 Welcome, I'm glad to see the auditorium filled because it's really a great, great pleasure to welcome Ana Paula-Ruiz Galindo and Mekki Rus from Pedro E. Juana this evening, both as part of our lecture series, but also as a way to get a glimpse of what they are cooking in their advanced studio this semester, which we're delighted to have them teach. I should also note that it's really a privilege that they're here given that they're presenting for the Young Architecture Program Competition for MoMA PS1 on Friday. So really a big thank you, triple thank you for being here tonight. At a time when architecture and by extension architects is more than ever urged to think and act across scales, to embrace systems thinking, to visualize and engage data and think relationally across contexts and cultures in an almost porous and disembodied way, it is both refreshing and empowering to consider Pedro E. Juana's practice as operating around and through the primacy of the object. Through playfulness and reinvention, Ana Paula and Mekki's work is re-engaging in new ways the power of objects to affect their environment through what they have termed, quote, typological transgressions, as well as through their now well-established bold use of material, texture, color, placement, and form. Whereas spaces often thought of as a means to stage relationship through architecture, it is instead around and through the object, its scale, its performance, its use and misuse that Pedro E. Juana have approached architecture's capacity to assemble new and unexpected relationships with those that encounter them. Among some of their most well-known and inspiring projects are Sessiones Puerquito or Little Pig, where the act and performance of cooking a suckling pig becomes a pretext to design a gathering and invite new kinds of encounters and conversations. Archivo Pavilion, an intervention in the gardens of Archivo de Seño y Arquitectura in Mexico, where they designed a series of interconnected cone-shaped pots as one of their first public projects. Helmut, a table that is turned into a bench that turns into a table for Galerí I of Museo Humex in Mexico, Casareas, an annex in an ex-colonial house in Merida, in Yucatan, and their breakout project at the first Chicago Architecture Biennale in 2015 with love from the tropics at the Randolph Square living room and installation that was commissioned by our own Irene Chang, as well as by Sara Herda. The project was absolutely gorgeous and included custom furniture, lighting, wall hangings, and transformed the space completely and entirely. More recently, they designed the commons as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the renovation that is currently underway by Johnston Mark Lee, with again an installation this time of hundreds of plants and light fixtures as well as a series of modular furniture which transforms the space from cafe to concert venue to discussion space, complacent education really at the center, education in the community spaces at the center of the Museum. Commenting on their Chicago Architecture Biennale installation for the Randolph Square living room, Annapola and Mekki once said that they are, quote, suspicious of big ideas. And yet it is evident from their work and the impact and resonance it is having in architecture as well as beyond, as well as beyond that their work as well as their framing of their current studio shows how the clarity of their design investigations and their embrace of intersectionality has enabled them to frame both their research and their design process as going well beyond the objects themselves to uncover instead the larger processes that architectural elements are not only part of but also can contribute to shaping in new ways. Please join me in welcoming Annapola with Galindo and Mekki Ruz from Pedro and Juana. Thank you so much, Amal, for having us here. It's truly, it's really an honor to be here at GZAP, not only talking to you all today but also teaching here is really great for us. I am Annapola and this is Mekki. Yes, our names are not Juana nor Pedro but yes, we are Pedro and Juana. We need a name that allowed us to be flexible with our practice and that did not respond either, that not represented neither, that represented neither of us. Our studio is collective, so it's our work and we were looking for a name that could allow us to grow wherever we wanted. We work across creative professions, not limited to one plus we felt that architecture firms needed a bit of a twist with their naming enough partners with funky last names, enough acronyms, just a common name that can grow or shrink that can flow through disciplines maybe also work as an alter ego and we thought that it might not need explanation but I guess it needs more explanation than we actually thought. We wanted our name to be one more actor that performs with our work, one that did not need to be defined by the discipline. If we wanted to cook, start a kindergarten or a dance company, Pedro Juana might as well lend itself to those. Anyways, Siegfried and Roy was already taken and since we live and work in Mexico City, Pedro Juana is much closer to home. So just as our name, our work also fluctuates. We constantly shift scales from furniture to building to objects and back again. History, myth and the politics of objects is something that really interests us and we try to mix it with our work. We like to be informed by the context and pay special attention to the viewer, the body that will develop a relationship to whatever we create. Our purpose is for all these objects to create unexpected moments with those that encounter them. To be clear, all that we will show during this presentation is architecture. We're going to show you a series of projects that shift in range but somehow follow the same investigation. The word should speak for itself. We wanted to start off with a project that might help lay out the way we work. In 2015, we got invited by the curators of the first Chicago Biennial to intervene in a public space inside of the Chicago Cultural Center, Randolph Square. We were interested in two particular things while developing the project. One of them represents the way we pretty much start every object and that comes out of a clip of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey. It shows the moment that the monkeys confront the monolith. It is the introduction of an object foreign to their natural inhabited. An object without history, without meaning, that is only form, texture, and color. We're interested in the immediate relationship of both. The moment that they get to know each other and figure out a way to relate. And what happens after once the body is separated from the object, how the object takes on cultural significance, how it translates, becomes part of our understanding and changes once it turns into a utilitarian object. How time and place affect how we look at these objects. The second thing that we were curious was the notion that the climate of Chicago would require something that we understand as an object of our technology where it had to move inside or someone might want to move in. But then all other younger public technologies would prescribe some sort of a technology that already says Pompeia and some power. Where architecture and furniture provide a space to be and socialize, to reapply the idea of public interiors and object-body relationships. Onto Randolph Square, inside the cultural center, a massive bazaar building, we decided to write a letter to Randolph. Dear Randolph, do you remember when the Chicago Cultural Center used to be the public library? Do you remember Randolph Square on the side of Randolph Street? The newspaper stands inside allowing Chicagoans to read the latest edition of the daily paper. Strange to call it a square, it being indoors. Anyways, Randolph Square used to be the place to go and get the latest news or just to look at the pictures. Imagine the social encounters, political discussions and mafia gossip that went on in and around that square. Then the books moved out of the building and with them did the newsstands, the gossip and the political discussion. The nature and program of Randolph Square started to change as is the infrastructure of the aging building. Gas was switched off and the sconces converted to electrical lighting. When the Tiffany dome started leaking, a state-of-the-art concrete shell was built over it. No more daylight, electricity did the job. Tile started popping out of the floor, vinyl was discussed, but carpet won. Then came fluorescent lighting. Maybe there was before the carpet, my memory spotty, hence not necessarily truthful. The building was to be turned down, but since it was funded by a 1% tax levied on the population of Chicago, the people remember that it was actually theirs and Randolph Square transformed into something else, allowing the people's palace to remain. Today it is called the living room of the city, imagine. The carpet came off and the tiles came back and there the square stands, bare but for the marble clad walls and columns. Quite modern, but also quite Roman. Inside a building of Victorian excess, a bunch of unwieldy tables, some form a French peace row, some seemingly from the middle ages, populate the space. Not too living room-like in the end, except for the gymnastics classes on the first and third day of the month. The latest rumor changed again. Some architects are going to take out the fluorescent lighting in the ceiling coffers, replacing them with a web of thick string and suspended glass lead balls from back in the day. The system is shaped through a computer control array of push and pull, transforming light and shadow, promising association of change throughout the day. The Roman marble walls will be dressed in Greek paint to reconnect with the original ceiling. This place will be unstable, aiming to fulfill an ideal of domesticity in the public domain to rock on, to grant a degree of porcining autonomy, sofas to lie in, tables to stand at, slight typological transgressions that hint at something else. It will all add up to create a conversation between the body and the object. Or maybe just between the furniture and the Chicagoans that use it. Just truly, better juana. This is just a play to play. So I mean, whenever you put something that moves in its place, people can really go crazy. At a certain point, we had to retain the weights because it was a bit too much play. So also, as a post-creep, we just wanted to show a bit of the testing, the pushing and pulling that happens kind of behind the doors or throughout our process. We're constantly testing things in a mode of, first, obviously. And then we actually practice how far you could rock before you fell, making all the people that were gonna sit on these objects. It's safe. Enough. Clay? As a child, you get dragged through museums of badly lit harsh reflecting this place with little figures who got their heads chopped off or are missing a leg. Spoons next to broken cups sent results. Christian scripture claims that you are the descendant of a man whose wife was cut out of his torso in some areas of the world. He himself made out of clay. In Guatemala, early humans were not so lucky. Made from earth and mud, they soaked up water and dissolved after they are created from wood. But they did not have souls nor minds. They lose favor with the gods who caused them to be beaten and disfigured before receiving a deluge of heavy resin. First success of creation came out of maize, though, according to Popol Vuh. The pot is part of a proposal for a competition of a pavilion for Achivo di Senior Architektura in Mexico City, that Pedro Icona won in 2012. What makes the pot such a peculiar object is the fact that by placing a plant into it, it becomes performative. We created one object for the design archive that when proliferated creates architecture. I'm waiting for it to proliferate in there. Made out of clay. The object becomes in a closed outside space that works as an amphitheater. It's a brick that becomes a wall but then transforms through time. It grows up, amplifying the garden and turns green showing an ever-changing object. Clay has existed for centuries and it is here to stay. We could even call it an emergent material, something that every civilization discovered on their own. And therefore it has been the storyteller witness and evidence of many lives and households. It has been part of design since before design existed and has always been part of Mexican life. We chose to use pots as an object of design to be recreated by us and as an architecture material to create a living pavilion that would grow and mold and when the time comes to tear down, you can just do it as they did in the old times, break it into little pieces back into the ground. In another approach to living creatures, we love from the tropics was a project that took place in Chicago. So this is then in 1991, Clyde House, Joseph Paul Clyde's house, gets commissioned to build a new home for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. 20 somewhat years later, the rationalist square is in the need of an upgrade. So what we really like about this plan is how it shows, I don't know who has been in Chicago, this is the lake and this is a public plus sign front. So actually the idea of Clyde House was to connect all these parks towards the lake. So he was expecting people to come through the museum and end up in the lake in the back. So with the new remodel of the MCA, they decided to go not to expand but just to renovate the interior of the museum by creating new program like the restaurant that you can go up until like two o'clock in the morning and this new area where we were commissioned to engage that was the commons. And the brief of the commons was the following. It was supposed to be a learning and educational space central to the museum that brings together artists, thinkers, and audiences through a constellation of artist projects, conversations, performances, interactions, workshops, presentations, and readings. The physical space will provide a forum to consider the fundamental social, political, and critical framework of art. This space will function as a gathering place for our community. So it wasn't short of ambition, but that was what we got. So we decided to break it into programmatic requirements into five scenarios and approach this non-commercial third space through looking at laser environments of artificial interior landscapes and also looking at its opponent, like the jungle, a place where something is always about to happen. But there is obviously a problem with that whole story if you move it into the context of Chicago where the MCA sits, which is the climate of the Midwest. They were recently like minus 20-something degrees Celsius. Nevertheless, there is also an architectural solution to that problem. The conservatory, which if you look at it from a programmatic standpoint is a nice analog as it is a site for experimentation, cross-breeding, and pollination. A laboratory that allows for new possibilities that would be geographically unavailable otherwise if it wasn't to a relatively simple architecture intervention made possible by glass. So, tropical winter. Bring some warmth and sentiment into the commons. Introduce the ambience of the jungle. Not being able to engage any of the floor surface of the newly opened space for the commons, we decided to go into the ceiling and suspend an artificial foliage. By opening it up and adding an artificial light, we created an individual autonomous conservatory in itself, which is capable of supporting the plants throughout the dark days of the year, which looks something like this, for a museum with a collection and an archive that has only one issue with our proposal, the four major pests. Spider-Mite, mealybuck, scale, fungus net. After some silence conversing with the plant professionals and consulting an entomologist, it turned out that by trimming down our plant list, there are no dangers to preservation. In addition to cover the ambitious brief, we needed to add certain elements to the ground. A table that folds to a bench that folds flat. A daybed that allows for the commons to turn into sanatorium, where clean air and the landscape is consumed from a state of the semi-horizontal. Two-seater and one-seater, which make up different configurations of people sharing a moment or not. These are Anastasia Brunhilde and Olivia in their first iteration of prototypes where we tested them in cardboard stock color and their lighting abilities. The second iteration at the museum itself with the curators looking at them in the ceiling as a pair of two. A third test where we actually added plants, then lights, and this is the final result. We're coming in through the renovation that Justin and Mark Lee did. Coming in, going up, you start looking like seeing bits of the ceiling. When you step up, you can see this upside-down garden on top view. This is a close-up view. Finally, these things at the end actually open up as a murphy bed for a stage to be put on. All of the furniture can be, well, there you have the table as a table and as a bench, and then if it gets folded, it can actually go behind into the hooks in the back. It's always also great to just see it to kind of live its life in social media to actually see that it is being used in all of its forms for presentations, talks, and performances that take place at the MCA. Now we're going to show you lost competition for the Venice Biennial and the one that Remco has curated. This was in collaboration with Jimena Cogreve and Montserrat Alvarez-Glison, and it will end up actually becoming a project, but it sort of plays with the idea of history and how we read it. So in the briefs for 2014, Cogreve talks about modernity as a loss of identity. The image comes from the presentation that he sent, this image comes from the presentation he sent out to the participants or those that were competing for the pavilion. The idea for the National Pavilion of the Biennial was to assemble a survey of a hundred years of modernity throughout the world. The following is our proposal as a possible perspective on a Mexican modernity. In 1969, the artist Robert Smithson, Nancy Holtz, and the gallerist Virginia Dwan went to trip to the southeast of Mexico. They went to Chapa's Campeche, Tabasco, and Yucatán. During their stay in Palenque, they slept in Hotel Palenque, founded in 1937. Three years later, in 1972, Smithson gave a talk known to us now as Hotel Palenque to students of architecture in the University of Utah, whom were waiting to be lectured about Palenque's archaeological site and got instead an architectural and archaeological analysis of the Hotel Smithson State Art. Through a slideshow presentation, the hotel was going through a remodel during the visit, buildings that were being partly rebuilt co-existed with those that were being constructed. It was a test of trial and error in which the edification, new and old, they seemed to intertwine with each other and lose each other out and cancel each other, generating a state where the architectural exercise was expanded in time. Smithson passed entire afternoons meditating this perpetual transition, one he denominated de-architecturization and was sure that would give a result of an undifferentiated structure without a center. Through a slideshow presentation, Smithson constructed an absent revision of the Palenque ruins, the temples, the Mayan observatories and other wonders that the pre-Spanish Indians built. That's all he said. He unveiled at the time cultural practices of Mexico, such as the Milpa, a constructive Mayan spirit that was still active and a Mexican temperament. By making a detailed revision of the building, he invented a modern narrative that was not pointing to the West as origin. An ubiquitous modernity already invented in Hotel Palenque and reinterpreted in the pre-Hispanic pyramids. The constructive method, as much as the structure he describes, can be amplified to the point of proposing not only a reading of the building, but also a reading of modernity. Pabellón, Mexico then becomes a system that through its various actors describe further ahead, proposes modernity as an operation and localizes the problem of architecture as a strategy. In Pabellón, Mexico, the notions of fundamentals and absorption of modernity set by the architecture biennial are inverted and find multiple points of departure. In the following, both Smithsonian texts and our words are interwind. The Pabellón begins in the tropical jungle. It starts with the pyramid and continues with its rereading. It is an exercise to narrate a modernity that disseminates the center and ventures to take as a possible model the pre-Hispanic architecture. It is there where modernity reinvents itself and where the system of hierarchies set by the West are destabilized. A modernity that weaves itself like a serpent, that piles and weighs that makes visible time in architecture that gets constructed through facades within facades, overlapping facades, facades on facades. A modernity that in this way from the future to the past breaks the historical linearity and generates a pause in which things are almost always about to happen. One in which things are always almost about to happen. Pabellón, Mexico uses Hotel Palenque as a strategy for how to talk about modernity, as a structure without a center that places the origin and that complicates the way in which it is absorbed. It's like a Douglas Graf's diagrams looking for parallels where time collapses and is no longer read in a linear way, understanding both time and history in constant movement. So, this is the Mayan Arch. The pavilion allows to present Mexico and the pre-Columbian architecture as the starting point, the pavilion as an inverted replica of Smith's system. It's about pre-Hispanic architecture as an instrument for modern thought. This system is put in operation through the interaction of four elements, architectural intervention, a cantina program, a diaporama and a printed guide. The architectural intervention generates a gridded forest, a structure without a center that replicates the intertwining snaking way from one side to the other and back again, back and forth to and fro. It's made up by a series of columns that reinterpret the Mayan arch. Columns in front of columns, on top of columns to construct a grid where the supports multiply and expand the void in between the columns create a gridded ceiling over the tables where the diaporama is projected. Element two, the cantina, is a site of the long Mexican afternoon and the place from where modernity can be thought and activated. It is a cantina, which is practically a pub that offers a pause, a breathing space to think about the themes put forward by the banal. It is the export to Venice of a Mexican space that allows for a unique and specific socializing methodology. In Utah, Smith's worked as a tourist guide of a site without a site. The same takes place in the diaporama. The guide encounters itself with a problem of talking about architecture without the site. The diaporama makes a revision of modernity through images of pre-Hispanic architecture allowing the visitor to construct his own stories connecting what they find here with their own experience. And so here comes the test of what you would have experienced while sitting in the cantina of the pavilion while sipping mezcal. We have arrived at the Templo de la Cruz Foliada, Temple of the Foliated Cross. You can see it on our left. Obviously, it gets some type of maintenance to be able to differentiate itself from nature. The force of the jungle in Palenque seems to have the same force as the growth of the gods that are venerated there. Nature and edifice are interlaced in such a way that at any moment it is going to be impossible to distinguish one from the other. That is because nature is indifferent. It does not recognize edifices nor gods. The Francois House goes through the same struggle when the Fox River emerges. It would seem that architecture exists despite the nature. It is an imposition. It fights gravity. It rises as close as it can to the sky and it encounters itself on a perpetual struggle. We could think about architecture as that which is always occurring against the devastating force that is instantly trying to blend and de-differentiate itself from it. Here, we see Teotihuacan. The abstraction of the site makes one think about the rational forms of modernity. The way the volumes are placed reminds us of Ciudad Universitaria or Illinois Institute of Technology even in Brasilia. It makes one remember urban utopia and intense driven by grids and sectors. Here, too, appears the linear axis of composition. The one that connects everything is called the calzada de los muertos, the road of the dead. Look at the lack of symmetry before an axis is potent. It seems to be a parallel gesture to the intent of the European avant-garde to disappear at the center. If you look closely, the monumentality of the void impresses more and suggests that we need all. It is within that void that we all move. That's where you encounter the architectural prominent. With the notion of relativity of time, appear the idea of the fluid and the dynamic space. An idea that materializes through industrial elements. This image obliges us to think of buildings that rise from the ground, like the prisons that prostrate themselves in the highest point, forcing our gaze upwards. It is like a skyscraper. It is a monument to progress in a moment where the city is screaming for more housing. These buildings will house thousands will house thousands. At the bottom left, where the columns clustered together, we can see the end of the super block of the Centro Orbano Presidente Aleman. The social spaces start there in the stacking of the rocks in the first plane, and they continue until you get the concrete blocks zigzagging diagonally like a serpent through the site. The blocks elevated by pilates start creating plazas for distinct activities. In one of them, if it wasn't for the strong sun and this use, you could almost see the pool. Closed due to the security reasons and the loss of community. So, Hote Palinga is not in Yucatan. It's the follow up of this lost competition where Montserrat Alboros Gleason invited us to participate in her exhibition that she was curating at the CCS in Upstate New York. And we followed up on the themes of the pavilion in order to come up with a project for her. So, we are back to the Mayan Arch that we broke up in two parts. One the column and one the drawing of the column but in a three-dimensional space solid and wire frame that we were going to place inside of the exhibition. Here the pavilion replaces the restaurant of Hote Palinga where Smithson used to spend hours at generating a space where you can spend hours having a discussion. We were proposing a non-hierarchical exchange, one without a centre to let knowledge and information presented in exchange during the symposium that was held during the exhibition by the curators of the world to find its own form. The rotated and tilted grid encounters and ignores the existing structure of the museum. A structure without a centre that is of assemblies of columns that in Paris create the Mayan Arch in which you can find a table that replicates the serpent's trail that circulates from one side to the other and back again in which hierarchies are de-differentiated. And this is how we actually made it so this is a place we are tearing down and rebuilding in Mexico City currently where we made the first prototypes of these columns. It was very little budget so the drawings of the columns were actually made out of yarn and the solids themselves out of cardboard and these are early tests of how to get out of the typical sheet of plywood cardboard, a proper column built together. We tried horizontal ways of assembling them and then vertical ones. They had to be shipped. We had to send them to New York so they also had to be flattened. There was part of the budget at the end of the day because it's really hard to get about 100 columns built in New York for the price that we had so we made it in Mexico cut them there and then painted them in dye and brought them over to the CCS. So this is just for scale so you can see the size of these columns. And this is in the CCA so one can't figure out why they put that there but it seems to be long. It seems to have some incredible sort of Mayan necessity. It just grew up sort of like the tropical growth, a sort of Mexican geologic man-made wonder. And this is what you encountered when you were coming from the middle of the exhibition after. And this is where the symposium took place. We were really trying to shift the idea of a hierarchy of not having the presenters in one side and so we put screens also all over the room and also behind in the other side of the wall in this idea of not paying attention to the existing structure but the curators still wanted a hierarchy and they sat in the front. It was really hard to make them shift. So, shift again. A house in the outskirts of Mexico City. Our client bought a house at a very low price in the suburbs of Mexico City in a gated community and wanted to flip it. So, we were going up and she found this house in not horrible conditions but the house itself was pretty strange. And so, our main problem was how to make something subtle so that it could be solved so it didn't have to be we tried not to make it too much but we wanted to work with very simple materials and throughout the house you can see these shifts also in scales throughout the patterns and the materials that we use. So, what we were more interested in is to design kind of thinking of the way that you move through this house. And we also wanted to show you a bit of the back and forward when you're like designing and this is the celosía or the facade in the front of just this brick that is produced in Puebla in Mexico that is a bit wider than just regular brick and these were the templates that we had to give the constructor in order to... So, this is a little bit the digital production that happens in the computer with the tools that we have available today and then a simple output that anybody that is actually a mason can use in order to produce something a little bit more complicated no machinery necessary to use. This is also pretty straightforward gesture, a little screen that passes in front of the street and kind of separates the terrace that is on the first floor from the rest of the street. So, coming in passing that first border that was kind of on top of you, you enter the first patio that has the radial detail on the floor also by just using river rocks that we created around the column and that kind of moved you into the house. So, this is what it kind of looked like before. It was constructed by a doctor apparently but the structure was pretty sturdy so we decided to keep the structure and concentrate on that and punch a call in the middle of the house to allow the light to kind of circulate into the building and create this threshold between the inside and the outside. So, this would be the second patio or garden interior garden that you will encounter in the house and we kept the original structure that actually helped us kind of organize the different programs in the house and we just kind of pushed out to connect with the outside garden. So, this is a view of the garden from the first terrace and here you can see a bit of that movement that we really wanted we were very interested in well, maintaining so you go in you go down to the garden and you can come back up inside and it's kind of a continuous walk. So, this is going back in towards the facade in the back and we were very worried about putting plants in the presentation but it's just to show a bit of how the inside and the outside communicate with each other and go up and back and in and out and this is how it looked before or this is what we were faced with and well this was the result. All of the materials are local materials this is a volcanic rock that we just caught to kind of resemble the interior wooden floor and we brought that to the outside oh and we were very interested in having a type of fussy facade or like trying any treatment you can't quite see it that well over there but this was also made of pigmented color and then just little rocks that were put up into the wall with a broom so it was more about just finding these local materials and trying to create different kinds of textures. Casa Reyes is our first project probably that we did when we were still in Merida the Reyes family had invited Ricardo who we were working with at the time to remodel a colonial house in the center of Merida and we were finishing up a project of Jorge in the Yucatan and about to fly the coop to Mexico City to start our own thing but then got generously invited to do the annex for this project and execute Horace project for the rest of the house. This is a very deep lot in the center of Merida typical colonial typology of courtyard structures and in the back you see perpendicular a bar that is the annex so we seriously repeated the courtyard gesture and created another one in order to then go through and get into the garden with a lot of color these are this is drawing of the tiled floors and the tiled pool and the same in reverse reflecting on the ceilings and the thing was again how to get out of a relatively cheap construction material a screen that would be a diaphanous gesture to let the garden and patio in and at the same time have the possibility of an indoor climate so we just flipped the center block around closed a couple of holes made a little production site on site filled these three randomly filled blocks on mass and then put them onto the facade there was actually a system because we could only have a certain variety so we put them together we did give them a drawing that they were supposed to follow in order to get the facade to what it was but it was a nice result and one that we got a lot more we were allowed to do more with what we had we were not going to sell this house at the end and the clients were very generous and obviously loved colors so this was the final result we connected kind of directly with the pool so from your bed you can just wake up in the morning and jump into the pool thank you I'm really happy to be here with you guys tonight we have know each other for we've had knew each other for a long time since the first Chicago Biennial so it's really a pleasure to be with you also I think kind of a parallel between your office and my office because we started at the same moment we kind of grow together somehow in the same context but let me go backwards a bit and try to gossip a bit about your background and link it a bit with what you explained tonight because it's something that we haven't mentioned so you both studied in different schools in the better making in Ghana Paula and suddenly you met here in the US in Los Angeles studying at Syark and somehow after those years you started working for an artist and you lightly mentioned it your relation with Jorge Pardo at the beginning and I think that that collaboration and the fact that you start practicing as you know working for an artist really influence your practice after that not only because after those six years working for Jorge Pardo allow you to start a practice together but definitely somehow there's a clear influence of the art world with your own architectural practice so the fact that for instance you always blur you always try to blur the relation between the object let's name it object not product or design but object with art with architecture at large it's quite particular in your work are you are you conscious of that yes for sure we met we met at Syark we I was doing there my masters and Mekki was there as an exchange student and Mekki started working Jorge Pardo before I actually finished school and I was really taken by what he was doing so I kind of pushed myself into the Jorge Pardo practice a little bit I think we just don't know any different do because we have no formation in a proper architectural office so our professional career under the guise of somebody else sort of an apprenticeship that we probably took on in those six years that we were working with him that the practice was very much based in the making of things and thinking kind of conceptually about what you were making from the very beginning until you made it and it transformed into something else and so to give a little bit of context this was a studio environment with a big workshop so the things happened in the computer and then got executed in the shop by all of us that were involved and so I think that and then sort of being on the sideline of the art world when we started to come up with Pedro Higuana engaged with the world of architecture as we understood it coming from that world that what you saw is to a certain degree the response of that so we're half conscious about it and for me what it's also really interesting is that you use the idea of a narrative always behind your present so there's a story always embedded in anything that you do and thanks to the use of that narration you're actually able to blur the limits between the object, the art piece and the architecture so you're always linking the object with the user with the enclosure and beyond that yes I think we like to tell stories through the objects that we create so it is I mean even if some of this storytelling happens like I guess it's yeah the narrative even is kind of part of our process of working because always when you're designing I think we have to often think about like it's either history of the context or the object, the history of the object something has to give you a certain amount of guidelines to how to start approaching something so I guess that's where the narrative comes in and we like storytelling too I think we're also looking for formats to try to describe architecture that kind of give credit to what these things actually are so we are not in the position to be critical critically looking at a project we're developing at the time and try to come up with a project description so we are using a letter as a format to describe what the hell we are doing and how to approach a process of design so these whether it's a letter, a recipe for cooking or sort of a manual for packing something these become tools that enter the design process somehow it's also something that maybe it's quite particular of the format itself the fact that you work a lot in female installations or you know like for instance the one at the MCA in Chicago interior designs allow you to jump really fast from the concept to the materialization and that allows somehow to keep the strength of the concept behind it so how much is that actually a fact in architecture can we affirm that or totally stupid thing to affirm that somehow these kind of practices allow the concept to emerge more easily or the narration to emerge more easily I don't know I mean at the end of our presentation we try to portray some of our more architectural projects let's say and I think of course is there I think we are also trying to step away from explaining kind of the process of our architecture in order to give it more of a conceptual or a narrative or a storytelling a way of telling that to explain like the day-to-day or like the technical parts we cannot jump back from that but I think yes I think of course it's possible because the concept doesn't only lie within an idea we did say that that we were afraid of like big ideas because we do believe that the material itself can show you can tell the story itself it's not it's not necessary like the concept doesn't need to it doesn't like you just have a concept and then you develop something like the concept is throughout all those stages so at the end the result is part of like the things that change within that moment of idea and design that middle part is what we're interested in alright that's the middle part is where the concept develops but I also think that two different animals to a certain degree is like they're sure there's buildings that are highly utilitarian as is a chair or a table so then obviously comes in the client that asks something from you so within the context of museum and installation the liberty you have to develop I wouldn't say really an idea these are kind of motions that put something into and become something in the case of the MCA where we basically just flipped the garden around or the house that we showed it sounds like easy we just flipped like a garden around but also it was a discussion with the museum it was not something that they were completely pleased about at the first sight of like plants within the museum so it's a negotiation I do totally agree I wouldn't say that it's thanks to client it's clearly your way of understanding the practice and I'm seeing this because for instance one of the facts that is happening in the last decades that it's quite controversial is the commodification of pavilions like pavilions and female installations and in recently where the place where the discipline could be pushed further so places were to test things to talk about things that were not able to be discussed in other formats in architecture and during these last decades suddenly pavilions have they turned into something that could be solved and therefore they became products they became objects of the system products of the market and somehow I think that through the fact that you use narration stories embedded in your designs you're able to go beyond the physical but as well you're able to escape that commodification and fight it back somehow maybe obviously the story can last longer than the maybe the commodification of the object but I mean I wonder is it wrong to become an object that gets modified in a way like what do you mean by that why are you kind of resisting the fact that maybe pavilions are bought because it might not be so bad for architects at the end of the day we need to make money somehow right well maybe with this controversy it's a good moment to open the discussion to the public and allow more questions did the archivo you know it did travel in some way has that appeared in other forms in other places besides friends houses well this project actually got donated to a public space and it got destroyed by the people who were using it or what do you mean some stole some of the parts and got broken it's actually still there it sits in the front of the city hall a city hall there are a lot of city halls throughout Mexico City people live in there temporarily put tarps over it and the plants pretty much have been ripped out so it obviously cannot exist as this thing that you saw curated nicely put into the garden of an ex-barragan garden but it does have an afterlife and I kind of appreciate that maybe that's in the next version of the presentation Maki was so afraid of taking the pictures at that moment that's reasonable my camera would have been gone well thank you for the presentation it was very interesting to see these projects and have them described by you and I thought it was fascinating to observe the relationships in the thinking behind those projects one question I want to ask is how do you think the presence of the object that seemed to formulate so much the first part of the presentation you made so the installations which were made by objects often repeated or placed in a context in an environment in a building in a lobby whatever the case was how do you feel that this happens when there's a more conventional architectural project like a house like the two examples you showed in the end because I'm trying to realize what for me was a big difference and I'm realizing now that I think the photographs of the apartments that you saw were even empty of objects they were kind of empty spaces so I want to hear how you feel these two different types of projects like do you feel them as very different or there are different fact that you do have a client that you have somebody that tells you what you can sometimes do but I feel the transgressions are maybe a little less apparent maybe more gesture like for example that we wanted to talk a lot about these patios that you encounter while you walk through the house and that I think is important even if you push back at the facade or you're crossing like a boundary that is at another level and then you have a garden inside the house that kind of talks to that other garden behind it so I think this also becomes something about living or being inside a space and how you walk kind of through it and maybe then it also gets another life because when it gets filled or when it gets bought which that house did and I heard that it completely changed they changed all the woods and put marble in it and they took away the garden the first interior patio I mean it completely now I want to see that afterlife maybe that's also something to do I think as architects you can sort of induce gestures to happen around the way you structure your environments whether that is a table it's like that you decide to put us in front of the auditorium and structure the hierarchies as us presenting to you you're asking us questions or us sitting around a round table and drinking beer and having that same conversation completely different scenario and I think at the end of the day if you replicate that and use the tools that you have available when building spaces somebody who deals with kitchens a lot probably can tell you how the fact that the kitchen moves at a certain point in history into the house affects the way we live together or how the bathroom or the toilet that moves into the house and relates to our body to a certain degree dictates how our own relationship to the body is structured so I think you're completely right that the pictures are lacking stuff but then you have these architectural photographers that take pictures without stuff and then you come later and try to talk to the people and they're like hey can I come and take a picture and I'm like nah but that's it's a I think that there's a link actually across your process and maybe it's not that clear but the idea of craftsmanship is always there even you know in the last in the houses that you have shown especially in the first one actually your first project in the little room that really is the tension of the house and for me it's something that of course I'm extremely jealous because we then have that level of craft machine in Spain anymore we have lost it in the last the last decade and it's something that I always envy about the Mexico production and it's actually a nice scenario that you're not operating it right because you have these local craft machines that have a high value on that but you're also operating in an international level right and somehow it's quite a privileged scenario that we should all be aware of but it's also a double coin of the double side of we have a double side of the coin because you can do it because of a certain you know circumstances of the economy we might get hired for that reason outside the country and I'm being controversial here now but I think that we should talk about it and we should be aware because of for instance the project that you produced in New York you were actually being and I was really happy to listen during the lecture that you were actually being quite sincere we have to produce it in Mexico otherwise we couldn't produce that and somehow so the question is not to be critical with that but actually to be aware and to know how to move forward without losing the quality of the craftsmanship how to be able to keep on operating in an international level keeping the local craftsmanship but at the same time rising the economy of Mexico what's interesting about Mexico on the sideline of that a little bit is that you're dealing with a country that operates on this very crafty level due to the status of its economy but then at the same time is having an output of high industries of car manufacture of aeronautical manufacture of high precision manufacture so it gives us access to these both worlds that exist at the same time and it is a great playground in a way the second thing about it is that we come from a world where we design manufactured in a way the stuff and then when you get a project somewhere else and you actually access over it and you can go see the sites where things are being produced you can take that into your design methodology to a certain degree so that is the great benefit on the other side what were you going to say it's easy no of course we're very conscious of we're in Mexico and we're like there's a saying in Mexico so far away from God and so close to the USA so it has completely like shift like being so close to the US also I think we are an example of this kind of relationship between Mexico and the US now everything that is happening with Trump etc is close to home and we understand the politics and we like to read the politics through objects as well we constantly say it gives you a bit of information of the conditions that are happening in a place that actually work within all types of materials we like to we work with craftsmen, people like the ones that made the pots and we continuously buy from them and we have a very close relationship with the people that produce everything that we do even with the fabricators that did the MCA which was also produced in Mexico and we send it over to Chicago crazy and then we now know all the loopholes that you need to cross bureaucratical things and we know how much we have been stuck in the airport for hours because we have tables with us in the plane so we understand those politics and we believe also that I think that the objects that you create are the ones that have the politics for you I mean in that sense we are not politicians right so we're hoping that whatever we create maybe there's something that informs that part of the process definitely probably it's a matter of raising value like in Spain craftsmanship has been lost not because lack of economy totally the opposite it was lost mainly during our construction boom and it was lost because there was a loss of value towards that and that's a huge disaster more questions Hi I'm just trying to come to terms with what I saw today and it's my first time seeing the presentation and I think I don't know from where I sit there's like a masterful subtlety of what we saw today in terms of continuity of wanting to work within the constraints and I really appreciated it's more of a comment not a question I'll make it short but the fact that there was a video shown of people using spaces of testing ideas the prototypes for the chair the silhouette for the column the packaging etc through to the house the construction and it's unusual for a young office to want to show that part of what they're doing and present it as part of the story and the concept and it's the beginning of something that you started and I think the future looks promising from my seat so just sort of thank you for sharing that it's something that should be recognized because it's atypical in most schools of architecture when you see these presentations I was very happy to see this dimension this craftsmanship dimension and it also showed Lina Bobardi in the beginning of the presentation and Lina was Lina in the context of modernity in Brazil she had an Italian background and she entirely reformulated her way to engage with modernity by looking at Brazilian craftsmanship so that's what makes her work so singular I think it's great and hearing that you also had a background working with an artist and the way that this probably influenced you and how you experiment with materials, you experiment with techniques it makes a lot of sense for me after this was explained and what I think it's great about that is that it's not only about, let's say it's about memory because you are looking you are looking at CNC but you are also looking at ancient techniques of brick making or whatever so it's really about memory, it's about engaging with technology because each new material that you work with you have to again to understand the constraints to understand the possibility and it's about development because when engaged with a material which is ordinary and like a pot or those perforated bricks and you start to give them a new perspective you are also trying, you are also helping to bring these things further so if we think of these ancient techniques, if we think of these, let's say these social structures that are related to the fabrication of those goods etc you are helping to push these things forward you are helping to to give new perspectives to help to find new ways to use these things so I really it's also a comment and I really enjoy to see your lecture thank you I mean in regard to the craft part I mean we constantly like to travel in Mexico because it's also a vast territory with millions of different ways of producing it takes a lot of effort to do this craft like the way that they is to do it so it also has to kind of change and get integrated to like marketable, well not to market it but to understand that the times are also a constraint for these type of things and it's still cheap to produce in Mexico and that has also to change because it's a lot of hard work going into different types of crafts but I think it's definitely a good question that not only you but all kind of this this new international practices that we are kind of living in and dealing with we should all be aware of we're big fans of Lina so of course we know that she was okay I think that with those two last comments that were really nice it's a maybe we can close up the session it was very much