Mateo Arquitectura

Textos Instrumentales. Josep Lluís Mateo

Edition by Albert Ferré
Collection: Arquitectura con Textos. Ed. GG. Barcelona 2007.
ISBN: 978-84-252-2049-4.

A book of articles is, in this case, also a book of projects. As often expressed in the titles of the publications and articles by the author, Josep Lluís Mateo—‘Sentimiento y razón’ (Sentiment and reason, 1982), ‘Solidez gaseosa’ (Vaporous solidity, 1994), Natur und Abstraktion (Nature and abstraction, 1995), Bauen und Denken (Building and thinking, 2002), ‘Naturaleza y artificio’ (Nature and artifice, 2005), etc.—, this is a work in which thought and production, abstraction and the manipulation of reality, exist side by side and complement each other.

The publication of this book comes 25 years after the appointment of Josep Lluís Mateo as editor of Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme, a position that saw him move into the vanguard of disciplinary reflection in Europe, and the production of his first built project. Since then, written reflection and teaching have developed alongside the production of hundreds of thousands of square metres of built work with his practice, MAP Arquitectos. On the basis of these coordinates of theory and practice, the texts written by Mateo in the course of these years manifest the way in which written reflection and criticism constitute a way of approaching practice, and how the possibility of constructing, structuring and giving form to programmes and material is a transcendental step in the construction of knowledge. Thought and construction are, here, superposed episodes in a single thread of professional development.

Adopting a thematic structure, which is often also chronological, the sections into which the following selection of texts is organized set out to trace the construction of a body of thought and the episodes that constitute a way of addressing professional practice; to map the development of his built work by presenting samples of the successive positions adopted by his thought process.
Albert Ferré

‘The limit, seen as a space where different realities come together, is really the contemporary space with which we, particularly my generation of architects, have had to work on numerous occasions: a space drawn out by many realities that simultaneously interact; a space that can be both rural and urban, built and unbuilt. In this case, the limit is a point of articulation, a point drawn tight by the various simultaneous realities acting upon it; this is the space in which contemporary action, construction, reflection and growth take place; it is distinct from the homogenous, constant central space, which, in theory, lacks these tensions.’
Josep Lluís Mateo