ONE MORE WAY OF DOING ARCHITECTURE.

Conversation with Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros.

By: Eduardo Cadaval

In the distance, in the hallway behind the door, a lively chatter begins to be heard interrupted by laughter. As the talkers get closer, the noise is heard with greater intensity: but it is not the voices that are clarified, it is the laughter that remains clear and spontaneous. Finally they knock on the door, on the other side of it are Iñaki and Juan who open it automatically -no doubt those who have rung the bell-, after entering the studio and saying hello, Ábalos and Herreros resume their lively dialogue now surrounded of books, catalogs, music, references, collaborators and artists. They talk between themselves and with them, it is one of their ways of doing architecture: through constant dialogue, an exciting and intense dialogue, without prejudice or moralism, playful and ambiguous. But a dialogue also that they now extend to all of us as part of their architectural work, as an extra element of the feedback they provoke and need, as a means of linking us with two of the most important exponents within the current panorama of Spanish architecture; one more conversation inside that building on Madrid’s Gran Vía, one more inside his way of doing architecture …

One of the aspects that draws attention when one approaches their way of working is to see how large-scale projects are developed by small groups of collaborators. Despite the large number of assignments and competitions carried out by your office, you seem to be reluctant to change this average scale in your study.
What advantages does this scale, this way of working, give them?
—The indisputable advantage that this way of working gives is control, control of the objectives that one sets when making architecture; But it is misleading to say that the studio is a small group of collaborators, that is, what we have is a fairly well-organized infrastructure that allows us to work at wide scales by decentralizing almost everything that is not of purely architectural interest, and We call purely architectural interest, to put it in the most reductive way possible, to everything that has a form and physical presence in space: what interests us is precisely to control those forms and presences, the rest is organized through collaborators with whom We have developed a common lexicon that allows us to work as a team without having to explain each time what our preferences are, our visions of how spaces with different equipment or structural topologies are implemented, etc. To make it clearer, everything that is the work of surveyors, structures, landscaping, etc., is centralized in different studios that collaborate with us permanently – some of them are in Barcelona – and we subcontract everything that are installations to consultations with which we are associated.

It must be said that this collaboration system that we developed a long time ago —through electronic means of communication— has completely modified the possibilities of work, since it is from a technological infrastructure that tasks can really be decentralized.

… does the architect become a coordinator?
—He becomes more than a coordinator, he becomes a director, which is more …

You started talking about “technique” in relation to the “project” when probably no one, or very few people, cared about these aspects, now you have expanded your proposal to other references …
How is this expansion achieved without losing the consistency of the proposal? What is your relation to “technique” now?
—Well, it is very similar to how it was when we proposed this topic at the beginning of our research, only that we think that we have expanded the notion of what the technique of architecture is.

When we started talking about technique, what we understood is that without a good knowledge – I will not say a specialist knowledge because that would be false – of the possibilities that the techniques that are on the market allow us, we can hardly give a coherent exit to everything that our fantasy — to put it simply — can imagine. We believe that there is a direct relationship between fantasy or imagination and technical knowledge, at least when talking about such a pragmatic issue as architecture, perhaps not in other disciplines.

This notion remains exactly the same as when we started talking about technique and when we wrote the book Technique and Architecture ¿?. The clearest difference is that for us the technical questions were then applied to the materiality of the construction of architecture almost exclusively, and today we see that its field of action is extended, first, to many other material practices that have links with the discipline of architecture, and secondly, it also extends to what is the construction process of the project in the office. In other words, the techniques of how to build the project, what we call the project project, has become one of the essential moments: basically what we have been doing is expanding this notion, but not denying it or contradicting it, but expanding it, make it more open from the disciplinary point of view, and also make it more linked to our own subjectivity within the office.

Recently, during a conference at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you redefined yourself as pragmatic architects. Just over 15 years after founding their firm, they still seem to feel comfortable in this category.
What do they find in it? How do they use it?
The encounter with pragmatism, with philosophical neo-pragmatism, so to speak, is an approximation that has been taking place in the last 10 or 12 years, it is a slow matter. What we were finding were words, at first coinciding between the ideas that Richard Rorty explained above all in the categories that he applied in his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, and our own internal methods. Especially at the beginning, these were two words that seemed key to us: one was the idea of ​​redescription, of how to get newness; more than as a kind of inspiration that came from the muses or from some strange place, like a change of lexicons and a different way of combining references, a different way that spoke our present time and not to a historical time — so to speak. On the other hand, the idea of ​​conversation as one of the productive methods, one of the methods where pragmatism is resolved. Pragmatism does not look for truths but credible descriptions or redescriptions of reality, and in that sense our own conversation technique is the basic working technique: Juan and I are, facing each other, and we constantly talk with our collaborators, trying to introduce new ideas in an open dialogue in which more people participate than those who are only involved in the project. References that are brought from buildings sometimes modern, sometimes contemporary, sometimes historical participate; of paintings, exhibitions, artistic activities, material practices, advertising, records … any type of reference is valid, and in these conversations we have always been solving our projects.

From these two coincidences or encounters between what Richard Rorty proposed and what was the breeding ground that was brewing in our study, we began to become more deeply interested in the interests of pragmatism and in our own interests. We understood that it is not by chance that pragmatism, historically, was born to give a certain explanation – that was not of a positivist nature – to the instrumental capacity that man had acquired at the end of the 19th century, especially in the United States, which is where it arose; an ability to completely transform the territory in a very few years and that lacked a theoretical model that would give it meaning, a human meaning; And it is not by chance that it reappears just at a time when, according to many scholars, the technique is changing from a primitive or archaic model – such as the first industrialization – to a model that we are witnessing today, based more on telecommunications and information flows than in the manufacture of heavy objects. Therefore, we understood that if we were interested in the technical and constructive aspects, and if we were witnessing a technological revolution that lacked formal references, it seemed interesting to us to have at least some ideological references that would allow us to address the problems posed to today’s architecture.

Linked in some way to pragmatism, you have used recycling and the juxtaposition of interdisciplinary references to enrich your proposals …
… How do you use it as a creative system?
—The idea of ​​recycling comes to us, as it does to so many people, from the media and the environmental sensitivity that exists today, and we find it interesting because to some extent it delves into the idea of ​​redescription of which we have spoken before . In other words, recycling is, in some way, giving new life to elements whose life-historical cycle is concluded; This is produced by the effect of transformations, manipulations, physical or chemical recombinations that allow artificial life to be breathed into these elements that were dead, and thus allocate them to new contexts. For us to recycle, and specifically recycle “modernity” as that period that is part of our tradition – the place, the space in which we were born and developed as human beings – involves two things: firstly, recognizing that its The cycle is dead, that is, “modernity” ceased to exist a long time ago; secondly, it supposes that it is a material to which we can breathe new life, and in that sense it is how, from our point of view, the idea of ​​recycling can be understood in our architecture, and also not only in our architecture, but in many other aspects that we see in contemporary architectural culture.

On the other hand, the interdisciplinary aspects of our architecture have a broader sense; As we have been finishing objects placed in reality, we have seen that the way in which they were perceived was not purely technical. That is, when we started we had a relatively autistic discourse: we believed that the houses did not speak, that the constructions that were made had a self-referential discourse and that therefore a theoretical body could be created around them that only took into account what was which is part of the technical aspects of the discipline. Once these objects have been built and put into reality, we have understood more and more precisely that this is not the case, that objects, since they have a presence and are placed in front of men and create a medium such as the city – which is a cultural medium—, they emit meaning: they relate in a way to the context, they modify it, they have appearances, they represent, they have character, that is, they have all the attributes of cultural objects; and it is once we have been aware of that reality when we have thought that it was necessary to incorporate and control, from the project processes, those meanings, those characters, those ways of relating to the context, that emit meaning and that seem to us, each time more precisely, an essential part of the project techniques. From there, and also because of our love of art —because despite having had a technical discourse, we have never had an anti-artistic discourse in life— we have been opening up everything that was part of hobbies at first. or the activities that we developed outside the studio, and that we have been integrating with a certain naturalness within our project mechanics.

You even use recycling to exchange and combine some of your ideas and proposals, so it seems that the Madrigal sports car and the Gordillo Study (on very different scales) have, to a large extent, the same spatial qualities …
… Do you recycle some of your spaces and then equip them with a program?

Absolutely. We are clearly working on different motifs that are appropriate in different contexts and simultaneously we are opening the range of possibilities for organizing the space.

Many times we have said that our architecture is not functionalist, that we are not very interested in function – which does not mean that projects do not work well – but our processes of project conception have a certain distance from function and are more based on meaning-making relationships. These processes of creation of meaning give rise to certain forms that in themselves are abstract and a-scalar, and are applied in very different fields and contexts; In other words, if we can recycle certain elements of modernity, which are also in very different contexts and on very different scales, why shouldn’t we be able to do it with our own work. We also think that this operation, which is based on a non-functionalist principle, on the other hand is contextualist, although it is often said that if you work with formal abstract models, they are neither functionalist nor contextualist. But we completely deny the corollary of “not being contextualists”, we believe that our architecture is contextualist even though it has a high degree of formal abstraction, because precisely the formal, spatial or organizational schemes that we use have different fields of action, always with great versatility to adapt to different climatic, technical and cultural circumstances and contexts. There are simply first-degree operations that are self-consistent and have a high power of abstraction — an example of efficiency, simplicity, and economy is the virtually universal inner-core skyscraper topology; however, depending on the cultural or climatic contexts, differentiated skins, depths or conditioning systems are adopted. After the patterns or models of the first rank there are those of the “second” (although we do not like the word at all) level, which serve to specifically characterize each project; There is as much value in them as in the former, we deposit as much intensity in these aspects as we deposit it in the primary formal decisions. That is why we say that this work system perfectly allows us to define ourselves as contextualist.

One of the aspects that they now mentioned was “abstraction.” In his architecture it seems to be loaded with a certain ambiguity, with a “yes and no”, a “no but yes” that enriches his work …
… How do you understand this ambiguity? What do they look for in it?
—In modern times there was a type of quite drastic opposition between what was called “abstraction” and what Worringer characterized as the “Einfuhlug” or “sentimental projection” (this concept appeared in his book Abstraction and sentimental projection translated into Spanish from a brutally manipulative form like Abstraction and Nature). Worringer differentiated two forms of development of the modern project that had precedents in history: on the one hand, those architectures that sought essential schemes, an essentialization of the form in search of processes of abstraction, and on the other those that sought to project subjectivity – like the expressionist and figurative currents. These would give rise to two different systems of approaching formal questions: a search for general schemes or a kind of sentimental projection that affects materiality, that affects ornament, character or the representation that architecture has. For us, the contrast of these two models, of “abstraction” and “sentimental projection”, is a remnant of modernity that should be eliminated, since they are perfectly compatible to a greater or lesser degree. If there is something that differentiates the activity of the contemporary architect from the modern architect, it is to have suppressed those dichotomies that actually have behind a Manichean ethical model of “good” and “bad”, and this elimination has not only occurred in architecture, rather, we have learned it more in contemporary artistic practices than in contemporary architectural practices. Artists like Gerard Righter, for example, are clear in this regard, because although those dichotomies that lead to a single way of understanding art can be of great intensity, they may not help to describe the complexity of the real world experience. . When Righter uses different techniques and is able to have expressionist paintings, figurative paintings, photography, blends, material paintings, etc., he is saying that these dichotomies no longer work.

In this sense, for us there is a very interesting job to do in architecture, which is precisely to abolish these dichotomies, and that is where it can be said that we use ambiguity in a positive way.

 

They spoke of “natural nature” and “artificial nature” … What is the contemporary idea of ​​Nature for you?
—The contemporary idea of ​​Nature is something that is in perfect mutation – like almost all ideas – but it is above all a cultural construction, an idea that is constructed and that each culture perceives differently. Painting, for example, reflects this in a magnificent way through artistic genres, “still lifes”, “still lifes” or landscapes. To each epoch, to each vision and to each projection of culture on nature, there corresponds an aesthetic model and a different compositional system. Currently, in the face of modernity there is a much greater implication of the contemporary subject —and a greater sensitization— about the idea of ​​Nature than that which existed in modernity; At that time it was known that it was necessary, it had a hygienic sense as well as moral or ethical: it was necessary to provide the lower urban classes with certain places of expansion in which they could recreate their minds in direct contact with nature, thinking that nature, in the end , hid a moral model. This is an idea that the American and Olmsted transcendentalists have clearly reflected in their texts and their conception.

That so medicinal and moral relationship has been replaced by an infinitely more sensitive and hedonistic model, of course there is still an ethical-moral vision based on environmental awareness and protection policies that exist today and that were not given ago. twenty or forty years, but on the other hand there is a greater projection of the subject in nature, not as something hygienic or moral but as something hedonistic and relaxed, as an expansion of his own notion of what the city is. We think that nature is becoming, in that sense, a public space of the city, of this contemporary city expanded by the globe, equalizing almost everything; On the other hand, we think that this Nature of which we speak is made of different materials, and that if we do without any of them we will always be talking about a nature that is not the one we know, that of our time, but is a received nature. through history.

For us there are three layers that Nature has: the first is based precisely on the natural materials that have been given to us and that continue to exist (rivers, forests, skies, caves, volcanoes); There is also all that second Nature that is human activity through agriculture or industrialization, and that has modified the territories; finally there is that other invisible nature, which is that of information fluids, which make the way in which we can perceive the natural environment today completely different. These three elements make up an amalgam of different densities and intensities that is the material with which contemporary architecture must express itself and be capable of creating poetic objects. This amalgam is precisely what we have called a hybrid material and that is the basis of many of the projects that we have called “Ecomonumentals”.

They were talking about the idea of ​​Nature in relation to public space, you have made various proposals about this space …
How do you perceive contemporary public space?
—The contemporary public space is many things. We think that there are two types of spaces that are different and that are of greater or lesser interest to the architect: there is certainly a public media space and that surely many companies and politicians have been interested in more than the public space that is physically experienced. Of these two fronts, one is the object of the architect’s work and the other would be more work for his reflection: the media would be a space that is interrelated not only with the physical space but with the project processes that we have, while in space Constructed public, the one that one steps on, is clearly the object of our work. If we think about this second meaning, which is the one that should be of more interest to the contemporary architect, we see that there are changes in social practices that are consolidating more and more, and that they consist both of the rejection – colloquially speaking – of the hierarchical space and institutional space that has been known as public space throughout history – let’s say since the baroque – as in the interest of people in barely defined spaces, where one does not feel the regulating and controlling presence of any institution or hierarchy that want to represent herself. For this reason, natural spaces, everything that is related to what until now has been called “park” and that is increasingly diffuse as a territory, presents the contemporary subject with a true territory of expansion of their capacities for subjectivation and socialization.

We think that this is the public space: a place where one can socialize and expand their subjectivity with absolute freedom. To the extent that this is fulfilled, public space exists, regardless of whether it has been built or not; many times it exists simply on a small path that goes up a mountain two hours from a city in which certain people, sometimes many and sometimes few, strive to walk for a weekend, reaching a true emotional experience, the best they are alone, but it is a form of expression of what public space is

There are some recurring themes within his theoretical investigations, one of them is undoubtedly “The Skyscraper”. You conducted extensive research on these and their influence on the city, which resulted in the book Technical and Architecture in the Contemporary City, and its American version Tower and office that will be published by MITPress in conjunction with Columbia University …
… How did this research influence the projects for the Torre de Algeciras and later on that of Las Palmas? What opportunities does the development of the contemporary tower provide?
Answering the second question: it offers enormous and highly differentiated possibilities depending on the contexts, scales, programs, climates and thousands of other factors. For us, the skyscraper is simply a conquest of modernity that can be reused or recycled in many ways. The conquest consisted, at first, in being able to elevate man to vertical levels hitherto only imagined by the most pictorial or literary fantasies; that suddenly became reality, as did flying.

On the other hand, through the improvement of the air conditioning systems, from the end of the Second World War until the eighties, another revolution has been reached, which is to disconnect man from the facade plan. That is to say, that depths previously considered without habitability conditions, and not only the heights, could grow almost unlimitedly and accommodate most of the activities that are today characteristic of urban life. This means that we find ourselves with the possibility of building in three dimensions with almost no limits to the imagination, which means that we have completely different ways of relating to the natural environment and of generating, in turn, the artificial environment. For us that is, in the most abstract way, the skyscraper and the possibilities it poses.

For years we have been developing these ideas in more or less theoretical projects, taking advantage of competitions, direct commissions, or any type of opportunity that would allow us to advance our research. In the cases of the towers of Algeciras and Las Palmas, as is usual, there are strong limitations of dimensions and program, but both have a common characteristic: understanding the large scale of the tower, or a skyscraper, as the possibility of proceed to a complete redescription of the city or the topographic place in which it is inserted. If the skyscraper in the modern city was more related to the purely urban fabric and was always located, in principle, in the geometric centers of cities, today, however, we have advanced in a redescription of the city that raises this relationship with the Territory, skyscrapers or the most emerging constructions have the function of dialoguing with this new hybrid medium that is the sum of what is built and the place that is framed. Both Algeciras and Las Palmas are redescriptions of the environment in which they are inserted, and are related both to the factory built by man, as well as to the context, to the bay, to the topography, to the Canary Islands volcano system, to all the elements that currently make up the idea of ​​the city in our imagination.

Another recurring theme in his research is “the beach” and “the artificial landscape” …
Do you have the opportunity to work on these issues in the park on the Barcelona coastline?
-Yes. Previously, when talking about public space, we have mentioned the lost paths and perhaps it sounded too romantic, but perhaps it is good now to return to another of the public spaces in which these dichotomies between the natural and the artificial seem completely useless, especially when they can build artificially as is the case of the beach, which is one of the projects in which we are currently involved. The urban beach is a space in which the search for solitude would be chimerical, and what there is is a true public conception of the space based on other experiences, not only on the Spanish coasts, but in those of all the countries that they are tourist destinations. The beach is one of the places where the notion of the public is best developed in contemporary society, to a great extent it is linked to that hedonistic relationship with the sun and water, but also to the nakedness of bodies, to fragility of all individuals that practically total nudity equals them and makes them enter into an infinitely more osmotic relationship with the natural environment. On urban beaches there is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting spaces for socialization in today’s city, just think of Copacabana, Ipanema or “De la Concha” beach, in San Sebastián. Therefore, it should be one of the priority objects in architecture research that is concerned with the notion of the public; If to that we add that Spain is a country whose main industry is tourism and whose raw material is having a wide coastal strip along three different seas, we will understand that this interest is also contextualized, that is, it is a country that has an industry and that must be able to provide a model of public space in this privileged environment, which represents and accommodates the expectations of contemporary society

One of the most important aspects of the coastal project and a recurring theme of its latest proposals, is the treatment of the pavements …
… What is their true potential for you?
It is difficult to answer this question that seems quite simple, but it has to do with a quite phenomenological conception of what architecture is. Before you spoke of our interest in everything that is related to a physical experience of space, as well as our purely intellectual interest in those other public spaces that occur in a medium that has no physical presence or has a virtual presence. The fact that we are interested in physical experiences puts us in a direct relationship with phenomenological conceptions, with the links that occur between subject and object, with the affects that are emitted from one to another and from the other to one; In this sense, it seems to us that one of the most forgotten themes of the theoretical discourses of architecture is that of the identity of the next, of being able to characterize and stimulate these subject-object links from an exploration of the qualities of the next. At this point, the issue of flooring in public space is key, since the understanding of quality is not simply in using expensive or noble materials – which in many cases cannot be – but in being able to characterize them by that other resource. that architecture has had throughout its history, and that it has been fundamental, such as ornament, drawing, texture, all those values ​​that the modern abstraction model tried to eliminate or reduce to a minimum, and that, when they forget those dichotomies of which we spoke before, they offer a fantastic field of expansion of contemporary architecture.

In both the Barcelona project, the Rio de Janeiro project and the Las Palmas project, you have invited the artist Albert Oehlen to collaborate with you; as well as Cristina Iglesias in the FG villa and Peter Halley in the Public Library of Usera …
… How does this collaboration come about, what is the result in the architectural proposal?
—As in all collaborations, sometimes it is more and other times less intense; What is certain is that in all the collaborations that we have proposed there is, despite the stylistic differences, a close proximity between some ideas of our architecture and certain ideas that these artists try to develop: Peter Halley’s revision of abstraction shows us. it looks extremely interesting and extremely similar to ours; the revision of the expressionist clichés in Ohelen brings us very close to that idea of ​​”sentimental projection” of which we spoke earlier; and the phenomenological aspects and the subject-object relationship in Cristina Iglesias keep a certain proximity to our interests in these aspects. In each case we have tried to collaborate with those artists who most interested us and who were closest to our project needs.
Our relationship is exactly the same as that with a structural calculator or a surveyor: we try to define the problem, specify what expectations we have about their work, and we seek to establish a dialogue through the answers they give us. To the extent that these artists are open to this technique, the result is more complete and more attractive; to the extent that they are more closed, the results are scarcer; But in principle our work is based on the same model of conversation that we use for any other technician or specialist with whom we work, an issue that we always mention when we start these collaborations.

Now they were talking about similarities between their work and that of these artists. In this sense, what can the architect learn from the contemporary artist?
—The architect has tended, and continues to tend, to understand art as a canon to which he refers almost systematically through modern masters. Only recently – and the work of Herzog & de Meuron is one of the most interesting examples – has a relationship been proposed that is not of this order (in which there is a canon that illuminates project decisions), but there is a dialogue righ now; and not only is it an immediate dialogue and a fusion that tries to avoid again that background-figure relationship (which also applied modernity in art), but it also seeks a fusion of attitudes and ways of understanding the work between the contemporary artist and the contemporary architect. If we talk about the need to abolish these fund-figure relationships when it is necessary to apply different techniques to the project, or to be able to question the techniques that are applied to each project based on the interests that that project raises, what we are saying is that We are going to look at how contemporary art is evolving, and we are going to understand how that model of artist that is being consolidated today affects the model of architect that we have inherited. In this sense, one of the most profound influences that we have on contemporary art in general, is precisely the change of status of the figure of the architect, the attempt to establish an architect infinitely more open to different forms, to different techniques of expression, to different problems that are a closed casuistry or in perpetual motion, but that conform the interests of each architect and that have a different translation: formal, spatial or technical in each case.

Finally, I would like to return to the initial topic, to the methods. You have spoken of the architect as a creator of methods, of systems. His system seems to have the virtue of working in various fields of architectural production, from theory and practice, to teaching and the dissemination of architectural culture …
… What constitutes the AH system? What is it made of? What is it that weaves it?
—The AH system is constituted by a basic interest in maintaining the notion of architecture, first as a notion linked to the fine arts, as one of the fine arts in itself, and secondly as a discipline that has the responsibility to shape the notions of the public and the private in contemporary society. This would be the common thread, then it diversifies into many ramifications, but if we had to define two themes that were nuclear in our work – and perhaps it could be paradoxical that in order to raise the artistic nature of contemporary architecture we have reflected so much on contemporary technique, although it is perfectly coherent – if we had to reduce it to just two elements, we would talk about this.

From our original training to today, we have seen thousands of ways to attack this very classic notion that architecture is one of the fine arts and we think that if we did not have this motivation to create a new notion of beauty we would not be architects; If this were not really a core notion, we would have abandoned this profession many years ago, because there are many other areas in which this idea can be developed. Therefore we defend it at all costs. We believe that the architect is basically condemned to seek a redefinition of the idea of ​​beauty in each historical moment —if you want to be an architect—, we also think that this notion of beauty cannot be disassociated from a certain political position in the broadest sense. of the word, in the etymological sense in which the polis is confused with the city. Any notion of beauty that can be developed today would necessarily have to be linked to a certain conception of what the city is and the way of life of men in it, and the freest way of life of men in it. In that sense, these are the reasons that have attracted us the most and that also explain our interest in pedagogy, in research and in so many other branches in which architecture materializes, perhaps with less consistency than the physical spaces built. , but perhaps with greater perseverance, greater intensity.

Insisting on this, they seem to use this system in the project of building an architect …
… What is the architect that you want to build?
Somehow it is answered very abstractly in the approach to the practical development of what the architect is. This construction of assembly or production systems for projects is the way in which these abstract notions that we mentioned in the previous point are deployed. The architect must be very aware of what his techniques are, what his practices are and how much certain techniques are related to certain results. To the extent that he is aware of this relationship between the techniques that he applies to himself and the greater or lesser extent of the results that he obtains through them, he becomes a manufacturer of systems, of operating systems, and there he becomes become a cook: one who knows at all times or who is capable of intuiting or experimenting with different combinations and producing the new.

Iñaki Abalos and Juan Herreros have worked in association since 1984; both are Full Professors of Projects at the Madrid School of Architecture, where they were also Construction Professors during the 1984-1988 period. They are authors of “Le Corbusier. Skyscrapers”, “Technique and Architecture in the Contemporary City” (English edition will be published by MITPress) and “Natural-Artificial”. His work, awarded on different occasions and included in a monograph published by Gustavo Gili, has been reviewed by specialized magazines and has been part of individual and group exhibitions such as the one organized by MoMA under the slogan “Light Construction” (New York, 1995) . In 1997 “Areas of Impunity” was published, which compiles texts, works and projects up to that date. They have participated in numerous international courses and seminars, having been named in 1995 “Buell Book Fellows” and “Visiting Teachers” at Columbia University, New York, and in 1998 “Diploma Unit Masters” at the Architectural Association in London, as well as “Professeurs Invites” at the EPF of Architecture of Lausanne. They are partners and coordinators for Spain of LMI (International Multimedia League), an organization that aims to contribute to the simplification and intensification of artistic practices.
Published in:
Bitacora 8. Mexico. Pages 22-31 Oct-Dec 2002. Domus 878. extract: Pages 75 and 78- FEB 2005.