Architects do not make buildings.

Eduardo Cadaval

Architects don’t make buildings. We just draw them. Buildings are actually built thanks to a larger collective effort involving many disciplines and many more people who do not always receive the recognition they deserve.

The project architects – those of us in charge of the design chapter – could not do our work if it were not for the contribution of many other people who make it possible; However, when a project is recognized, the authorship tends to be credited individually to the person who designed it when it should be collectively credited to the group that made it possible.

We have recently finished a building on Córdoba street in the Roma neighborhood, in Mexico City, for which we are trying not to be exclusively credited with its creation, but it is not easy to achieve it. The media and broadcasting channels have very clearly established the categories that should receive credits. In a primordial place is who designed it, but not who allowed it to become a reality. In the case of this building we did the project, but we did not have the idea to do it, nor the courage to set up a startup and ask people to entrust their savings to build a fund to rescue cataloged buildings. We also did not locate an abandoned house or negotiate the purchase so that the operation could be viable and allow to densify an area of ​​the city in which it is desirable for this to happen. We do not deal with the authorities, nor do we process permits. We also did not choose who we thought were the right architects to do the project, nor did we approve that the building had no parking.

Builders deserve a separate chapter. In the Roma building, -as in any other-, the final quality depended on them. Builders are the ones who transform our drawings into built spaces. Teams of masons, construction foremen, plumbers or electricians. Craftsmen commonly coordinated by another architect in whose hands the constructive suitability of the building remains. Anyone who has been near a construction site knows that the success or failure of any project passes through the hands of the builder. If this is good, their contributions are invaluable and improve the project by providing technical or even spatial solutions that daily contact with the work provides them.

It does not mean that the design, the “how”, is not important, but the “what”, the building as a whole, will always be more important. In the case of the Córdoba street project, we consider that the “how” is undoubtedly important, in particular because it is inserted in an urban context of enormous value and because it rescues a house of historical value. But the most important thing is without a doubt that the building exists, that buildings are made without parking and that people are willing to live in them; that there are buildings configured with units of different sizes so that they can be occupied in a more diverse way, and that the central areas are densified.

Architects help shape collective aspirations, but no more. Merits are always plural and on many occasions we intend to appropriate them exclusively. Architecture awards – turned into sad marketing tools for some and business for others – distort reality by individually rewarding a collective effort, rewarding only the design rather than a building as a whole. It does not matter if it is poorly constructed, if no one uses it, or if it is nonsense from start to finish.

 

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Texto en Portavoz.