Josep Lluís Mateo MAP Architects
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Conversation
between Iñaki Ábalos and José Luis Mateo
< B A C K Barcelona, 17 September 2002 IA: I wanted to begin by asking about your working method, to examine and find out the way that architects really work, not the way that is presented to society, which is often overly artificial. (…) M: (…) The first moment, when nothing exists, is more closely related to ideas. You haven’t got anything and you have to imagine, to produce, to “invent” something. (…) Recent competitions —after a long and hard learning process— have followed a dynamic that’s always very similar: we analyse the interlocutor, as if we were out hunting. Before we shoot, we observe the animal, how he moves, where he’s going to go, so that at the end we fire just a single bullet. This observation and accumulation of materials often brings my collaborators to the point of despair, as they can see how time’s passing and the project isn’t advancing. I look at it from the outside, indifferently. These are introspective beginnings that give way to frenetic activity when the situation condenses at the end and the project emerges. At this point, we produce various types of material: diagrams that summarise in visual form the fundamental issues. For example, in Haarlem, the relationships with the land and the existing building; in Chemnitz, the building-tree metaphor (Bau-Baum in German); in Lille, a kind of zoning… Then come the conceptual models, but with the idea of volume. In other words, the organisational structure takes corporeal shape. In my Works, there’s a clear sculptural urge. (…) In the second phase, everything needs to be adapted to the customs and norms: this can at times be a long period, but I don’t see it as being too laborious and find it relatively peaceful. If you’ve got the support of a shared prior idea. The most dramatic moment is the third period —the construction, the physics and the materiality— a moment I find very hard, very complex, very arduous and which I dread because it demands proximity, control, strategic capacity, skilled people, organisation and discipline. (…) IA: (…) We give generic and complex descriptions to ensure that there are sufficient resources on the day, and when you get into the thick of it and you have to establish greater formal precision, we go back to the design and often make decisions that imply changes on site. I don’t know if you work like that. M: (…) Our projects are increasingly resolved using specific inventions that require actions that are also specific. For example, to define the skin of a building, life-size prototypes are required. That’s what we did with the homes in Borneo and it proved very useful. We’ve done it again with the Forum 2004 and the bank at Chemnitz, where we are designing a sandwich panel of alabaster and glass that we’re going to patent. In all these projects, we have come across this kind of encounter with almost artisanal technique, and not just as a making of decisions on assembly. IA: (…) Perhaps you would agree that we are seeing a growing polarisation between two types of architecture: one that is useful for building square metres according to modern canons (…) and another to be presented to society. M: The modern world is unquestionably tending towards a split, towards the production of a vast mass of pure construction amidst which there are a few islands of what we might call architecture. I have always believed that our role should be to expand the territory of architecture in the shapeless mass of the real, rather than to cynically accept to some degree or other our exquisite marginalisation. IA: Is there room to insist on housing as a design issue? M: (…) There’s not much room for manoeuvre for mass housing in Spain. I’ve built my best housing in Holland; the homes in The Hague and above all those in Borneo are the result of a much more attractive social and economic climate, a more positive situation as far as property development is concerned. I’m still interested in the spatial idea of the house in the Borneo project, as an open space from which the specialist areas emerge vertically. I’m still interested in its relationship with the space —the water and the sky— as well. IA: (…) In them (your memories of projects) and in your explanation of your methodology —and here I’m going to act as if I were your psychiatrist— I was surprised to find that the most constant feature is the reading of the place, and even though I don’t believe that your architecture in itself has any radical contextualist urge, it does nevertheless constantly strive to establish synergies with the place. (…) M: (…) I’m interested to see places not just in terms of their physical presence, but also the consistency of their energy. In the case of the Ascona-Locarno project, I was very interested in a river that ran through the valley, with all its associated fluids, the water and the wind. Depending on the position of the building, it interrupted these flows or allowed them to continue on their way. (…) Many of my projects are closely related to nature, not in a literal or formal sense but in an essential sense. In the case of Mallorca, I was intrigued by the rocks, the mountains, the sea and the wind, but I was not in the least bit interested in the surrounding architecture, an architecture that is not only repugnant but which reveals how dire it is when you contrast it with nature. (…) IA: (…) Now we’re looking at the city face on and in motion. Before, everything was fixed and this vision even influenced our way of life. M: I believe that we are now taking another approach. We understand the city as a landscape, as a kind of territory with things, as a landscape in the ordinary meaning of the term. I’m interested in cities like São Paolo, where you’re aware of the presence of nature in the city’s interior, this mix, as it were, between the built and the not built. One of my favourites streets in Barcelona is the top part of Balmes, a street that moves like a river and which still has that relationship with the old existing flow. Many of the streets in the Eixample in Barcelona are based on the movement of the water flowing underneath. The contemporary city is not so very different from this vision of the energy of the landscape. (…) IA: When you talk about the difficult of the third phase of the building process, the aspect that you term pragmatism or dirty realism seems to be an open strategy (…) M: In the most traditional sense of the word, I have not built urban projects but I have operated in this somewhat peripheral world. You talk of pragmatism or dirty realism, but I think they are two very different things. I consider myself to be a kind of semi-inventor of the term “dirty realism” in architecture through my recent activity with Quaderns. I remember having discovered it in the early Eighties via the British journal Granta, which focussed on the literature of “dirty realism” in a number of issues, which I read with a sense of genuine shock as the concept corresponded to something that I had intuited at the time and which interested me (though I didn’t still didn’t know it at the time), that kind of raising of the banal to the status of the monumental. It was also related to something that had constituted another shock in my childhood and youth, which was the Neorealist movement in film. (…) Dirty realism was an important moment for me, though less so now. I’ve always tried to find lateral paths, to avoid looking directly at the sun, a sun that blinds, but instead to navigate indirectly. That’s what dirty realism was, picking up that which nobody wanted and turning it into something fundamental, indispensable. It’s also a typical intellectual and creative strategy. IA: (…) There’s a kind of paradox: the way the city is understood, which is what lay behind Quaderns, which you led, is now taking material shape in Barcelona, and undoubtedly more ambitiously than anywhere else in the world. Nevertheless, even though you have settled here and you have a certain link with this new Barcelona, you have developed professionally in a way that is very remote from the city. This kind of divergence is a paradox. M: The proposition of Quaderns arose in relation to the end of post-modernism, the end of Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi and all that, and it put forward, more or less consciously, ways out of the earlier situation. I believe that this proposal has been a total success, not just in Barcelona but throughout the world. What we suggested 20 years ago —authors nobody knew, ideas nobody had heard of, architects and works— have become the driving force, are at the pure centre of the architectural debate. I say this without any kind of presumptuousness. Ninety percent of the leading figures on the stage today were taken up, promoted or proposed through that publishing and intellectual venture. (…) IA: Talking of education. I have always been impressed by the manner of your teaching, an experience that we have shared on several occasions, because to my mind your model of a teacher is old though very effective. (…) I don’t know if you’re thinking of any special technique to be put into practice at the ETH in Zurich. M: I am very keen to take the pedagogical stage, to consider teaching in a very theatrical way, like a set with a story that the students don’t always know. In Zurich, we are preparing a kind of plot, a kind of screenplay, in which there will be a series of stories each day. The teacher opens a trap between the student’s feet so that he plummets suddenly in. The idea is not to give the student a sense of security but to remove it. The teacher is the one who, in a relatively planned way, confronts someone with a problem that is beyond them. When you’ve managed to strip away all their knowledge, their routines, their securities, you open the trap and the student falls in. Knowledge occurs at that authentic moment, it is here that the student learns, where the leap of knowledge is made. The rest is nothing more than repetition, like the rolling of the drums that accompanies the lottery draw, movement that never moves on. The best thing the student has (almost all students throughout the entire world) is enthusiasm, energy. Teachers must introduce awareness without reducing that, because the exciting adventure of knowledge demands enthusiasm and passion. IA: (…) I’d like to know whether there’s any concept on the way reality is changing that might gives us clues as to how architecture might alter. M: (…) In addition to the traditions of the place, I have always backed European culture, a culture that is being built and which has certain architectural possibilities. Furthermore, we are in the throes of the discourse of globalisation. This has affected, and will affect even more, the practice of architecture. I believe that the Spanish architecture of our maestros belongs to another time, another epoch. It’s already very archaic. These are people who truly lived in another world. We are having to deal with the phenomenon of globalisation more and more. Twenty years ago, I backed an idea of Europe as a possibility, an idea which in part is true, because architecture plays a role in some places and in some countries in Europe. (…) As far as we are concerned, architecture is at the centre of the tension in the economy, money, ambition, power and so on, to the extent that in order to make something with all of this, you have to aim at the centre, otherwise you’re left way out on the fringes, and that’s something the system does not tolerate at all well. As an architect, you either build a lot or you do nothing. At the present time, it’s pretty well unimaginable to think of an architect constructing small or medium-sized works with a small structure; you either have a well organised and very powerful structure, and you build (a lot), or you do nothing. There are, with very few exceptions, no intermediate positions. Within these symptoms of change, this minimalist discourse, this essential reductionism that has influenced us so much that it is difficult to see how we might escape it, it is difficult for it to remain an emotive language of communication, for it not to be total trivialisation already. Reduction as the sole mechanism of communication is beginning to be oppressive. IA: (…) What kind of projects would you like to work on? M: (…) I don’t want themes, I want conditions. (…) The best project in the world can finish you off, depending on the conditions. The Olympic opportunities in Barcelona managed to finish off almost the entire generation of architects that constructed them. |
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