fala atelier: Portraits

[Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] good evening everyone hello hello my name is Ellen Alderman I'm the managing director of public programs here at the Graham Foundation thank you all for coming out tonight we are so happy to have you with us and to welcome Philip magesh of fala Atelier to Chicago proceeding follows inclusion in the Chicago architecture biennial this fall tonight marks the fourth and final event in our series of programs related to our current exhibition spaces without drama or service is an illusion but so is depth curated by Ruth Estevez and 1ax given that the exhibition aims to investigate the recent resurgence of collage and architectural representation in relationship to a sonography and set design I can't think of a better way to close them with a presentation by fala Atelier who have contributed some incredible works to the show including a model theater and book on the second floor and a pair of collages just outside the ballroom door in tonight's talk entitled portraits Philip will discuss how the firm leverages the imprecise and speculative nature of collage and portraiture is strategic drawing tools voguing a dense array of references to tell a story and stimulate dialogue this approach as they put it marries architectures rationality with the inconsistent beauties of reality following tonight's talk I hope you'll join us to continue this dialogue over a glass of wine in the library the galleries in bookshop will be open late so I urge you to go spend some time with followers work and browse the selection of books and journals that we've brought in to accompany the exhibition fala Atelier is an architecture firm founded in 2013 by Philip magesh Ana Luisa Suarez and Ahmed bel koja the group describes themselves as the naive architecture practice based in Porto Portugal tackling a wide range of projects from renovations to birdhouses fala engages with architectural questions through the built environment public engagement exhibitions and academics quick thank you for the introduction and thank you for the invitation for the exhibition and to be here today it's always nice to just yell work side by side with some of our heroes and as a very very young office I mean most of the offices involved in the exhibition are young offices I would say but I think by far we are the youngest so it's very very nice to see our our work next to them and it's unavoidable to talk about hosi when we received the first email from one at a time and we had a first Skype talk to discuss the exhibition it was very confused because he was this is the bookshelf right behind my my chair in the office and he was spotting the the fukuoka hotel from hosi in the back and he wondered if we put it there just because it's on the title of the exhibition should we should we just act like we really love Rossy and pretend no no it's it's actually been there since the day one of the office we had that painting in our previous small space where we worked and it was just there by chance together with our birdhouse our first house under construction right now some of our hero's plants and and it was it was a funny coincidence that he noticed it right away and I always like to start with this image because it's it's not a plan image it it's just a cell phone photo from how what is right behind my desk but I like even more to show this one this is what I see from my desk so this is my laptop here and this is our studio it's 25 square meters I apologize my I use the metric system I don't really understand your system it's small there's a big table eight people work around that table as you can see it's quite chaotic there's cables everywhere coffee cups everyone has their own space but at the same time everyone is sharing everything every talk every discussion when we have client meetings it's chaos because we need to put half of the team on that side to go for a coffee and me and Anna have the meeting you know it's really really insane but it's it's home it's where we really feel comfortable at it's when we started we were free now you are 1118 port when freeing Lisbon and the office is slowly expanding and in September we're going to change to a new place because unfortunately it's not possible to keep working here but it's left or it's still living very very good memories but talking about our practice is a little bit talking about a ghost town it's our practice is a fake I would say we build so far pretty much nothing we have been wandering around for three four years we are holding a lecture in Chicago and everything we did put together sums up to I don't know 400 square meters nothing there are offices in Porto building 1000 times dead that you never heard of and we are here still so I like to show this image because it's a very naive thought to imagine that we are actually a town right now we are we are just a bunch of billboards and as a as a fact we didn't build enough to to prove ourselves as a stable office but because we don't have that pressure you know we we are young we don't we don't really feel the weight on our show we are we are free to define a billboard we want to be we can define our own agenda we can we can we can change tomorrow and go in a radically different direction that it's only our problem no one would care our contracts our clients they come to us because we are cheap not because we are famous or because they want to follow the project we are young young offices cheap offices cheap projects so in that sense we are very very free to do whatever we want with the projects we receive and talking about billboards this is our main billboard this is our website this is where you can see a lot of color you know it's very it's charming even but at the same time as I said it's a fake if you pay attention you have maybe one two three four photos in twenty five images and most of these images are actually illusions they are your collages they are possible scenarios for four buildings we are building now course this condition is changing very very fast we have under construction 15 buildings right now and probably in the future in the next 2-3 years this is going to probably invert but it's it's very funny for us to see that at some point in our careers this point with four apartments we managed to be talking at the granham Foundation Chicago and it's it's impressive it it was not expected it was never part of a plan and today I'm going to talk about portraits portraits is a fancy word to use in the office to describe our collages but it's it's it's it's what we are trying to achieve let's say as I said our office is a kind of billboard office and we want to we want to move away from this concept of collage and probably settling in this concept of portraits because it has it has well first it sounds better and it's much more poetic but it has a kind of double meaning that the collage doesn't the collage seems like a technique it's very technocratic it's it's describing how you do what we do but portraits is describing a thing it's describing a kind of goal it's describing something at the end of the of the path and one of the reasons one of the things I'm going to do today is that I'm not going to present projects it's the first time I'm going to present this lecture it's experimental in that sense and I'm going to do it because every time we hold a lecture anywhere we present 11050 project is as matter the first question in the end is why do you do collages if we are not lucky enough someone asks how do you do collages if you are really not lucky at all they ask which software do you use to produce collages so depending on the on the whole look who we are we will end up explaining why we do the images we do so considering the context of this exhibition and the context of six luxury we felt that this was an opportunity for us to do a kind of check point and even to discuss in the office you know to put into paper or in this case into a PDF this kind of theory this kind of rhetoric this kind of experimental research we have been conducting in the last four years and try to verbalize it in such a way that someone that never met us before people that never work with us could actually understand what we do and these collages they started because we had no agenda as I said we we never planned our office me and Anna study together in Porto and we started we are partners in the office but we are also partners in life and we started doing a couple of extracurricular project competition here small Pavillion there and at some point we went both to Switzerland we met Amit who was also doing his own thing besides what he was doing in the office then we started collaborating and one day we just felt like we have enough as a body of work to give ourselves a name we have enough to create a website we have enough to if not a website let's call it a portfolio that is digitally available let's let's just throw ourselves on the market and see what what happens and at this time we were still working for someone else we were still in Japan because after academic experiences between Zurich Lausanne Porto Gothenburg Singapore Tokyo and professional experiences with architects as hairy Googler Toyo Ito said Jima tsukamoto from Baja I mean we we were gathering a lot of ambition from the places where we had been and you know when you work for is a photo from Santa's office when you work 20 hours a day seven days a week and you are always there it really triggers something in you you want to jump to the next level you wanna you want to do something else and fun enough while while I was working there and Anna was working at Toyo Ito's we decided to do our first competition as follow we decided to try to you know stop with the student competition kind of thing and with this ideas competitions that leaders know where and to do something that if you if we will if we would win we would build something we would build a public building of course we didn't win it was it was obvious it was not going to happen but what was very very compelling for us was to understand that we had no time as I said we were working 20 hours a day it was it was impossible for us to have a proper meeting because although we were living together we had different schedules so we didn't see each other for a few months almost and everything we did was done almost on a conceptual level so we were discussing a lot we were talking on skype like I was working on this housing project in Paris for the office and I was skyping with Anna that was working on a Mexican Museum and we were discussing a library in Portugal like this was this was our our conditions so there was there was a lot of this there was a lot of texts a lot of narration a lot of description so our architecture started a lot from that since we had no time to actually sketch and in Porto it's a sketching school sketch alot in if there's the problem we keep drawing and drawing and drawing until the solution comes out and we are not very we are not big fans of that so we started talking and talking and talking and our goal was to achieve the chair but the maximum we got was to the image of a chair and since we had very little time 1:19 like 45 minutes one hour I produce these two images and I sent them to Anna to kind of summarize everything we had been discussing for a couple of weeks and I sent them to Anna and Anna made minimal Corrections and that was it the first two collages we ever did were done at 7:00 8:00 a.m. I don't know after a 20-hour shift at sauna in one hour and we did these images not to do the final presentation images of a project we did them because we wanted to communicate with each other that was the main goal but since we had no time we just produced a couple of plans and we submitted this and the results were fantastic the the critiques were I mean as you can imagine Portugal is not the most experimental context but in one hour we were able to produce two images that could say much more than if we had spent a couple of weeks working on them rendering testing lights filters lens flares whatever so we felt like we found something we didn't do it because someone else was doing it I mean we have our own influences of course and we know what was happening around us but we did it because of our lack of resources and these images were very very simple they were just a couple of textures and a few painting cropped few crops from paintings and that was it so a few years later when we get this call from joseph griemann asking us to exhibit these two images in the Chicago the first edition of the Chicago the Chicago biannual we were amazed how you know the billboard that I am a monument kind of thing happened that such images that would not plan the search ended up as a kind of art piece in a biennial it was it was it was fantastic for us to see and we were living in a Tanaka again at a time in this one actually and when you live in just six square meters it kind of changes your perception of everything your perception of scale your process your perception of domestic space and as I said we had very different frequencies so we had only one desk I mean we had only one square meter to move so and while Ana was working at home I was in the office and then I would have my two hours at home and while she was in the office so it was enough it was fine we didn't even share the bed because when she was sleeping I was working and when she was working I was sleeping so this became our home our office our well our everything and for one year we were working in this environment and you can see some of the the references in the back and a couple of days later not even weeks after delivering the first competition as hala let's say we see the second one and the second one was he had some influence from the space that we were occupying but most important what I want to talk about are the images so we decided to try something else let's try what we did before but let's mix real photos let's not try this kind of painting like based image let's really take the references were talking about we were talking about rocket on Fazal Japanese contemporary architecture and Jeff wall and Jeff wall was very important for us at this moment and let's just mix those let's just see what happens if we take the moriyama house and we just put it on top of itself let's see what happens if we take the Maruyama house plus this Bordeaux project from Lockhart on vessel and we put the Invisible Man from Jeff wall in the mix let's see how these two come together and we were not that happy I mean these images were almost photos technically speaking they were collages they were built in the same way but the final result was moving too far away from our idea as a project and what we had learned with the first project was that the more distant from these images get the closer to get to be a pure idea and the more understandable they become so days later third competition and this one was very complex big park sports park in porto and we did almost 25 renderings because there were a lot of spaces different sports and they requested images for all of them and after doing all these images that were normal images we decided to just give a step back and say no no this is not going to happen so if we are in this crossroads and we need to make a decision again there's no pressure these are competitions we do whatever we want to do we're going to do it right and instead of 25 images we produced free I mean we actually produce maybe 50 collages after and from those 50 we selected 3 and we're going to summarize the proposal in these free images there's garden and in that garden you have white walls outside the white walls you have a public garden inside white walls you have a sports field that's it and with this free images we managed to convince the jury of something we didn't win but the point was that they understood the proposal they got it and we understood that there were many ways to build and to to think these images but what was really really relevant is that these images they were a tool they were means to an end they were there to explain something and the better they would explain it and they were not alone I mean when you do an image like this you have plans you have axles you have other drawings supporting them but they were working as a tool for us they were not this kind of we were doing them during the process like this was done before there was even a drawing this collage was done before there was even a section or a plan it was it just happened and and these three competitions were done in two months so the last two months we were in Japan and when we come back to Portugal there was the the most important checkpoint ever we decided to to gamble we spend all our money we bought our our office we bought furniture we bought the computers we we just risk everything we hired collaborators and we just put all our chips that we bet all our chips that this is going to work out we gonna we going to make it we're going to make it work and we even released our Facebook page and we got our first Commission to do an exhibition for the Lisbon architecture tree an alley about Tanaka game and this was not really a competition there was there was a budget there was a brief and and we had to we had limitations we were not just working in the middle of nowhere and inventing whatever we wanted to invent so it was an opportunity also to test again if this is let's say this knowledge we collected in during our stay in Japan was actually gonna produce results and what happened was that there was a curatorial team on the other side and criteria teams they are very demanding they have ambitions for their exhibitions and as such we need to understand that we were not working alone anymore so the collage for the first time was used as a process tool so we used the collage not only has a you know a final product to say you know this is our project you can see it here this is the collage we use it during the process to actually explain to the people we were working with what we were trying to achieve and in some sense this is not that far from the sketches we learn how to do it Berkeley you know what I can sketch beautiful perspectives we are all taught to do it but we never did it me and I never did it Emma doesn't sketch that much so the collage became a kind of very graphical very colourful sketch of ours and when we got to the final proposal we started understanding two things the first one was that the people on the other side they would get it they got clearly all the 10 20 proposals we sent them and they understood what we are trying to do and if these images took us one hour to do why should I spend 12 instead of one I mean they get it and the second thing we understood was that there was such a a kind of close relation between what we imagine and what the collage was trying to say and what we actually did and how conceptually they were so close how the architecture and the proposals we were doing were somehow becoming in you know the collages were trying to help the architecture but the architecture is helping the collage and at some point you don't know it's like the chicken and the egg which one came first and the technique had an influence on the architecture itself at some point we think because this building was there there was a layering of elements on top of it so we added the structure and on the structure we added the contents and you all probably know Photoshop it's almost like you turn on and off the layers and the thing just makes the image complete or not and in a series of projects that follow this idea of layering and overlaying of elements became more or less clear and we kept doing competitions and several of the topics we like so much to address the generic room the greed the repetition the square became more or less compatible with such a strategy and in this proposal it was becoming really unclear for us what was happening were we doing the collages before of the project the project before of the collages was the was the goal to achieve a plan that could produce a collage or to achieve a collage that will help us to define the plan it was really becoming a kind of gray zone and when we decided to do this there was the the last competition before everything changed we had a very big plot the plot was pretty much the size of the proposal and this was an elementary-school and we produce we produced a collage project we the project is divided in two structures there's a wood structure that could be completely independent that contains all the classrooms circulation reception etc and there is a brick structure that defines the perimeter and the perimeter grabs the wood structure and grabs the playground from the outside you have just this presence so you have this Waal that somehow defines a territory that grabs the program of the school and on the inside you would have the public side of the wood structure and the classrooms and because rhetoric sometimes is connected to the tactics we exposed the wood structure as much as possible so that you could really feel that this structure holds this wood structure the the wood side the wood part at brick pulled it up and even the forms of the elements we were asked to add like there was a pond in a sandbox and a basketball field and whatever even those had shapes that fell like they were collage so at this moment we felt a danger that this kind of informal research we were following could become could become a trap for our own architecture we were extremely convinced with the proposal but at the same time the way how we were getting to the proposal was was scaring us a bit and something happened that changed everything we had our first client and clients you know if someone comes to you and tells you I'm going to give you 100,000 euros or dollars in this matter to do something for me trust me they care they they care you spend their money and they they are not educated as architects most of the times they don't really understand anything I'm saying right now they don't really and they really care they don't care they have the money and most of them as in this case have commercial purposes behind the projects they're doing so we were forced to confront our own research that at a time I'd already like we worked in together for almost two years and you know this unstoppable force there is a client that wants to do money with his own project and this was the let's call it the turning point because the project was very simple we are talking about a small apartment 60 square meters sign Lisbon the apartment was completely wrecked we had to completely refurbish it and we had to choose how to communicate with the client and it was a turning point because we could have decided okay this was fun so far but now let's try to get you know mainstream but what we did is that we didn't care we just kept going and as I said there was never an agenda twas never planned and since there was no pressure we felt if this doesn't work out who cares let's just try to see what happens and it was a success the client understood it on that side of the table there was someone who had no idea of who we were what we cared about but she understood she understood exactly what we were trying to achieve and why do we understood also is that this was a very fast project three months many things decided on site the moment the big building was bought we had no project demolitions already happening so everything was kind of a reaction but what was fantastic was that with the collage we define the distance to reality so we were not the client knew that the table was not that table that green was not that green that cabinet was not that cabinet she understood the general principle for the project and the collage work as a kind of perimeter it told her this is what you're going to get I don't know exactly how it's going to look like in the end but this is what you're gonna get and Indian it actually it worked out quite well the project was a small success but what was important for us that wonders we understood that we didn't need to be afraid we could just use the same thinking the same technique and the same working process regardless of power let's say of our client because when we working for ourselves as I said in competitions you do what you want you can get to a point where you say well I don't care if I win or not I just want to do the right project that's why we never win but in a client-based project you need to understand that these people they bring the money they they make decisions and they are part of it you know you need to learn how to dance with them if you don't it's not going to happen but what was even more amazing was that we had a chance to confront a kind of parametric decision that was the collage and its final outcome and to confront the two of them side-by-side and to understand how for the first time except for the exhibition which was a kind of an experiment how far are our clothes were our rhetorics to the final result of the construction and we got obsessed with opening at this time we during this process we bought I don't know three or four different biographies from him and we started getting obsessed with the way how his images were so powerful they were not really about space you see especially this image doesn't show us a lot there is a window you know that there's probably a garden outside there's another building on the other side of the park there are a couple of object objects that hint intimacy that hint you know a lifestyle even I mean who puts the telephone on the floor and there's more important than that there's a tension Hockney's paintings are so tense they they almost make you feel something and at the moment where we were moving slowly from these public competitions to a domestic scale we were moving from 5000 square meters projects to 60 square meters project Hockney became more and more an obsession of ours and the project kept coming I mean these were apartments that had several interventions during the years this is a almost a 150 years old structure and the more we we got into the project the more we got into the images because at some point as I said adding egg and chicken we could not really distinguish one from the other and we started producing images in do it and do it's allowed us to you know get they were fakes because you see like the dimension of this room is not the same dimension of this bedroom but it didn't really matter for us what was important is that this but they were allowing us some sort of consistency they were allowing us to explain the idea at a higher level and if in the end the result was going to be what we expected great if not well let's see and and we started building the images in pairs and sometimes not only in pairs in triplets and I don't know how to say wait for or wait five I mean we just started producing images in series and series in series and the image that we use for communication that is this one was actually built on the first day of the project because we just built a space as a collage and then it kept evolving and evolving and evolving and we saved hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of versions of all the steps and on the first day the first version of this collage had just the the white space and the furniture before even it had doors and windows and shutters and so on and again it was interesting for us to see in the final outcome how close the two of them are and how somehow the collage is not really really perfect the perspective is not exactly that perspective there's no cat in the apartment there's you know but it is what we got and the client understood and that was the main conclusion we needed to reach that we could communicate with normal non architect clients without needing to go commercial and these are commercial projects so they are supposed to be sold we don't know who was going to occupy them was going to use them so we had to expose ourselves a little bit and to do what apne does in his paintings to expose and to propose almost a lifestyle the way how how he composes his paintings has a lot to do with a kind of his own perspective of the world and his la period and and well what we were trying to do here is that we have never been to LA so I don't know how is it there but it's to expose the way how we me Anna Amit and our collaborators would occupy this these rooms and and then see and confront the room itself with the way how the clients ended up occupying them and it's a lot about bringing small elements that we were the ones bringing like and this photoshoot we were the ones bringing that this is all ours the we brought books we brought vases the vases from our office went there because we wanted the photo to be as close as possible to the collage and vice versa and as the project kept happening this technique of doubles and do it sorry became more and more present and as you can see the based textures they never change so these images were built and on the wall we would have ten of them and we were making all the tests and on those versions sometimes the space was always the same but just the occupation was changing because as I said we had no idea of who was going to Navitus basis so we had to somehow do a project inside the project it was how is this base going to be inhabited and again the projects were happening and they were being built so we could confront that you see it's not exactly the same thing the perspective is not completely accurate but the the way how we fought the space is the same and that was what mattered the most first and the clients kept changing and changing and all of them are understanding it so answering one of the most typical questions we got after the lectures do clients understand the clashes yes they do they actually understand them better because when they see this they are not discussing the finishes they understand okay there's going to be stone on the floor the doors are going to have different tones of blue and there's a white curtain on the window in the back that's it if I give them a rendering they're going to be talking about the handle I don't want to talk about the handle I want to talk about architecture I know I'm not an interior decorator so I want to talk about the aspects that matter for me it's very important that the side of this panel has the wood exposed and that the front just the 2d surface has this blue tone and the client understood that so when I told him it was going to pay X amount more to keep this detail I understood it but but it was part of a process and that was relevant and when we went on the other side the same thing so it was fantastic for us to see that you could use these tools to express more than just you know this is your room there there was an idea behind the space there was in this case this curved wall was very important because of the programs behind and behind the wall needing a certain amount of space so we had to curve it just slightly to fit them but it became the key attribute of this space so these doors were designed as kind of you know we didn't have the sounds to design this is an important apartment on the outside of building exactly the same so this was our elevation and and you see even in the patio it was not exactly as planned but the main idea behind it remain and the client understood it and that was the most important for us at this time we started receiving a few commercial project retail projects I mean and in retail projects the occupation of the images was different because you don't really going to put you know domestic scale objects on them so they became dryer it became more almost sad and but the projects themselves still had this relation between the 2d appearance of the collage and the physical consummation of that space and even some of the project choices like this is a real estate shop when you enter the shop you have this monolithic of pieces of stone and as you move in a space that is this kind of flamboyance scenario you understand that these sheets they're actually 2 centimeters are so thin they're so fragile so it's a the project's had this influence from from the images that we're building them we didn't stop doing competitions of course and when the chicago biennial released this open call for kiosks probably the less relevant program worldwide we felt so amazed with the idea of producing a masterpiece of out of a kiosk and what what they asked us was that it was mandatory on the presentation to use photos of models so we would have to build models we would have to go physical and we took it as an opportunity to actually try what if we build collages physically that's how it start richard Amazonia was not using Photoshop it was actually cropping stuff so what if we actually tried and for one months we had four adults in a room cutting color paper ranges and just building collages we did like eight of them and from those eight free went all the way until the end and then and two of them are actually outside and it was it was such a relief to end in to end them and to finish them and just say okay it's done but we learned so much from it the way how we build these collages and the way how how you have to work the materials taught us something about depth keyword and about distortion because we were thinking about of doing this real scale but there was so much distortion I mean you can imagine you had to cut the people in one size here and the completely different size there and you know when did we don't Photoshop you just do command T and you scale it and it's done but when you build it physically and you crop 50 people and you understand oh we need to crop 25 more because the ones in the back they don't match so we have to and it was it was a fantastic month we had a lot of fun and and we got an honorable mention so it was it was it was birthday and the competitions that followed letters in a different direction like this collage is also outside but it will see it's not exactly this collage because we started building them physically and then editing them digitally so there was a kind of hybrid mixture between techniques and as you can see this is only one but then with Photoshop you can make it night day etc and and it was it was a period of consummation of experiments the competitions the the relation with the clients the need to communicate this to more generic public and then there was another change I call it hybrid we got Commission's to build buildings or to renovate buildings that were in an urban context so we were not working inside four walls anymore there was a place there was a site there was there were neighbors and and this created a dilemma for us because when we were doing a competition we were building something from scratch so we would build image from zero but when we when we were confronted with his context we had to we had to operate in a different manner and the first thing we would we try to do was to deal with these images the same way as we would do in a competition it's a new building let's try to build it from scratch but in reality it was not true because we kept a building so we were not fully convinced so we moved to the second option that was okay we go to the models we produce and we try to transform them with photos and a lot of photoshop into into a collage but again this was a complete collage it was not really reflecting the con X in which the buildings were working on and as a coincident and as a coincidence we got a commission to refurbish a building important that the municipality did not allow us to demolish we had to keep all of the granite elements around the openings but we could play with the with the material between this granite elements and this was this image was a key image for us because it's not really collage it's not really a photo it was somewhere in between it was you know we could always change the tile so we just changed the tiles but what this image allowed us to end and now it's built and what this image allowed us to do was to actually put in context the collage so to make a collage somehow of an addition over a real existing element and since then we got a few more and the front facades are always protected as you can see in Porto it's not the same building all the time but it could be if we decide to use the same tiles everywhere we produce the same project over and over but on the back facade the municipality is very open-minded do whatever you want you can you can demolish because the tourists don't see it so you can just do whatever you want that's how you define every Church in Porto keep the facades and we had much more fun there so in the back facade the first project we were still kind of afraid of changing anything but on the second one we went ballistic and on the third one and a fourth one and so on and as the project's kept growing in scale this is a very funny one this guy buys a plot in the 80s builds a clothing factory but makes it look like a house according to his words because he wanted to integrate the building in the landscape and this was the result thirty years later we are commissioned to transform this closing clothing factory into a housing unit with six apartments so we decided to make it look like a factory and what happened here is that as a start this is a photo that is already 30% collage that at some point moves to a 50/50 photo and collage and that at some point moves to a 100% collage in this hybrid became more and more relevant for us so we understood that there was a tool you are not using properly photographs we could bring photographs to this mix and we could as you can imagine these are the final versions of it and this image had again a lot of versions variations and so on but this mixture between what could photograph on site and what we could do digitally that somehow we learn from the scans we did for the Chicago kiosk and so on became more and more appealing for us and now for example this is a distorted perspective of one of the buildings we are building right now even during construction we keep going there and we are doing collages of the process of deconstruction and construction always trying to fit the same perspective so that we can create a consistent narrative so between what was there as a start what was there a couple of months ago and where we expect to be in a couple of months more the perspective is always the same and the the fact that we can manipulate these images as much as we want and that software is allowing us to do more and more with them is becoming a thin mini office like we want to find out more about what we can or cannot do we want to expand the possibilities of our own work and even the architecture itself as I said in the beginning it was very rhetorical and de tactical like we were really collaging elements on top of elements but even today when we decided to get rid of this facade and build something new the the constructive detail and even the choice of materials it could have used concrete it would have made more sense but even the choice of materials reflects a kind of layering and the detail we're going to have on this window is that that we're going to have the glass then the metal structure and then the old building and even the old building is going to be treated as this kind of collage of elements we're going to expose the wood structure that we can preserve we're going to add new metal beams everything that is structural is been here in wine and then so this is the opposite perspective are going to do it you can see all the elements remain in the same place and then the next floor and we are doing this kind of garden matta-clark moment where everything is somehow being you know we are turning off a lot of layers on Photoshop and we are selecting the ones we want to keep and we are adding a few new ones so when we go now on site you see that there are some elements that remain some that are added some of these walls are going to be plastered others are going to be just painted and you know this is how we have we I don't have it here but we are taking this from this perspective we are doing collages on top of collages and you can already see from this perspective when this is finished and and this is an exercise we are doing more and more often so a site visit usually results in two or three hours in the office after just editing and working with the photos I mean we already know how the project is going to look like but we want to test it and since many of these projects have several decisions made on site we are using this as tools to just question and to be sure that this is exactly where we want to go and clients tag along that's very very important so as I said the collage is a tool but it's not the only tool we use we always start with plants we always always always always start with claims if the plan is not there there is no there's no there's no second step so we draw a lot of plans we and we we need to find a reason behind the plan before we move to through the collages because a plan is a group of facts I can measure a plan I can understand the size of an element on a plan I can read it I can describe a plan by words if I write a text if I give you a page of text you can draw exactly the same plan as I have there so a plan is a logical element it's completely mathematical a collage is the absolute opposite a collage is just feelings like a punch change you know like if you put the two of them side by side you define the project if you have a possibility to explain your project your client I mean these are several stages of one project if you can show the plan and next we put a collage you can simultaneously show the rhetoric behind it you can explain it you can narrate it and you can punch the client with this feeling of what is going to get because the plan is not showing that the plan is not telling me that there's color that there's you know there's a soul the plan is only giving me a skeleton of theory but then the collage gives you the perfect complement to this and just to this mystified we of course we work with free D of course we also render of course we do those things it's necessary and you can see that sometimes the perspectives are almost the same and the rendering has the advantage of being with the right size and all the elements have the right proportions and they and and it's also very operative too but I cannot explain the soul of a project with an image like this and I'm not going to pay 1200 euros to someone else to build an image for me to do it I'm going to spend 10 minutes on Photoshop and I'm going to do it myself and these images they have they have an appeal that you know many times they are simplistic they are very almost pornographic they just say this is the idea this is a one-liner and that's important because they are there to do that they are not stating facts they are not stating more than what they show the plan is doing the rest we are doing the rest the images says to the client yes or no the client can just look at an image and say no way I don't want it but if you looks at the plan you will think about it you will go home you will write as an email to us saying yeah I don't know let's see let's think about when he sees the image if he likes it it likes it if he does like it that there's no way we're going to be able to convince him and as this happens we are very much obsessed with colors materials textures if we decide we're going to use curtains on a space we need to understand how is the text the texture of the fabric so that we can scan it and put it on the image if we're going to use a certain kind of color and we are obsessed with this palette of colors and certain tiles we are going to try to find the right tone so that the image is as close to reality in that sense maybe the perspective is completely up the colors and textures it's exactly what you gone again and when we produce the collages we also need to occupy the space and and you will see that in most of our projects the way how we work are we occupy them it's we have the generic room and in that room we place the furniture any elements almost as if they are art pieces in a museum they are detached from the background there is the white canvas and there you know there's the painting on top of it and we end up talking with our clients that they need to furnish the space in the same way they need to be able to understand that the space has an idea behind it the project is not just some sort of desire of ours to do it like that no there's an idea there's a rhetoric that starts with a plan and that rhetoric only makes sense if all the objects that are occupying the space after are treated in the same way as the image was treated so in this case all the elements including the kitchen and the hood were designed as if they could you know I could take it away from here and put it there it's a complete fly I can't it's completely grounded there but visually speaking it feels like that all the pieces of furniture have strong colors like I would never at least from my house buy read furniture but it makes sense there so it's not really about what I like or what I don't like it's what it's about what rhetorically makes sense in such a project I mean it's a garage house it makes sense that you can bring a car in and and then the images they that I liked most are for example this one this is this shows nothing you see a wall in a column in a beam that's it but space wise but when you start seeing the tension of the elements you can hint there's a sofa and so that says social there's a reflection of a bed so that says private at the same time there's a car which is kind of weird and then there's a curtain that it's separating two spaces there's this plant I mean this tension reminds me a lot of that image from Hockney again that this was a cell photo photo you know like you just got there and this photo says more to us than this you know like everything we were trying to achieve with the project is summarized in this very very strange photo and the tension of these elements the tension of the car and the bed compared to a sofa that you know if you don't know the project and if you just show this to someone you will not understand it completely you will you will guess there's something strange about the space but you will not understand it completely and this is probably my favorite photo of this project and sometimes as I said we we have to invent we have we were doing of these competitions we're reinventing something from scratch we were just creating out of nothing and as you saw in most of the projects I showed so far we are now correcting something we are you know these are buildings like this is the one I'm going to talk about this is a 120 years old building that has been abandoned for almost three decades it's completely rotted on the inside completely destroyed when we got there and there's not a lot to do here you know like sometimes you have a building like this you should be careful about what you propose but when you find this I mean this was a single-family house the client wanted to transform it into four small apartments there's not a lot you can keep so the question is if you have nothing to to ground you how can you how can you produce a project in such a context because again the facade is going to remain that municipality wants it very much but on the inside we had to create our own universe so references are very important and the same way as David Hockney had we're upper also were very important on a graphical level because of the tension of their images we have several other references then at this time for example we're looking very deeply into the early years from Toyo Ito and these morphemes and when we have nothing to work with we have to invent them to create and to bring these elements at our own desire and lera one of our collaborators says that we are shameless formalists and yeah I'm fine with it I'm I don't have a problem that form is usually connected to a very negative image like I say form and people in the room start you know getting low no it's it's perfectly fine if it's if it's controlled it's it's a tool and this is here to show that the the way how we build collages at some point even goes on top of how we are we render we render these tests in five minutes and then we just start sketching on top of them then we go on Photoshop and we put those layers from this file on top of that image and the collage becomes a kind of ultimate expression of how we see the space and again this is a space that we don't know who's going to live there so we have to occupy it ourselves as if we would be there so we expose our own our own ambition let's say our own existence over the images we produce because we could just do this and it's the same space but honestly I prefer this one and but if I show this to the client the client still gets it but he will not get it completely when I show him this is convinced because he's yes the space is inhabited and that's the final goal and it was fantastic to see the brochure of this project people that want to buy departments they get this image they don't they are confused they are expecting this kind of Vitra furniture rendered image and so on and then you open the brochure in the cities like whoa what is what is happening but what is important is that they understand it fantastic and and now it's this is almost built it should be finished in a couple of months but as this as I said in the back sometimes we don't really have an alternative other than erasing completely what is there and instead of building this trying to find something else and as I said we are shameless formalist so we don't we don't mind sometimes going a few steps for and really trying to make the back facade the main facade because in this case that's how we see it it's since legally speaking we cannot intervene in the street side we er quickly look at this building as the street side is a back facade the front facade is actually the one facing the garden it belongs only to four people because this is a private court here so only the people that live here will see this facade and the guys living there they don't deserve it but they will still see and it's almost it's almost finished now this is a photo from yesterday morning and we were we loved that there are some materials that collaborate with us we love marvel marvel in Portugal is like the same thing as plywood in the US I don't know it's it's cheap it's I'm serious like the plywood panels with unrolled pine wood you have here in the US we don't have that I pay a fortune to bring them from Belgium to Portugal because we don't have that and instead we have this so we have fun with it since that so it's a material that is very affordable I mean it's not the cheapest but it's still very affordable and you can produce very funny composition like this is a 2d surface it's completely flat but you can you can create a sense of depth that is even more emphasized by the reflection because when you are there if I'm in front of the facade I see my reflection in three different colors and it's it's it's very interesting to to work with and sometimes as I said we not sometimes we time we started using photos as a kind of mechanism to achieve so we started doing collages and then photographing the spaces that we did the collages so that we could compare the two now we take the photo before during and during the construction and we do two collages and and we overlay them so the egg and chicken question becomes again very relevant what came first the first photo of the site as it was the the collage then what is the order it's not just an egg in a chicken they're like six stages what what happens before and after and images produced in duets allow us to to be playful sometimes and enter explain for example in this case to decline that departments are very small she's a 3,000 square metres building with 30 apartments and they are not that big but since they are all the same we were trying to explain that although you have two sides one has the kitchen and the other one has doing though you could just close the two curtains and keep the two exposed beams with these curtains and create a kind of temple in the middle and this image allowed us to explain it and then we build this small model just off the temple side and they got it and again this is a house that is under construction and we keep going back and forth with the this is the exact same perspective how the space looks like now versus how it's going to look like in the future and sometimes we go there and we take the photo and we take that photo into a collage and then we start changing the frames and the colors and you know it's being decided now because we already have the quote we know the money we have for a project but changing this between six panels or four panels it's the same so the collage is helpful in that sense and what I was afraid that would happen in the beginning ended up happening in reality that is the way how we think the projects today is somehow related to the way how we think the collages it became unavoidable and this is a gana building this is a regular proposal old building poor to synthesize etc several several small rooms we just clean it completely and we define four apartments we define a new staircase and bathrooms and there's a connection between the street side and the garden side and there's a lot of colors you see the front facade upside down it's always the same and in the back facade we did something something but what is important for us is that on these spaces you have so you have big studio this is almost 50 square meters with a bathroom and there's a small kitchen counter so you need to organize this space and the client says okay just build gypsum walls everywhere and divide it and no because it's been quality of such a space is that it's big so you have this place the biggest mistake you could do is just cut the space in two because 25 plus 25 is less than 50 in architecture so if you can find a technique if you can find a way that you can divide a space that you can create you know the social hierarchy because people are afraid of having a bedroom and the living room as one space you could you could achieve that so this is just a study on colors uh so with this element this is a concrete column that the four apartments have it's exactly in the center and with the directions of the pavement we could divide it in areas so you could have the dining cooking leaving sleeping or depending on how you move the furniture around you could whatever and as you see the kitchen can never move but it's always designed in such a way like it feels I could just take this and flip there and it's still the same which is not true but it feels like that and because this column is actually not structural it's not holding anything it's just holding the space as an architectural creation it doesn't touch the ceiling it stops 30 centimeters it form so because he told us what if you put a cabinet no what if you put a ball no I want to put the minimal element and I put a concrete call it's the minimal architectural element but if the concrete column touches the ceiling rationally speaking everyone is going to read it as a structural element if it doesn't people will understand sooner or later that that column is there for another purpose and the purpose here is to help organize the space and when you move from one apartment to the other you see the pavement remains the column remains the doors move because it's in your apartment but the function here is also so in one case we could have the bedroom in the back and the table in the front or vice versa and when it turned around again you see the same thing so this layering of functions private column public garden you know the way how we think the the project becomes itself a succession of layers and again back facade fan and some projects are getting really really really literal like this is a very old building in Porto with eight apartments I mean it was one house but it will be divided into a department and the way how we it's there's a stair in the middle for levels and then you always have one apartment in the front and one in the back and the way how he how we read it was that again the client wants to retail to divide space but we didn't really want to divide it you see it's very high it's almost 4 meters in ceiling height what if we found a way that we had one room but we divided into three rooms because the guy wanted kitchen living sleeping so what if we extrude and when we had a chance to clean it all and go there and build this kind of mock-up what if we just build this walls and you know depending on the perspective you would be looking literally at walls and if you would move a little bit you would be looking your bedroom and your living room are one if you rotate 45 degrees you are just in the living room if you move around and and and of course you can imagine the gradation of light you have here you have 100% eighty percent sixty percent of light so there's there's this game where you have four functions four rooms but it's just one room but the way how it is built it's built with layers again it's you see this is one possible perspective where from the entrance I see the sleeping area and I probably could see the shining from the sleeping and I could see this no but sometimes I only I only guess those those those those layers and the way how the image is built again tries to reflect on that that depending on where I am I only see one function and half-wall or vice versa because this was are very very important in that space or the opposite when we went so far that instead of proposing a building as a collage we started reading the building's we were gonna refurbish as collages themselves already so this is a four thousand square meters building in Lisbon and it's from the late 19th century very high ceilings beautiful plaster works but when we entered we noticed that there were several rooms more or less the same and all of them with these beautiful different doors it almost fell comical like this is 60 centimeters by almost three meters this is not common and the room on that side is this is just one room there are not three rooms there's just one room here and run room there and we feel like this is this is so funny it's almost like someone was trying to to play a game that we could now continue and this was the plan as we found it and we decided to just remove a couple of this walls that made no sense and emphasized the grid and you can see the new ones that were added they interact so they are not they are not there they are new so they say they are new but everything else is just agreed and although the rooms are not exactly the same size the way how we see them is that they are all the same the fact that one is four and yellow one is 4.5 and the other one is 3.8 meters it doesn't it doesn't really make a difference for us they are all exactly the same and as you can see the base of the collage is always the same and the occupation changes and for us the collages goes so far that theoretically speaking these are the bedrooms these are the living areas and this is a kind of in-between condition but if you put your bed here your sofa there and you want to have dinner in this one it's up to you the spaces are treated again generic canvas grid square bla bla bla and the occupation is defined by the user so in these collages we are just randomly placing the furniture in such a way that could activate I don't know which room this is these are invented rooms except for this one this one we fell it was too funny not to use these are invented rooms that we just speculate about and this is actually a room in the middle of the space imagine your living room without a window why not it's perfectly possible and imagine that your bedroom is actually on the main facade facing the street it could be it could be so nice and you see we could show the same images without anything and we did to explain it to the client and the pink wire there are pink walls all of them are blue the pink walls are the ones we added so that it's very clear that the geometry of the new walls and the new doors are new and you can read them and everything that was existing was existing and the walls we closed we just painted so every time there was a door and we closed it we just painted a blue square so that it's clear that there was a door there at some point it's not part of the space anymore but you can visually see what was there the whole time and and as I said it's very important for us that in this project for example we read the building as a collage we worked it as a collage and in the end we proposed generic spaces that we ourselves are occupying as you know collage again and this is the this is a building we are building now it's a temporary museum for first help and the perspective becomes a topic because we become more and more obsessed with cohn we became control freaks and now even the way how we build images is somehow super rigid like this is a square it's a cube so the images we produce to see both opposite facades are exactly the same and control freak so life style we could try to I'm going to pass through this part because I already talked about it it's we could produce our images always without the furniture but what happens is that the definition of this space happens almost at the end when the project is almost finished but the furniture is there since day one like when we start defining the typology which has nothing to do with form it's already occupied and as the time passes we just work on this but the occupation keep moving and adapting according to the changes but it's there since day one although this is actually what we are building this is how we are always looking at it and the same thing and and and this is something that happens not only in collages the way how we produce our plans is also that we are so obsessed with if the space is actually going to work out and now cookie I mean if you propose a living room like this you need to make sure it actually works so we we are always working with this occupation and these are examples of projects of commercial projects which help release our project that are going to be sold so we are going to be the ones bringing whatever we want a photograph there and then they are sold and we don't know how they are going to be occupied and the same but these are projects where we know the client so we know exactly what is going to go there and fun enough in this project we actually don't and this is the same the same another project where we know the client we don't feel the need to actually furnish this because in this ones we are just discussing space with the client so we don't need to expose ourselves and this was something we conclude only a few months ago that someone told us yet but this garage it doesn't match why does it match because it doesn't have the furniture yeah but we know was going to be there so we finally understood that what we were doing was happening because of not knowing who was going to Navitus paces in yet and you see the difference this is a project with a client and this is a commercial project and the concept is even not that different but you see the relation you have with image ending printed leaves on you it's very very different and the only exception of a project where we know the client and we actually furnished it was our new house so because we are the clients and we already thinking how we are going to occupy it and so it's a funny building again that municipality doesn't let us change the front facade so we are just having fun with it and but on the back facade since we're going to be working on one level and leaving on the floors above we have a residential facade on top of a commercial facade but the two of them kind of work together final topic theater every time we present a project and in the office we have the walls cluttered with printings of this we summarize them in one image and one plan and since one year ago more or less we started drawing all our plans without thicknesses so we found a kind of code that could allow us to summarize the architectural intentions regardless the fact that this is almost a sixty centimeters thick wall and this one is a five to six centimeters gypsum all that really doesn't make a difference because the way how we read the space is that the space is this so if the world is sick or not for us that that amount of depth it's not really making a difference so we can explain a project with these two drawings in a very simple indirect manner this is the house example this is a house living area below longitudinal space free curve private spaces above complicated integrated geometries so the kind of geometrical principle that guides the public is different from the one that guides the private and then they work into it again the bathrooms are mirrored and although they have exactly the same shape the fact that it's opposite completely changes them curve convex and concave and then the two bedrooms so we are always able to summarize the projects in these two elements one set of plans and one image and it's pixelated and this is one of those photos like and sometimes when we go on the construction site we change something we take the page out we print a new one with a new revision of the collage and when we were invited to do to submit a proposal for for the exhibition downstairs the provocation was very clear I mean as you can see we are very obsessed about this idea of depth and collage the main references for the exhibition were Hockney and Rossi I mean it couldn't get much better and we were very much confused we didn't really know what what to do because we had to propose whatever we wanted it was a theatre we could do anything we could choose the the play we were gonna we going to design the set and as such we we asked one of our younger collaborators reason she had just arrived to the office to just you know work on it just come up with some ideas and for two or three days every time we asked her you want to talk she said no no just let me finish and after three days she came to us and she said well I finished let's talk and she had been studying the whole office production she had been studying all the projects she had been depicting you know she had been somehow trying to do what I tried to do in the last hour she was just trying to understand what we do and why we do it she's a second year she just finished her second year in Manresa so she's still very young so there was a very naive approach to a study over a naive practice and she came up with like five or six elements inside this is what you do all the time you do white spaces and and you put stuff on top and the stuff has strong colors and there's usually a column somewhere and and and I found this sketch so funny and and she said and I was reading these things you say like the she was paying attention to those sentences that just shout out you know like once in a while like she makes this that is our about we are what we are and something that Lara said one day I like Clemson s a lot and she was referring to this describing a project we were doing and she kept you know collecting she was there she was young she was just she was fresh in the office and and then I asked okay but how does this you know become a theater how what are you going to do and she she kept working on it and the same thing happened again we said you have total freedom because I think the direction you're following is is very very interesting I want to know where this is going and so she started trying to define the most generic room as you saw most of our collages are defined by four surfaces two walls one floor in one ceiling and there is a background that is usually also a wall with some sort of opening and then there are elements in front so this was our conclusion and she started doing tests on that direction and building models and we were so okay with it because it was just feeling so natural that we had a first talk with one and hoot and we said well we are just going to show who we are that's it we are not going to be more arrogant and then it's just going to be that and what is fun is that at some point she said what if behind on the outside we show the big projects we will never build because these were going to build a lot but this ones we're not going to build any so but if we put them this kind of arisen as this kind of background this is the goal and okay you have a point let's do it and then she tested it also in 3d and in the beginning it was even more abstract and of course we were trying everything white but in the end blue doors it's always the same and and and this is our me looking at the model it was just so so natural that we changed nothing and and this is a photo of the after model downstairs and the model in context and but it Lisa said at some point yeah but we we need to do you need to do more we need to do more because we cannot just say who we are this is an exhibition there there are all my teachers in Manresa are also there so we need to do something more to prove a point okay and she came I mean this is was one 100% on her she came with this she came up with this idea that what if we we do the opposite of what are you always do so what you do is that you create spaces and you try to prove that they were what if we create a publication a kind of small small book where we do the opposite we go to spaces there are immortal spaces that every architect would know and we somehow had something that will subvert them what if we you know this is about in the title of the exhibition there's the expression that I'm having a blank the title of the exhibition is spaces without drama that surface I surface is an illusion that's autopilot surface is an illusion and what we notice is that well actually what ELISA told is that if you think about it no one will visit Mario bought this house I mean the existence of this house is limited to a series of books that publish that house and that's where it exists and it's 99.9999 percent of the people that know this house know it from there so it's a very 2d thing so imagine that it starts spreading online images where the space was changed and imagine that you do that to Baja because you seen Bauhaus house they already have a couple of elements but they don't have the cat and in this one the shadow was very well done and imagine that you add a dog or imagine that Toyo Ito's whitey was actually a roller blade I don't know to call it space or imagine that it Tsukasa cows house was just for pigeons or that in Kubrick's scenario someone was actually using the bathroom or Lautner was just taking photos because he was just producing the spaces for photo shoots or Sakamoto would actually you know show some life in his images or so on and so far if you meant this is the house where a porno movie could be shot so why not go on that direction and she was acting she was having so much fun and and we fell we felt compelled and we then of course everyone collaborated but it was it was very very funny to see how an invitation for such with such a theme and with such references from Hockney to hosi led us to produce the most generic follow leaving room if we can call it like that and to question frank lloyd wright's living rooms it was it was just the result of a process and to come to finish we see we see architecture and the way how we produce images and you know everything there is a late related to the discipline has a kind of an act of curation and we are about to publish our first book and that started with this exhibition not the book but this idea of curating our content so we were in a process of redrawing all the plans of everything we build so far and the book is going to focus exclusively on built and under construction works and we started understanding that there were several themes that were consistent several approaches several solutions and we started setting ourselves at the same time elisa was doing this research as an outsider and just arrived on the office we started selecting the collages we would want or not to publish and how we would want to edit it how we want to show it so that you have an idea this is actually the layout of the book we're going to have 50 pages with plans and then you have 100 pages with collages more or less so it's really about the elements it's not about the projects you don't have planned collages planned collages it's really about saying these are the two tools we use this is the first book we publish so we need to say you know this is how we do it this is this is how we publish the plans just the lines and the collages that are the absolute counterpoint so very dry rhetorics flamboyant depictions and these are some of the color tests we had from last week we wanted to have it ready to bring at least a copy today but it was not possible and this started as every project starts as every human being starts collecting since the day we are born until the day we die we keep collecting we keep adding and adding and adding movies books meals talks friends enemies buildings I mean our brain keeps collecting without any reason and without any order it just does it over and over and over and at some point every time we wanted to a project every time you want to narrate an idea every one we want to do a collab every time I want to do a collage every time we want to do anything what we do is that we select from everything we leaved we saw we collected so far what do we want to say at this moment where we want to stand where we want to you know do you want to be a provocateur you want to be respectful do you want to we want to talk you want a screen and what we do is this we go to the images we had collected before and we organize them we choose sums that we put in the bank which is others that will be highlighted and we create this kind of composition of images and why would your project this is exactly what we do we go to our heroes from season 2 Peter Merkley to shahara to Hockney to hosi we take something from all of them we mix them with our own personal ambitions and our personal experiences and then we create this kind of board we don't create anything you know like lava sea everything is transformed nothing is really invented and as such every time we propose a project every time we propose a space every time we propose an idea or it matches this lecture every time I propose a collage we are actually not inventing anything we are just doing this kind of imaginary museum so novell says that we are we are robbing we are stealing from the pot eating a the daily life and and in the end what we do is that everything that we still that we stole we project in this imaginary museums and I I would like to finish with this sentence that is a kind of game word with something we are excited a few years ago where it is our it is our perspective that architecture is a smart sophisticated game where everything becomes a quotation from something else thank you so much should I keep the mic a second so on your on your site you guys I think display your thesis project which I think was like a typographic study of contemporary practices is that sorry can you repeat hi you guys early on in your education or for some kind of thesis project it a kind of cataloging of contemporary practices is that correct I'm not recalling it okay now on the site there's a project which is just like a screenshot of a list of contemporary practices is that let me think about it we in axonometric sorry no in photographs and text no no I know what you're talking about no no we did in Porto to me and Anna I mean Amit studied in Zurich for his diploma and in Zurich the final project is a project in Port is a theoretical study you can do what everyone so both me and Anna in different contexts and in different years decided to answer one single question how do you do architecture that's it and as such in order to define a field of study because this is it could be an endless research we selected a series of practices that at the time we felt we liked that was the only principle to select them these are practices that we react positively towards - and we we asked I mean we didn't ask from the text we read we try to extract like the answer to several questions the same questions like how do you address the site how do you address the client how do you address the program how do you question la la la and try to understand what they share in common or not so this was still in the student student phase of our four lives yeah so I guess the question is from this study do you feel like you still draw from that kind of bag of tricks or different idioms of production and working yes definitely but now the difference is that at a time it was a very open field now it's more curated field of references like today it would be unthinkable I mean if someone in the office I'm going to be now a little bit provocateur if someone says to Fujimoto no no no it's not going to happen if someone says Peter Merkley I say okay let's sittin let's talk let's let's let's see what comes from that so I think what is happening now is that as the time passes our list of references is slowly you know reducing is becoming shorter and we tend to look more and more to the same periods and to the same architects again and again like we are truly fascinated with the young Toyo Ito the Toyo Ito until he turned 45 after that Toyo Ito disappear but until that period it was fantastic he was probably it was a genius we are fascinated with the full career from Caesar we are fascinated with pretty much anything that Peter marketers we love algae at his ego more than his work is ego is fascinating we love I mean there are there are these aspects to Kimoto and kijima the two of them together as a couple and as architects and as someone who lives on top of their office you can see where the reference comes from from our own office I mean there are these aspects that are not only concentrated in architecture rhetorics and plans and photos and so on then we try to get something from but it's the amount of names is getting more and more reduced like we have two bookshelves in the office one is the one we actually use and the other one is where detached in books and those that we don't really look more into our like those that have be colorful architects of the 20th century kind of thing you described your work in several ways that in a couple ways in those two ways he met odds so on the one hand is smart and sophisticated but also naive and clumsy and I wonder I mean that that that that those two things are odds is I find interesting but my question is where how long can use sustained and naive practice as you gain more and more control over your techniques of representation and your this sort of command of material detailing I that's a good question I mean the average age in the office right now is 26 I'm the oldest I'm 29 I'm at is 26 and all our collaborators are younger so in that sense I think we still have a couple of years of innocence let's say so until we are average 36 it's fine but but more important than that on a more serious note is that we like to take chances and when we need to a lecture like this you showed the good side you know like you show the strong side you choose the Billboard you say I'm a monument but it's true that we also because of our attitude towards the discipline we lose clients with those competitions all the time like we emit likes to say that we lose with pride like you know like we know we're gonna lose there's this discussion let's meet in the middle I'm going to say if we go this way it's not going to work out yeah where we go anyway you know and with clients we are exactly the same so at this stage I think one of the reasons why we consider ourselves naive it's because we we really are willing to take chances and we are willing to to care enough to not care of course now the office is growing and with this expansion we have my responsibilities there are contracts their salaries I mean we need to pay 11 salaries every month it's it's a big responsibility so in that sense there are also some projects that we are doing now that we don't talk about there are projects like most offices do if you go to the most successful offices in the world the numbering jumps five or six digits at a time and there's there's a reason for that and these projects they always start the same way we always push for our own agenda that it's not defined but it's somehow there but if it doesn't work out and you feel that okay this is an important project there's you know salaries we need to pay and we can find resources in the project like this there's no shame in admitting it we will keep doing those projects and we'll never talk about them and every office does it but in the projects that matter in the projects that we are allowed to do what we feel we need to do it's not what we want to do or it's not like just we are rebels no in the projects where we can achieve something with meaning those will I hope we will keep working in the same way what is probably going to happen is that the other project we can talk about aren't going to be probably more and more often in the background happening with more and more presence and maybe at some point we're going to have to hire people just to do those so that the three of us can have fun in the other ones I but I am afraid of that it's happening now I feel that the responsibility is becoming more and more like what I said I truly believe it like it's we carry enough not to care but it's true that at night sometimes we don't sleep that well because of the pressure of of this change because when we were just doing competitions we had no money we spend all the money buying that room in Porto and we went bankrupt and we just were gambling all our ships I'm leaving I was living with my parents so I had no expenses I just try and try and try and we could have been trying forever we would not get anywhere I mean we would get a lot of these proposals but we would never get two bricks and concrete and metal beams that would never happen so now the more metal beams and bricks we have the higher the chance that this will collapse but I really don't know I hope it will stay the same honestly we have a lot of fun really we in the office I have no doubt in saying this there is no office worldwide that has more fun working than we'd like the discussions we have the way how we work we all go together to have lunch we for a Saturday and Sunday and Monday I mean it's the same thing oli days are you know if someone tells us like Larry teller told me like last Monday next week and I'm going to Berlin to meet my boyfriend I'm going on Friday and come on run away ok who cares no it's it's just like that it's really really informal and I believe the only way to be to produce what we produce is if we work like that and sometimes we have a big deadline tomorrow and there are 4 people having fun cutting you know color paper and doing scans and testing and so on while two are in panic just finishing documents and you know and a normal office would just try to okay help them and then but it's it's there's a kind of equilibrium when we were working in Switzerland we found the perfect system in suits on everything works it's it's like a clock it's perfect it's boringly perfect when we went to Japan in a difference of two or three weeks we went from this to that it's it's absolute games it's like no one really understands what is happening around you like there are six people working in the same plan there there's no server people are running around with pans then someone is doing a model of a proposal that was left behind two weeks ago but it didn't finish the model so no one told him is just in a back building the model still I mean this happens and this happens in Pritzker winning prizes pretty greening offices this is really thing but what we understood is that in the end the final outcome the architecture that comes out of a Swiss office and the architecture that comes out of the Japanese office it's perfect in both ways so I think that the fact that we have this completely stupid working system is probably one of our biggest assets and if we lose that it's going to be probably the most valuable asset we will lose thank you so much you

Channel: Graham Foundation

Views: 5,759

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Id: by5P3VEERbw

Length: 80min 52sec (4852 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2017