of economies of scale or of thinking that doing it more is more useful. We intuit that part of the problem is in the world built around fame. If a scientist leaves his laboratory and goes on tour giving lectures and living off the story with the argument that he is raising funds for his research, they go to the den and the rats in his laboratory die.
It bothers him that the media publishes buildings only by the name of their author.
It bothers me the effects that that has and the media that do it and brag about not doing it.
And to spend an unforgettable night thirty years from now, would I choose: Eva Mendes or Kazuyo Sejima?
Have dinner at home with the two of you. We invited Clooney and toasted Le Corbuiser.
After an hour-long meeting with a client, would you ask permission to go downstairs to buy tobacco and say: I’m coming back now?
I have been fortunate not to run into any heavy clients. Either that, or we are flexible enough to understand your concerns. Let’s hope we don’t have to correct this answer for a couple of years.
Advertise all the buildings you build.
If the question is if we have work “B” or that we do things in which we do not believe for money, the answer is absolutely NO. The bad things of ours that you see out there, according to us, they fit us well,
Hilberseimer believed that the two dominant currents of nineteenth-century modern architecture, the one that viewed style as a matter of how past configurations could be readapted to the present, and the one that understood that these new forms could be invented out of nowhere, were overcome. through the modern project that tied them to the spirit of the present. Today, more than an overcoming of both, this third way seems simply one more alternative. Are you comfortable in any of the three?
There will be a fourth and a fifth way, things will continue to evolve and how good it is.
His biggest disappointment as an architect.
That it is much more difficult to change things than it seems.
Taking into account that man descends from a monkey, does it seem like a logical evolution that architecture tends to be sustainable?
What seems an aberration is that it has ceased to be.
Who do you love more, your son or your last building built?
Anyone who has a child will answer the same … but how they screw up sometimes …
If the reason for art is not to fulfill any function, that of architecture is …
Meet many.
Do you know something more kitsch than covering floors and staircases of contemporary buildings with decorative ceramic tiles?
Surely not, but competing with the ceramic dwarfs is tough.
Esther Ferrer has ever said: “I have never had a special interest in carrying out my projects in a physical space on a large scale, if the model works for me, the work is done. If I can’t do it in a real space, nothing happens. What interests me is the process. ” Do you have architect wood?
There are spaces for everything. In our case, once we try the drug from the built space, it is difficult to disengage.
For what work did Roland Berger and Oliver Wyman become famous in Spain?
We did not know, now that we have looked it up on the internet we are ashamed of our ignorance.
If you were given the opportunity to be the interviewer, what question would you ask?
Are you serious or joking?
If the newscasts were directed by bloggers, would their content consist of a succession of photocopied clippings of the daily press?
Anything would be better than the shame of the current TVE newscasts. An act of incivism and an example that Spain is more of a banana republic than is believed.
Form vs function, matter vs abstraction, context vs concept, regionalism vs spectacle. In architecture, as in other fields, the confrontation between opposing pairs is frequent. Why are the defenders of one of these opposites always those who are most interested in having it prevail? If you feel confident in your ideas, shouldn’t you constantly question them?
We are never sure of our ideas and that is why we like to contrast them.
Which of the above questions do you refuse to answer?
None, some were very long. Chomsky would kill them!
What happened to your bitter controversy with Carlos Arroyo?
It ended with blows.
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