 tonight's very special lecture. It's special in many ways. First, it's the first in-person open house lecture we've had since fall 2019. And yeah, I know. And second, it's really a privilege to have with us our very own Anna Pujener to present the work of her practice, as digital acceleration, innovation and disruption across all dimensions of work and life make a deep impact across architecture and the built environment. Few architectural practices have carved as particular an alternative a path as that of my through the firm's unique typological investigations, material explorations and the collaborative structure of their office. The practice has shown us the possibility of new non-conforming built environments that can shape a more equal and fair society. Founded in 2012 in Barcelona, Mayo is part of a generation of Spanish architects. I like to think of them as a stealth but powerful Renaissance who emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 global financial crisis. Spain was particularly impacted and found its crisis embodied not by the devastating impact of the home ownership mortgage crisis as in the US, but by the starky texture phenomena of the early 2000s, which gave Spain a post billbow effect in the form of projects, such as the giant parks designed by Santiago Calatrava, or the endless forever under construction Galicia Museum by the city of culture by Peter Eisenman. Pugano's generation crystallized for the field its specific context, position and forms of practice at the 2016 Venice Biennale, where the Spanish pavilion in which Mayo was featured was awarded the Golden Lion. For Mayo in particular, this moment brought into focus the ways in which the practice redefined notions such as civic engagement through the design process, for example, with their project for a new public square in Barcelona, or their 110 rooms housing building completed in 2016 also in Barcelona, and which defined a new housing apology that undoes normative ideas about domesticity, programmatic boundaries and spatial, which are often boundaries which are often gendered and or generational hierarchies. Since then it's been exciting to watch my was influenced growing working now with Barcelona municipal housing authority to help shape projects and policies that address more deliberately issues of social justice and work against long standing biases that are built into existing typologies and programs. I heard Steven Berg say, change the world through housing. And in fact, I feel like that is very much what Maya and Anna have been doing. Recently, Pugano's office has won a number of competitions, including for 40 units social housing building for Barcelona's Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management in Spain, now under construction. The practice is also collaborating on a new urban housing master plan for the government of Aguascalientes in Mexico, and has 18 projects in development, including a co-housing building, a rural hotel, a monastery, five houses, and two pavilions, as well as an exhibition design here in New York. It's a lot and it's very exciting. Maya has won numerous international awards and the work has been featured extensively across publications such as Architectural de Aujourd'hui, Architectural Review, A Plus U, AV Monographs, Detailed Domus, Harvard Design Magazine and Plot, amongst others. Their work has been exhibited at Matadero, the Design Museum in London, the Royal Academy of Arts, also in London. I had this architecture form in Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, amongst other. The practice is currently featured as part of the exhibition, The Fabricated Landscape, created by Raymond Ryan at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Finally, and as importantly, Anna Pugener has been an invaluable thought leader here at the school. Beloved teacher and wonderful colleague welcoming the first year architecture students through her brilliant reimagining of Core One, which she coordinates and often ushering them out into the world through her memorable advanced studios in the spring. We're so lucky to count Anna amongst our faculty at the school and are so excited to hear her present the work of her practice Mario this evening. Please join me in welcoming Anna Pugener. Hello, everyone. I have to confess I'm very nervous. First in person lecture since a long time. Thank you, Dina and Drows for the kind introduction. So yes, I'm Anna Pugener and I'm here today on behalf of my own and architectural offices that I co-founded in 2012 alongside Maria Cherneco, Alfredo Lérida, Guillermo Lopez who are listening and all hope they are listening. They will join us later for the Q&A and it's true as Dina and Drows frame it, our office cannot be understood without the global crisis as we emerge after it in 2012. I want to express my gratitude for giving me the opportunity to share Mario's work here today with you. And for me it's very special because I consider Gis up my home and it has been my home in these last years. So I'm very happy to see friends and colleagues and to share the work with you. I'm also particularly thankful to be part of the dance lecture series. It's such a special day that it has the open house which is a day for us to celebrate, to show the school. And not only I want to thank you, not only I want to thank Dina and Drows for the kind invitation but also Laila our director of public programs as well for her support. Thank you. So let's just start. In the last years we have seen how digital technologies are transforming our lives and our environments. As recently described by Paul Bebreciado in an article published in our forum, very interesting one, totally recommended. Today we are moving from a written society to a civil society, from an organic society to a digital society, from an industrial economy to an immaterial economy. And all these changes are affecting the limits of our houses and their natures and those are shifting. Online platforms not only allow people to work from home but also to market themselves, their objects, their possessions, their services online easily. In some cases these new social, in some cases these new social patterns have further extractivist practices and have further social imbalances. But in others these new situations have contributed to new symmetries and new forms of reconciliation. And in this scenario the house is no longer a space where we do have our objects, our belongings or a space of caring, a space of love, but actually a multi-connected transience and space that changes with the use of these digital tools. In a way houses have become closer or more urban and users are merging more and more. And modern ideas, modern design criteria such as the definition of a spaces per program or you know relating program with form that used to define housing and city as a large are completely outdated. And that's why that's how I that's how what I learned at the school actually. And despite these changes our built environment is still mainly defined by modern apartments addressed to a nuclear family structure defined as this image by a couple and one or two kids. However our social structures and ways of living are much more diverse and complex. Actually just 20% of the US society can be classified under that description of family and in the case of my hometown in Spain or Europe at large those numbers are a little bit higher but not that much around 30%. And the widespread typology is this one that looks like a key in which the living room and the master bedrooms are the main spaces defining clear family behaviors and hierarchies. That type of arrangement not only empowers ethereopathical biases but also neglects wider social realities and ways of living. These circumstances relate with the fact that most of our housing laws and regulations push developers and public institutions to be to build just this type of living putting therefore a lot of weight on citizens. In Maya we have been exploring non-conforming domestic spaces and practices of care. We claim the need to dismantle modern biases in particular those that relate with the modern house so kill the mother house in order to produce diverse and inclusive ways of living able to welcome any social setting. But we also claim the needs to define a built environment able to respond to our actual cybernetic reality. And at the same time we claim that we need to keep on breaking down extractivist practices. So we are critical with our actual norms and laws that empower those biases sometimes dismantling them through legal loopholes we love to find legal loopholes. Other times we just turn visible and balance these constructions in order to transgress them. So today we will talk about bias architectural norms, bias modern designs, we will talk about non-conforming spaces, we will talk about legal loopholes and how to transgress laws or how to define laws that can be transgressed. One of our first projects that we designed was an exhibition displaced for a show about George Sprague book Species of Spaces at the most modern of contemporary art in Barcelona and the curator asked us to focus just on those chapters that address domestic spaces. And we took that commission as an excuse to define a built statement about non-conforming domesticity through the idea of equality. Like it happens in this artwork by done by Likuna's work where all characters of the comic book have been erased and removed and suddenly one can think that infinite stories can happen within the same background. Likewise our displays in our display we create a set of generic rooms in which the specificity of each space was defined by the content when not the continent. So the character of each space was defined by the objects and the artworks inside rather than by its enclosure. And suddenly one walking in the exhibition felt being in a bedroom because all the art pieces exhibited there were related with that domestic group and the same with the living room and so on and so on. So this idea of generic rooms that allow several ways of being occupied and perceived was actually the aim behind 110 rooms. A collective house in building that we built in Barcelona as Dina mentioned and Dina and I was mentioning in 2016. Our housing building is placed in the neighborhood of a Champlain which is characteristic by its resiliency and we have been always fascinated by the order. This strict order that allows any disorder to happen within is a strict homogeneity that allows any heterogeneity to happen within. And the area has been extremely mullible since the origin of the neighborhood. It has changed from being a housing neighborhood to an office neighborhood to back again to housing nowadays. And the key of this flexibility is precisely the nature of the original 19th century typology which is defined by semi equal spaces to the point that from our modern perspective it is quite difficult to distinguish where was the kitchen or where was the bedroom or where was for instance the living room. But beyond the ambibility we also love about the typology the banality of it the capacity of the ordinary and following that non-perspective character our building is actually a renuncment of that past typology and is designed as a system of similar rooms in which domestic program is not predetermined so in any room any use can happen any room can host the bedroom the living room and even the kitchen can be placed in any of those spaces thanks to the position of the bathrooms and here where installations are placed as point of supply. And we call it 110 rooms because it's composed by 110 spaces that can be potentially arranged forming different apartment size. So each apartment can be size and program depending on the needs by adding or restricting rooms. So with this building we were not only claiming to have non-hierarchal abstract domestic spaces well able to welcome wider social realities that could go beyond the nuclear family the nuclear family but also to imagine flexible limits in order to define an inclusive structure able to adapt its organization to diverse social realities but also to changing life changing needs right we know our life changed a lot why not our house. And we could argue also that this surface adaptability and also therefore housing cost adaptability provides answer to many many contemporary crisis so and we could discuss about how it could provide an answer to the impact of labor instability or the impact of having a family restructures or the impact of aging and many other similar social changes that we are living. For the first time for the first year each floor has been divided in five apartments sorry four apartments composed by five rooms and as you see there are no corridors and the interior patio is ruthless allowing the rain come through but also the air come through an important factor for comfort but also to reuse consumption and this capacity to redefine the limits of each apartment expanding and reducing its surface was actually characteristic of a kitchenless typology that we have researched that emerged at the end of the anti-century in this city in New York and this kitchenless typology allowed the disappearance of the kitchen from the physical space of the house and at that time involved the reconfiguration of a whole domestic realm but especially and more importantly the role of women at home. The story the history of this kitchenless apartments that's back to the economic depression that followed the civil war in 1865 when due to the lack of land and housing stock most of US cities so this does not happen in New York but many other US cities needed to build apartments at lower cost appeared then different the well in typologies that and golf maybe consciously or unconsciously some of the utopian social utopias formulas that were envisioned at the beginning of the 19th century by people such as Saint-Simon, Owen or Freer. This life in these apartments was very popular and we could collect hundreds of them that appear in New York as they constitute an alternative that answer to the need to redefine care labor or care how care labor was being taken care of and obviously as you can imagine it was very popular among working women. Proof of the diversity of its developers is a diverse of range and sizes of apartments we can find among them various small apartments as this one that you have in the image or extremely large ones and luxurious as well apartments as this one in the image with two apartments per floor many rooms no kitchen and at the end of the century started to be common in these buildings to offer a wider flexibility of composition of apartments for instance the Selremo the one that you have in the image that is actually the one that influence our building offer different size apartments and the key of this flexibility was precisely a room that was located in between apartments halfway allowing to communicate both simultaneously and allowing also to enlarge with an extra room either of them but these stories could be a whole other lecture so let me go back to 110 rooms the facade constitute continues the fabric and the context and the historical context in the neighborhood there was the tradition of to represent the past of the site through motifs through the core of the facade in our site there used to be industry textile that fabricated gloves so we use the pattern on one of those gloves and we apply it on the facade and you might consider that it's too abstract but actually neighbors recognize it immediately and then suddenly the facade was able to establish a cultural bond with those that live there and knew the past of the neighborhood the name the ground floor is also again a reenactment of an architectural tradition in the neighborhood in which the best materials and the spaces are placed and arranged in order to define the image of the collective to define a place for communal gathering and representation and from the street we open the views to the backyard and the patio ambitiversa and the interior patio as mentioned before is open to the sky allowing the rain to come indoors and diffusing the perceptive limits between the street and interior of the building so yes it rains inside and as Dean and Jones mentioned we we we were very happy that this project could influence um Barcelona housing actual Barcelona housing policies and it's not only um obviously as you can imagine it's not only an individual effort many other similar proposals emerge at the same time um and what we are very happy to see is how current social housing tenders in the city of Barcelona nowadays consider social justice perspectives in their briefs promoting typologies that dismantle former etereopatical biases so yes things can change and actually sometimes very fast if you try and actually finally now in public housing in Barcelona there are no family living rooms there are no suite bedrooms so those types of arrangements are gone gone for good and meanwhile those changes are happening at the office we're trying to push further ideas um defining ambiguous domesticities hundreds of plus competitions and other more successful projects but very interesting processes to go through and among them we have been also trying to redefine the relation between care labor and housing among others nowadays we're building in San Felu very close by to Barcelona a social housing project that is now under construction in which apartments are similar to those to Provença very similar here probably the novelty is a sixth room so there's this semi exterior room a room that can be a terrace and an interior space at the same time and actually building revelation is also manifested in this project through the formalization of this semi exterior room as the floor that can deliver outdoor occupies the maximum surface exterior surface allowable by the law so these forms or forms to respond to that and probably the difference with hundreds of rooms is that here the interior patio is closed defining a climate buffer that alongside this winter room allows environmental control of the house and the reduction therefore of comb consumption cost and impacts and as you see also another another light change is the position of the double doors that are placed at the edge of the room reconfiguring the type of relation among between spaces and this for us is actually very important we always use double doors in all projects why double doors doors are for us actual legal loopholes so our topologies are also ambiguous in the way they answer housing regulations the door allows us to legally consider two spaces as one and that tricks assures us that any legally any space can be any program so we can argue that any space can be a bedroom or any space can be deliverable thanks to a large opening so we like to think that we're also defining us through the door legal inclusivity on the other hand as I was mentioning before in relation with domestic care the ground floor contains a public infrastructure for domestic care that provides supports to neighbors this space as you see literally allows to pass through the building connecting the street with a park that is on the other side and you might ask what means public infrastructure for domestic care good question we are still not sure about it we're nowadays in conversation with the city constantly finding this new type of public service how it will operate how will it manage the manage but definitely we as know that it proposes to understand domestic care as part of a city infrastructure and these last years we have been researching about similar spaces in particular urban kitchens a new type of cooking space that does not happen within the privacy of the home of the house sorry but happens in the public realm as part of a metropolitan infrastructure as part of a metropolitan large network and they are used in a daily basis by thousands of people we have been researching about three cities in which in the last decades as an answer to diverse crisis social crisis hundreds of them they have emerged in um tokyo in lima and in mexico city and i'm doing this work with a former ccp student joseph ianueva and an actual mr3 student takashi anzawa that if he's not here hello takash and we have been doing a lot of work mapping them meticulously generating a lot of data about their operator activity the architecture and so on and for us but sorry what is very interesting is that this new type of urban kitchen defines redefines domestic care labor it's a spaces it's economies and the bodies that carried out and it's able to dismantle former social imbalances produced by a type of work that usually happens in the visibility and in a in an unregulated manner within the privacy of the house in these urban kitchens we see how the idea of care is deeply blurred with the urban scale but we also see how this blurring allows to think about a type of domesticity that is disperse disperse and we started about we started reflecting about the values of a disperse nature about a domestic disperse nature back in 2013 where we were asked to design an installation for an archetypal house if that could exist so as an answer I cut out rooms and domestic spaces from an architectural book and disperse them we tried to produce new forms of ambiguity that was the floor plan of our project and with it we built a model by extruding those rooms far beyond their normal scale so then when looking to the model it was very difficult to distinguish if we were proposing a house or a town or a whole city the floor plan actually invited to imagine all kind of configurations it was difficult to say if it was just one house or many or where it started and end the diffuse house is an open entity that challenges the limits of domestic space and challenges predetermine configurations and predetermine programs thinking of an extended house is a way also to aim new possible ways of coexistence that requires permanent citizens consensus and descent that's an essential thing to make it work and we are now starting a construction of a domestic space in Barcelona on a rooftop which pushed this idea of coexistence further here the house is like a garden a domesticated landscape where there's no indoors or outdoors as such when there's no domestic program as such and we're living species doing habits thanks to a permanent mediation this mediation is facilitated through a roof this roof that acts as a climatic buffer and facilitates climatic climate control mediating air temperature air flows water accessibility and the roof is actually complemented by another mediator by an earthy ground so the ground is earth that supports life our life but also life of plants that can root and life of animals that can nest and we will see how it goes the negotiation after that years ago we received a commission to design also a non-conforming space for a dance performance titled epica which choreography was designed by aimar pereggale here at the picture I'm in love with his work so if you don't know his work please follow aimar has worked about the impact of AIDS in Spanish and Latin American dance communities and due to AIDS in particular in the 80s the fluids were on the target and even sweat became something dangerous a dangerous fluid so in dance studios actually there were some tensions that started to arose due to dancers that who sweat it right in aimar's work criticism is embodied so criticism is part of the body and the body always sweat so criticisms sweats and sweat is also using his work as a political tool able to give voice to subaltern figures so he asked us to design a space where bodies could be emancipated through sweating empowering tactile sense the tactile sense of body sweating and at the same time he asked us to he asked us to design a space that should they would negate the possibility of recognizing gender through body image how to do that so we design a non-scoppy space a non-scoppy device sorry a complete dark room promise is very difficult to complete that room very difficult when you have to spend hours you know our eyes get used to it very difficult but we achieve it so it's complete that room non-parallel to anything in order to enhance sensory factors by means of not only the walls and not only not being parallel but by means of a ceiling a movable ceiling and that incomplete darkness the ceiling would move reducing the sense of a space changing the temperature and humidity of pressure of the space when you have hundreds people dancing and you move the surface of the of the ceiling you feel that everything changes so temperature and humidity change things this to the ceiling and in the performance for dancers that could not be perceived because of the darkness deliver their energy and offer themselves as a spacetime excitation agents in a session promise I was there twice of epic techno really oh sorry epic techno should start and I could affirm that this light images or this light shadows it was even impossible to perceive when we were there so bodies allied with other bodies in darkness and to carry out let's say a cellular liberation that was beyond bodies and that was done through dance so this theatrical resource produced an effective experience freeing the perception of bodies and giving voice to struggles formed by western cologne heterosexual norms so there we were beyond bodies huge jump here but have a lot of imagination similarly similarly we conceived an exhibition that transcended the limit of a space and conventional forms and its design aimed to create an open narrative providing at the same time a background for the ad works for the pieces exhibited the project proposed a set of disperse spaces where the visitor could experience different scales and levels of proximity and interaction with the object's activity everything was exposed equally allowing the visitor to define their own experience based on their way of seeing things understanding things and as you see walls were textiles allowing to be trespassed anywhere as you know if we were visitors were gossed so there was not preset entrance or exit there was not preset order of the show and while some projects reflect on the value of non-conforming spaces those that we have seen others reflect on the value of transgressing laws this is getting interesting transgressing norms that conform or in another way around how to define norms or instructions and views that do have the potential the potentiality to be transgress understanding that we need norms let's define them in order to be transgress we were invited to do an installation in the gallery in monambient in Buenos Aires that had to reflect on the idea of instructions of use as architects we were asked to send a set of instructions to the gallery that had to be performed by a building team freely without any supervision or guidance with that goal in mind we sent to the gallery a set of instructions to build a bagmaster fuller dome that which was published in the hollard catalogue and used to be sold in popular science magazine sold mailed so somehow the project was also a critical reenactment of you know the do-it-yourself culture that was so popular at that time during those years we literally sent we found bagmaster fuller um pattern we send literally the pattern of I mean with some tips but being aware actually that the dome which bagmaster fuller dome was 460 square feet was way much bigger than the gallery space which was just 260 square feet so you know there was the impossibility to perform the instructions of use as they were defined and sent the forcing and necessarily appropriation and adaptation and well yeah the dome looked differently the dome was originally built with metal bars um and we couldn't afford well they couldn't afford to do that so they bought these broom handles and you know the original dome was built with a very very well designed complex join they couldn't make it so they embedded a simple one using plastic hoos for watering and the dome as I mentioned didn't fit so they had to decide how to cut it and even you know the result yes is clumsy but we find it very beautiful beauty in the clumsiness and at the time I think that we brought the idea of instructions of use to the limit being aware of their dysfunction because I think that we are interested as much in norms and instructions of use as their interpretation their subversion their appropriation and as mentioned their transgression soon after and I'm going backwards because this is actually one of our first first projects soon after funding the office um Mayo won a competition held by the city council of Barcelona um after 2008 after the global crisis the city was filled with empty lots that couldn't be built and that needed to be occupied in order to avoid um decay the competition is uh demanded to design and a criminal urban space that had to last at least 15 years but the budget was like nothing really very tight so not enough to fulfill all neighbors we needs and wishes we had a very long list after the process of participation and therefore today we decided to just do nothing in Barcelona public space means light otherwise you need to fence it and then it's not public so we decided to do that the proposal is based on a definition of a regular grid of poles that organizes the urban space and holds the light lighting and electrical systems the grid is composed by a tension cable that works as a uh that works as a temporary support for different uses and the size of the grid is defined in a way that allows the fit the maximum possible possible uses among all that of that list of neighbors requirements and what was very crucial is that we not only define all these drawings there is all these drawings for the neighbors but also you know post imagination but also the the most important thing is this alongside the grid we define a set of instructions this is an over simplification it was a thick thick document a set of instructions that sum up legal and architectural conditions in order to facilitate neighbors to continue completing the square through process of public participation so we didn't do anything else than lighting nothing else so the project proposed the project proposed a urban space understood as an unfinished space with it built not a square actually but designed the potential conditions that this that will allow its open definition in the future by means of a permanent citizens consensus and descent so it forced a permanent discussion in fact since the grid was built it was empty and has been completed in many ways as a result of many neighbors meetings and discussions they stopped inviting us after the first year i think that they were like okay you know guys but during the first year we were always there during these last two years they have decided to play during these years they decided to place grids i have soil shadows benches trees fountains even trees plants even a statue and nowadays they paint the poles different color and we proceed similarly when we ask to these to the to reformish an existing bar by means of a new spatial identity that would that could be applied in other locations the client also asks us to that this um special identity should reflect reflect the culture of pa and to market which is bread with tomato not only a typical catalan dish but the main dish you might think like very stupid yes it's just tomato scratch and bread that's it but it's very delicious or at least we consider very delicious so basically he asks us to design a typical catalan restaurant or at least that it looked like catalan um and we work on the location with a graphic designer and an art director trying to define what catalan culture means because sincerely that question was a bit uncomfortable for us i could give a whole lecture about this but um yes our food is essential and uh it's always composed by few elements very usually very simple so we start collecting and generating all these images and working with collages to build up an imaginary of the catalan cliche of the catalan cultural cliche and of its architecture and if catalan culture if catalan cooking culture is essential its identity the identity of the space had also to be essential as well as its architecture so we decided therefore that we were going to define the identity just with one element the ceiling using catalan bowls we always considered that the bowl was invented in Catalonia for some reason nobody has proved it but you know this kind of idea so we used this iconic architectonic cliche and we created a new bolded ceiling system that could that define an order that could be applied in the different context and the first place that the special identity was applied was this corner in the center of Barcelona and the ceiling bowls are extended up to the front line of the facade and intersects the facade in a free way and the windows as well and what we like about this project is that the result form is cannot be predicted we define the system but the result is was definitely out of our control and we like to think that somehow the role of the designer consequentially changes so the result depends on the context and on the axis as you will see the frame of the ceiling is displayed in order to make clear that it's not non structural character and to make clear and strength it's a scenographic character while showing how things are built how things are built we have been thinking about that a lot lately we have been working on the political capacity of a construction detail on the political capacity of construction processes on the political capacity of the budget where the budget where the money goes where the budget goes and how to turn this capacity visible through design around a year ago in the middle of the pandemic we received the commission to expand and reformation existing housing connecticut but also to design all furniture pieces the start the project started with an undone as yeah as mentioned we were in the middle of the pandemic so initially we had you know the intuition to work with artisans craft workers small practices that were suffering you know just to support them economically so one day talking with a metalist about the production of a chair that we designed using industrial components and parts he asked us to allow him to replicate the industrial elements by himself manually apparently he would get greater economical benefit in doing so and that was then when all the project started really we designed everything furniture and architecture with the same wheel so the house and its furniture would be designed in a way that would require a lot of time to build but use very few materials and industrial elements so investing more in time investing more in craftsman labor hours than in materiality and showing the idea of time through the acceptance of the process through the acceptance of process imperfections so the chairs despite we kept the design as original we thought that there was you know the anecdote should be formalized aside so this is the chair that started the conversation and despite as you see their industrial appearance chairs chairs longs stools and arches were produced manually using small metal pieces and we left the coating the anodized coating that needs to you know to protect the chair against rust we left it visible and it has this iridescent finish which actually allows the color to change depending on the impact of light and then these structures actually were designed not to be perceived alone or behave alone but actually to be covered by a large diversity of textiles that were crafted and handmade and that provided a diverse type of comforts so some lighter and cooler for the summer others were warmer and thicker for the winter and we love this you know when they the chair doesn't disappear and that actually happens so it's like because they are very comfortable as much we produce like hundreds of them just to find more furniture I'm not going to get into this this is very interesting as well so for the lamps we did a long search really a long search trying to find the artisan that would be able to blow the largest mass of glass possible like you know so the form of the lamp it's it's huge the form of the lamp is the representation of the mass of the maximum capacity of breath of an artisan so you can see the you know the breath of a person so the form the form talks about the process of making but also about the body that has produced this piece um and then a smaller because you know you cannot ask too much so smaller pieces were fabricated to produce the floor lamps and here the lamp is just supported promise no screws supported on this light metal bar in a very very delicate equilibrium very delicate and why so because that force and that um you know in order to make it possible it forced the collaboration among two artisans they needed to control exactly the weight of another you know a handmade blown glass with the possibility of reducing the bar to the minimum so they were at all the time in permanent intercom environment through the the the lamp and the former house was designed around the 60s using a colonial style as in other elements that um you know the process of making uh it's turn visible so we proceed in the same way uh with this and we started as you see very lightly because it's almost faded we started deconstructing its colonial decor leaving the traces of the past but also the traces of this process of dismantling and the architecture is built very similarly to the furniture this is the one of the main floors so walls and ceilings are covered with a cheap insulation material that usually is not installed as a finishing material and it works similarly to textile so the material requires a lot of care and a lot of sewing tailoring points you know you need a lot of points to fix to make it work and it's very fragile so it breaks so it reminds to work it very slowly a lot of time and then you have you know wrinkles and you know you have foldings and connections that talk about that process of making and about that it's past and you have holes because of the mistakes and that's okay and you know like scratching the thing and carrying the hands carrying it in another project we turn visible through form and materiality and through construction we turn visible and we embody architectural laws and architectural regulations we were asked to transform a persistent space into a gallery exhibition in Trafalgar Street in Barcelona that and the directors ask us to question the format of the white cube they ask us to reflect on what the contemporary exhibition space should be so this project is critical with the understanding you know of the idea of a gallery space as a neutral thing right you know this idea of a white exhibition space as assuming that white space is neutral because it's just white space is never neutral and white is not neutral at all so understanding the condition that so understanding that condition we we design we propose to accept the site to create and decide accepting its past and to go away from the genetic form of a very cube and of this fake neutrality a site that would define itself including the traces and memories as it happened in the previous house of the past but also the memories of the future and the futures wants to come so the exhibition space is a place of narrative in permanent transformation with all the elements continent but also exhibition content act as a reversible and mutable overlays in time as a palimpsest and responding to this idea of the exhibition space as a permanent space of transformation we wanted to make visible and meaningful our work as architects and the process of an architectural project so we did that by presenting technical and normative solutions in a direct way and by basically adjusting them to what was needed by law so formalizing the law in a very obvious manner and in that case in order to make and open the gallery legally we needed to basically install lighting we've needed to add a bathroom at the back and we needed to improve fire protection the roof was easy either ceiling was easy we just covered it with a coating with a continuous coating and the program emerged with the beautiful columns actually the client rent this space because of these beautiful columns cast iron 19th century very precious ones but we couldn't afford to live to leave them like that we couldn't have the means to pay another type of fire protection sprinkles and so on and we didn't want to quote them as the ceiling because that would damage them so the only solution was literally to cover them completely we used very cheap fireproof panels building a box around them as a time capsule like this yeah the client was a very attention meeting that day he is happy very happy and since then you see the space changing right we till the columns to signify that there were really boxes capturing and raising value of a content it's like covering something delicate right when you cover something it's suddenly the value raises and yeah space has changed a lot columns have been painted this was an an artist intervention that repainted the columns for color blinded visitors to allow them to see the pink so the green is pink for some visitors and one of the first invited artists that intervened in the space understood the capacity of the space clearly as this space as a that is a palimpsest and decided to take out and unveil again the columns unveiling the work done in relation with legal regulations and putting them into crisis because yes suddenly the space is illegal but it's open because it's an artist so this happens every time that the piece is sold if you're interested this will happen again for sure soon and and we have collaborated with this same artist before Luz Broto and this is the project with I would finish today with this project it's a very tiny project very tiny in size very tiny in lifetime as it was very femoral but sometimes the smallest projects are the one that are more meaningful we were asked to do an exhibition an installation at the architectural association in Barcelona which is in the in the main square in front of the cathedral very central and the exhibition spaces this one looks to the square in front of it but this image that it's empty it's never there it's always crowded with things and installations and exhibitions so you never have the perception of the outdoor space so we decided to do something outdoor instead of indoor and sincerely at the beginning we didn't know what to do so we used the money to pay an engineer to draw the square waiting an idea to come and we were running out of time and but thanks to this drawing we realized that there were two points that there were you know the lowest points in which we find the drainage yes simple you don't need a drawing to know that but that helped to realize about this and and we proposed the city council to block the drainage we asked permission legally we were denied the permission and sometimes you find loopholes sometimes you just need to break the law so you know with friends and you know watching out because it's the center of Barcelona it's deeply policed so watching out we blocked the drainage for the day of the opening because a pouring rain was expected to come so the idea was literally to float it was a criticism actually about how we have designed public space in Barcelona that if you come to my city everything is paved you know continues perfectly very good for accessibility very important something that we don't have here in New York but on the other hand sometimes it's too much and so we wanted to float it in order to create this fantastic lake and to imagine a new a different type of you know urban space and as it always happens with the criminal projects they never come out as you expect so the day of the opening that yeah the gallery is a space that I show you was empty hundreds of friends came in hundreds of people came in nothing happened but luckily we left one of the drawings inside one of these drawings inside the space and bit by bit progressively visitors realized that we were proposing realized about the blockades and we realized that we were proposing to float the main square of Barcelona and what was very beautiful is that suddenly we learned something important in our work we learned that imagination sometimes is much more powerful than reality obviously imagine floating the center of Spain the center of Barcelona is it's a very dirty public space so it wouldn't have been beautiful but the visitors imagine this fantastic landscape that was much better than what we could have achieved so since then we always like to think that architecture is not what it is but it actually is what it allows to be the potentially thing of something else and keep it a match. Hi Alfredo, hi Guillermo. Hello partners. Hello, hi how are you? I wanted them to speak but couldn't come couldn't become this in here. This is quite the experiment. Anna you think you're far away. I hope you're proud of Anna's performance, yes? Always. Good. Amazing lecture Anna it's so inspiring. I particularly love the trajectory of it you know it starts kind of very sort of with the certain I don't know rigor or need to engage with housing's history or you started by saying you know against modernism and you're playing with these rules obviously and these systems of housing and you're really focusing on the plans and that you're you're what's interesting is that you're really working through abstraction but at the same time making a claim that you know abstraction can be highly specific and and so you're kind of re-engaging the kind of modernist notion of flexibility and but always kind of with the twist and turning it you know on its head but you know even even I think the word comes back you know abstraction but it it works completely against itself in terms of you know there's no claim to universality on the contrary it's like highly specific highly appropriate in terms of being able to be inhabited or high you know abstraction as highly contextual you know and constantly kind of working through typology so you're working through against program except for maybe the ground floor and trying to inject sort of ideas about the social and and then of course this abstraction to your experiments in representation you know is constantly undone by the richness of the materiality you know at the beginning it's sort of museum and then it takes you know the body performance sweat you know there is like sort of this dark space becomes incredibly sensuous and and alive you work with scale and materials to undo this abstraction you know the furniture is kind of mini super studio but it's completely you know and and and then you know suddenly your kind of experiments and in collage and aggregate you know the way you develop the play with scale with the you know the house that could be a house it could be a piece of furniture that kind of extruded model could be a city there's so much play and at some point you start using the blue background and there's like food like a banana and it you know and we're talking about tomatoes and bread and and you're like forget all these systems I'm so tired and we're we're in the realm of like pleasure and fun and play and just kind of an excess of materiality and sensuality and and this like at this moment we're in this like incredible I think creative space of the imagination of taking over everything from the smallest gallery to to kind of a public space and I mean do you see that in the work this kind of trajectory of like just shedding shedding the rules turning them over and then you're like you know what we're just going to make our own rules and and I just it's just so much pleasure in the work and in this moment where I mean I wanted to be in that black box you know dancing with your friends just it's just it's just like we're so there's there's such a lack of pleasure in this moment to see your work it's just actually the kind of maybe most impactful sense of criticism in terms of how we come out of where we are and that and that it's possible that to produce change we're not going to do it for a reason I mean look at what the rational kind of western mind has brought us to so that's another way to kind of short circuit I think and so I just love the trajectory I mean do you feel it in the office like are you guys just having more fun now or you're like it's a terrible time we're just gonna like you know kind of resist this um it is a form of resistance I mean I was thinking about the surrealists you know after world war two and there's just no way to engage this moment rationally right so do you do you see that in the work or in our case I'm gonna start answering hoping um Guillermo Alfredo please follow uh or correct me and yeah I think it's a very good point because um it shouldn't be I think that fun and enjoyment should be always there not because of the crisis but we reacted like that to the crisis for many reasons first color was forbidden when I was studying when we were studying at the school was literally forbidden so everything had to be white or for some reason so you know that is actually a reaction to that but mainly a reaction to austerity and a type of aesthetics that were brought after 2008 in Spain but also in many other territories in which then architecture had to look like austere to the point and things that were not austere by you know with extremely wealthy budgets etc had to look like austere so we reacted to that so probably our first buildings might look that had larger budgets that they do have actually um because we were against the image of austerity and fun probably was also a way to help us to go through um an estate we actually have a motto at the office that it says this is huge slogan at the entrance it's that it says nothing will last from all of this which means you know and it was a sentence that emerged at the beginning to have the last ring really nothing will last of all of this so have the last ring but progressively rooted in the in the office and rooted in the in the process as well to engage with temporality I'm taking a I'm seeing my partners I don't know if you want to jump yet you want to jump yeah sure well in in Catalan we have a very nice expression which sometimes is used with us which is uh Seny Russia but that could be translated like common sense and maybe for liter just becoming mad for some seconds or just some hours and I think we sometimes there's some people who describes our projects like yeah a mix of a lot of common sense but sometimes you have to allow you a little bit of uh heaven yes me in the end right which is I think it's also a political statement somehow yeah definitely of course so since I have two of you on the screen and you know the other the other statement is how you work right I mean I mean from the beginning it wasn't just a partnership right there was a set of uh you're like one of the first practices that I think of as a kind of collective like I never know exactly how many people are you know part of my I don't know it's part of the aura or you know how do you work or what um what is maybe special about you know is it also a sort of what is the conversation or so yeah like um yeah we I didn't um introduce that but um as you as you mentioned in the beginning the office cannot be understood without the crisis we took a ground floor space in Barcelona and we decided to share and at the beginning we we didn't have an office really it was this need of okay let's share resources first for an economical reason or we all needed a space to work but also there was the need of uh to have people around to have conversations to have discussions about what was going on most of us we lack of work really and uh you know we thought okay let's get together let's start sharing things and sense it all and progressively offices were formed we were not all architects we were just people that admire for a reason or another and little offices open so our space we are not just Mayo but most of the projects that we have seen are not just done by Mayo but Mayo in collaboration with the other offices so there's a construction engineer um an environmental engineer a landscaper a graphic designer you see because there's a lot of colors do relate with the fact that we work very close to to them but also the use of plants for instance is because we share space with a landscaper and and that's very meaningful the problem of it I would say is that you have to accept the format so we will never grow too much because if you grow you cannot keep on sharing so we we accept all of us that we're going to be small little offices that we work as a very large one when needed but we also wanted to be independent to have much more freedom legally speaking and economically speaking responsibilities are shared things are shared expenses are shared but the fluidity is positive so maybe I'm sorry I'm sorry I might make a jump in and it's it's a yeah this way of work it's in practice from the beginning but nowadays I mean you need to work in teams right everybody work nobody works um you cannot work alone and in the way that architects work past year so so at the beginning was like a necessity and but at the end it was a a necessity too I mean we we we have decided to to to maintain it in in that way that very very original talk to be able to include um people in the in the in the studio so yeah I can say we can it's a normal way to to to proceed for us yeah the one thing we spoke about once Anna is that I think just recently you're using that model now to also join forces with other practices to go after large work so as opposed to compete you know on every single competition and in a way to as a way to compete with against large firms you know sort of having but even what you're doing in Mexico City with Mars and Tatiana and and others you know this is kind of new way to aggregate you know really amazing design practices that sort of this kind of incremental I think that it's actually I mean there are many in the 10 last 10 years or 15 years there are many practices have emerged that operate similarly and this means that there's a change in the discipline that that it's very deep and and and probably we could argue yeah this is because of precarity I could talk about the day for hours and part of it is yes but but I don't I wouldn't I wouldn't completely agree with that because there are many other reasons that make that those more tables structures much more fair they're they're fair I would say I want to make sure we give time to students to ask questions yeah yeah I have one one comment that says rigorous and riveting presentation thank you it's okay josh you can ask a question if I didn't ask you about models yeah and maybe you could speak a little bit about the role in the development and the documentation and maybe the self-reflection of your work because the images are sort of seamless with the narrative at least in the way you present it so what about models be careful in core one we produce a lot of models and josh is a is a partnering crime in here at the office models are always fragments of elements really and we build very large ones but they're never complete we test things in different scales and that's why some images are piled up models there's no model or a finished model but rather they talk about the process so yeah working process and yeah what partners help me here but I would add that it's a process document for us but but it's real that we have relieved that for clients to to agree we use models with clients too not just one a lot of them so when they come to the and see the models with us together not not as a finished document or a delivery document it's we see and we explain the project and the process with them and it's very useful because it allows us to to to integrate them in the in the process it's a thing that we like most and it's very important to achieve some kind of projects to to to to integrate them in the in the conversations so yes we like the models and as a process document for us but for the clients helps a lot too so yeah it's both I also think that this is connected to the previous question which is how we operate and how we work together because of course we are four partners and we collaborate a lot with a lot of people so we really understand that design is 90 percent dialogue and test and test process and honestly I have the feeling that this 10% is like there's a deadline and you really have to figure out what to do and how to close the thing but otherwise we really enjoy this previous 90% because all of us of course we have different roles but all of us design and all of us design together in each of the projects so unless there's a an agreement we don't move forward which is sometimes painful and it's like crazy but uh this is the way we work and what we really want to do is think about being so many working with so many officers at the same time we spend most of the time discussing and there are a few times drawing which shouldn't be like that but it's the only way but no I think it's it's I mean it makes a lot of sense and I appreciate the I mean it is interesting I think often uh here with maybe I think of more corporate practices there's you know the rendering is is everything right this is sense that you don't make models and you you know anymore it's just we're still in the realm but but the model is such an incredible tool to to kind of engage I think you're right with the client at a level of a formation you know before um it's just such a everybody's looking at the same thing right I mean even as you're designing it has a kind of presence which I think it is quite useful as a tool which is interesting because it's almost like we've forgotten how important it is um hello um I just want to go back to the idea of breaking the rules and we talked about it graphically but through your the project that you presented you are breaking the rules and I was thinking about it in kind of more of the academic setting that's kind of in academia we try to break the rules in terms of a critique of what is going on but in real life the way that you're doing it there's real life consequences and real life clients that may or may not agree with what you're doing have you have you encountered clients that have really not wanted to to follow what you're doing and what is your reaction to that do you just stop working with them or no this is one of the positive things about having long conversations and complex structures it's not about an idea really it's not about the our design is a whole process so it's a complex process so there's not a moment of me or you know like idea of the designer proposing something that that never exists and so confrontation happens in a daily basis yes but as part of you know the process of of the production of of of the project and you can you have to find people around the table that do have something in common at the end so there's a common something common need common will common something then it works so rules can be broken when the conversation evolves to what towards there and it's obvious that they need to be broken and then you need a partner in crime that would accept that to happen and take the risk in the case of public institutions it's very difficult you have to find the loophole you really have to find the loophole to make that work and and now we're working to find the legal structures for for instance this care infrastructure that come on ground because there's no still a legal infrastructure as such that it there is for elderly housing for students housing but not for social housing in general so how to use the same tools municipal tools but bring it into housing that doesn't specify the type of inhabitant I mean I like the idea of conversation I'm thinking about your gallery project right where I mean it's just the project is a process right you you know again working against the white box decide to cover up the columns with these cardboard columns and then and then the artist comes in and the only thing they can do is chip away at your installation right so I think it's a kind of really interesting process and you were mentioning temporality and working with time and the notion that things are made and unmade in the work I think is really interesting yeah this just to add one comment about this thing of the the rules and regulations mostly mostly times the these regulations are some rules that we manage we manage to change not to change to play with them to they are going against the client needs so it's not going against them by going against it's a necessity in that case we try to to transform to try not to be stopped or not to be not to understand the regulations of especially regulations as a as a limit for the client needs so you would just need to to to understand it try to understand it in a in another way so we can actually achieve what what is what is asked what the people ask us or what is needed in any in each case so yeah imagine and as you can imagine we have at least one person at the office that it just obsessed with laws and that's actually Alfredo he spends most of his days reading but you know that's why he would how we can manage it's about it's not about reading one it's about re-reading re-reading re-reading you know many times yeah many times complementing one law with the other finding the gaps yeah actually this question kind of picks up on that from Quem he we in thinking and working through abstraction is there an active feedback loop between abstraction and construction or is the process linear well that's a different difficult one Guillermo you're changing the rules so the relation between abstraction and construction or or what is that right I mean construction is very real and you know I guess but you've showed how in as you I'm not going to answer it for you I think well I don't think that of course it's it's really difficult to to think that that's a linear process and architecture it never is I mean and if it is you have to just be very aware of what you're doing so and and on the other hand I I see ourselves as being conceptual but on the other hand as you were saying before we are also very interested in materiality there's also materiality in bits or in bodies so many things so so many political aspects from climate issues to social issues so you you can never detach one from the other so we don't like to understand architecture's form of duality I think these two these two folded images is not real in in many ways um yeah Nicholas do you have a question yes I um my question kind of similar to the fabrication and the appreciation for fabrication is commendable also the evident collaboration and I wanted to ask how in the current climate in which a lot of the resources I put on fabricating duplicate modules as opposed to very specific specific furniture or how do you find the conversation with fabricators usually like when you want to start a new project when you propose something you know like those arches in the in the restaurant in Barcelona or the furniture what's your general experience one of again one of the benefits to have a construction engineer on the table we work on a very long table um around has like 12 meters and a half so it's very long so we work close by and you know you have a coffee and you ask and so construction and budgets actually are from you know the first line because you have a coffee and you ask I guess this is too costly etc so so from the beginning there's this relation but also with fabricators is something that we are not yet there but it's always good to have a network of you know artisans and you know to expand the office with craftsman ships etc that you built you build your work together through time right and you learn and we have few people so few people around us that we have been working with for a long time and you learn from the metalist you learn details and then when you go back to him you know the metal it's better or it's him with wood so I think it's like you know an extended office in a manner but it's not easy you need time to build that definitely and we are still not completed our work about collaborative care um and this idea of like the kitchen less um domestic space are really exciting and inspiring and so what I'm wondering is when you're thinking about designing for a collective um how do you understand your role as a designer and what are some of the kind of techniques like I see that you're sort of cataloging and collecting like specific examples um obviously understanding it as like a cultural act and understand there's a sort of diversity to the way these spaces would be used is it a matter of collaborative design or is it something kind of conceptually else entirely well I think that everything has a double time right you have a contemporary time the actual time that that's tangible and it's very easy to grasp and then you have to deal with another time that goes beyond the actual time that probably there the idea of abstraction enters more strongly to try to do something that can you know change through time and and at the same time benefits and correspond to purely contemporary needs and ways of being but at the same time you know that or it disappears or it can be transgressed or it can remain but you have to think ahead and especially in housing and housing is essential because at the same time you have to respond to now and at the same time you want to be you know we have a mental consciousness we want the whatever we you know the materials we use to remain um in order not to waste more so you want that to work in 100 years 200 years with the design of the monastery that we're doing also with a group of architects kind of involved with dogma and it's uh yeah we're talking about a thousand years how to design a building that has to remain thousand years I remember the meeting with you know one meeting that we were talking about internet and the community look at us like it won't be internet in a thousand years so suddenly we didn't know how to react right so that project maybe is a bit extreme probably I wouldn't like to think maybe it's better to disappear not be there a thousand of years you know but should we take one last question or two last but why don't you both ask it and then Anna will just have fun hello hi thank you for your lecture um I was really interested in the comment that you made about this idea of fun and how it shouldn't be a reaction to crisis but something that's more implemented in design which is something you really see through your representation and I was wondering um if you could talk more about this and have fun moves beyond representation and more into the built environment okay sorry can you repeat the question yeah I was saying um I really liked this topic of fun that you discussed and how it shouldn't necessarily be a reaction to crisis but um more something implemented into design and we see that really clearly through your representation and I was wondering if you could talk more about this and how it moves beyond representation and into the physical and built environment interesting Stefan do you want to build or um I mean I think all your projects are fun so I think it's it's a good question what I wanted to actually ask was a through line of your of your practices this research into the idea of the diffuse house in terms of housing I think something that we've seen over the last kind of year and a half has been um the diffusion of like the workplace you know and new ideas of what does it mean to work and has had a strong impact on domesticity as well and I'm wondering if this diffusion of the workplace has had an impact about your idea of the diffuse house as well I'm going to start answering the first question maybe I'm going to give the word to my partners as well there's look there's things about representation that are produced after construction so there's not a linearity at all and you know this idea of we do the design first the sketch then the model and then that doesn't exist and and actually we explain process differently through time so we understand what you understand what you do differently as you know as time changes so and I think that's positive and good so there's not a before and after I would say and in terms of Guillermo do you want to jump in yeah sure I because I think that strangely enough these two questions are really connected and going back to this last question I of course we have witnesses witnessed how productive and reproductive labor have have merged and Millet capitalist has turned everything 24-7 in a in a very blurry way but of course we as architects we also want to see which are the let's say positive aspects or where are the possibilities where we can operate and just take these transformations and produce something from scratch or from which is newer which is opposing to that process so and I think that the representation also tries to be projective and positive and positive so how to turn these concepts into something which is meaningful and can in a way talk about the idea of the future and I think I think that the idea of the future is central to I mean it is an agreement and of course capitalist is based on the idea of future and it's based on the idea of future because of course it relates relays on depth and it relates on things which will come and of course we're facing a very strange time in which climate change is in a way making future not reliable so it can be seen it's two-fold it can be seen as an opportunity also to change things in a very radical way so we can also see the positive part of how the instability of the coming future can be transformed into something which is something we can use as architects. I think that what you would be worried responding to Stefan's question is to know but not to be critical with the change or what is happening and that's why I was mentioning before about okay the need of being critical with certain extractivist processes that are just being empowered by this change and it's not that they're not really changing they're just empowering certain companies that they were already there through you know working from home and etc etc or you know even pushing further social imbalances and differences and we and this is a conversation that we had here in the school very often right how the pandemic has divided the society in different sectors I wouldn't say too but clearly those that you know that can stay at home work from home etc that those that cannot and many other circumstances. Sure I don't see it anymore Technology do you want to read it Laila? Yeah I'll read it so from our colleague Yemina thank you Mayo great lecture it's like listening to your favorite album but with new singles I also really loved Amal's surrealism comment which I think has always been in the work a new element here I observe today is the misapplication of very practical technologies cultural conditions building codes I'm sorry and building codes which requires a degree of astute observation and skills and a courage for deliberate haphazard misread of the real to the edge of absurdity this is particularly the case with the new lumpy lamps thank you so much for all you do oh thanks Jimenez we miss you Jimenez we miss you thanks everyone yeah I think it is the best it's a really great way to end so thank you so much Anna thank you