Sitting among the audience, on the pallet benches built to organize the room, we were surprised by his lucidity in the debate. Once the discussion was closed, he gave us an interview. It was a fluid and clear conversation about their position regarding the architecture collectives, the social architecture and the role of the academy.
M: Andrés Maragaño. V: Verónica Rosero. N: Néstor Llorca
V What do you think about the monothematic line of the BAQ 2016? Do you think the richness that could be presented in a biennial has been lost in some way?
M Yes. I was very impressed by the focus of the biennial in the sense that the classroom is the main element. That is banal. Likewise, the architectural competition has been lateral; it requires to be more fusioned. I have felt a little strange because we do not work as a collective, we work as a university. As an academy, we want to solve problems from the academy and its problems: how to educate, how to learn. Our focus is on education. It seems that the 21st century is much more towards the social than the 20th century which was more technical, more provocative in a sense of the invention. We managed to build structures that were very complex, but it seems that the social structure was somewhat forgotten. Now, politics have hidden a lot of problems, one of those is the education and that has not been touched superficially in the biennial.
V Perhaps we are at a point in history that emerges as a cycle. In the 20th century the modern movement is based on social issues, but it dissipates in the 70s, probably because of the Pritzker. We have had more than four decades of social isolation. The 21st century has resumed it, but I realize that here it is taken up rejecting the academy. It is necessary to remember that the modern movement comes from social issues but in addition it was quite academic. In the colloquium you commented that it is not bad to withdraw to think in the "bubble" of the academy. You also mentioned that some of the proposals presented at the Biennial provoke the banalization of architecture and the academy. However, the theme is the "useful classroom". Is this an anti-academy speech?
M There has been lots of conversations about social architecture... it doesn’t exist. Architecture has always been linked to dwelling. It's like assigning a first and last name to something that is a very humanistic discipline that is in charge of constructing spaces, of organizing the matter. What happens is that this discredit of the academy also has been a fault of the same academy, but we need the academy. The university is important socially, knowledge is still a value, but it is a public value; maybe here lies the conflict. It is not that architecture is ultimately social or non-social, what happens is that it requires a public space of conversation. That space needs to be gained from the academy itself, from the architects themselves, deciding what is their contribution to society. That requires time, which is not necessarily the action time, the meeting time, or gathering people. We need to meditate.
N I make an analogy: we have learned in the profession to make high tech cars. Now they are showing us wooden cars, a battle between urgent and necessary. It's a very fast mechanism, with what you have in your hands. How do you think it should be the processes we are looking at, the experiments on materials, about the immediate? How to make them compatible?
M I believe that the techniques are vital for developing a good architecture. Structure and architecture are the same and have been treated as separated problems of professionalization. The contemporary university has been given a role: to create professionals, but that is not its single role. You should also explore techniques, knowledge, processes, look at the face of the society in a time that is required. That time of dedication doesn’t involve money, they are not monetary resources, not even social. They are purely intellectual resources. Universities build this universality at one point. There is a link with local development, we have to make them compatible, but there is a rhetorical reflection, an approach, an intellectual dialogue. Definitely, what the students learn is applied in their own possibilities, in their professional worlds, but the professionalization of the university is a mistake. The university requires its independence, requires its state of knowledge approach.
V Finally professionalizing the university is a dangerous approach. Isn’t it paradoxical, moreover, that this approach puts so much emphasis on monetary resources, on how to get money to execute the works?
M In the case of Talca, the architect manages to reorganize, to move, to mobilize, but it is not the economic or social resource, it is all the resources that the territory has. The economic resource is almost a devaluation resource. This cost, this amount of money ... Well, okay, but that cannot be transmitted as a model. The model itself is very dangerous, it is applied without knowing why. It seems that it should solve everything but it does not, instead, it moves a quantity of energies. The university erases the economic and social resources to articulate them to the intellectual resources, to compact them and make them real. Our profession has a lot to do with it. An anthropologist said that materialization, compaction, are the things that makes it possible to understand society. We cannot understand the Egyptians if we do not understand their buildings first, therefore our vocation as architects is to solidify elements. Now we are doing a reading of this moment, but we have to understand, we have to build good techniques, we have to question ourselves and correct ourselves. That's a value why the university is so important: it is not taught outside, you cannot have an outside feedback, you do the work, you close it with the community and you leave.
N If you are very aware of that, how do you do in Talca to introduce students to these processes that are first academic, and then they result in social evaluations?
M It's interesting because sometimes it results that many of our students when they are explaining their titling work they explain how they built it, how they generate the resources, but actually, what we always ask is: the project that you have done, from the point of view of architecture, what is your approach? If you are making a tower, you cannot forget the history of architecture that has studied the towers and made them their own as an element of language. The profession has its own requirements from the disciplinary point of view, you cannot forget what you are: you are not a sociologist, you do not know the community. That is a very potent discussion within the school.
N Well, something similar is happening here. If you are an architect and you learn a language from the graphs, from the constructive, the creation of spaces, the answer has to be from architecture, not from sociology. Architecture solves architectural problems, it does not generate work.
V It does not solve of social or political structure problems. Poverty and insalubrity are generated, so they should be solved, through the political and social structures of a country. Architecture is a tool and the architects have been taught to believe that they have more power than they actually have.
N Of course, it is compatible with society but always starting from architecture.
M Always from the architecture. Because in the moment that we start to dress up with other clothes, we are going to make it wrong.
V Does it mean we're trying to improvise in disciplines that are not ours?
M Yes. And the speech is finally a meeting where you start to contaminate yourself with other languages and to doubt your own nature. In architecture, creativity, the construction of space, the location of the material, must remain in force. What happens is that social demand is so strict, so urgent that it leads us to lose in the way. We will be much more vital in society if we work from architecture.
N We talked about this with another of the speakers at the Biennial, Donn Holohan. We asked him about all these mechanisms. When you approach in a very detailed way to obvious social problems, then you sensitize, and generate instruments that improve that context. Donn lives in Hong Kong where the apartments were 20 m². Then they were divided and now they are 5 m². in which now lives a person, not a family, HKurbanlag designed furniture for this users to life with better comfort, but they realized that with that design, the were facilitating the same condition of real state speculation that they wanted to eradicate, generating tools for that mechanism to continue to exist. How do you think we can generate awareness about solving the phenomenon instead of being part of a specific resolution that continues supporting what you don’t want to do?
M That is where I put an important point: the reflection of what are you doing. And the academy is that, a permanent reflection of what are you doing, of what are you achieving as a society, of what is the problem you are trying to understand. The academy has to organize problems, to talk to the student directly, not to a classroom with 45 students with a blackboard, but discussing where the problem is and if indeed, architecture, from that point of view, of what is done, as you said, is deepening the problem, not solving it. I don’t like the "let's go out" social speeches ... you have to be very careful with that. Those are easy resources and in that sense the academy is complex.
V When you are critical about altruistic discourses you submit to hateful catalogs of ideologies where you are placed on one side or another, right or left, and that is not only insubstantial, but dangerous for students.
N If you want society to be inclusive and have social values no one will tell you that it is wrong. There is a much smaller scale approach that is solved from the architecture. That is not being talked about.
N If you want society to be inclusive and have social values no one will tell you that it is wrong. There is a much smaller scale approach that is solved from the architecture. That is not being talked about.
M I totally agree. Suddenly they put us into sacks of an easy speech. The map is complex for the architect, but there is also a lot of intelligence in architecture schools that has to be exploited and re-evaluated. I really like working with the students, with their social capital, even if it's a boy who comes from the rural area and works with fear. That student comes with a different sensitivity. I cannot tell him/her to work for society and tell him let’s build. First, we should build the architect, and let’s do it calmed, because we are so hurried. We should give the student a critical space where he/she is invited to think. Thinking is not easy.
V It is not easy because it involves reading, researching, not just gathering information; It is necessary to work the collected information.
M That is a super important subject: the creative use of the collected information and the creative use of it according to the requirements.
V One of the members of the BAQ committee told us that they have brought the speakers to BAQ to teach them how to do things. They are aware that they are "green". They want to be better collectives. What do you think they want to learn from you?
M The Talca project is of interest because it has somehow linked with the community. We try to make good projects and the quality lives up to it. My presentation doesn’t have music, it doesn’t have balloons, it has projects.
V In the conversation after your presentation, I was impressed when you mentioned that to validate a project you do not have to put a photo of a child with a slightly darker skin. Imagine putting together the photographs of many of the speakers at this Biennial. You could not identify to which group they belong. There is a homogeneous iconography they have created: the "social photo".
M This situation is very complex because it is leading us to a state of affairs that I think we will regret later. Architecture remains valid in the 21st century. The speeches are not bad, but the architect has to build good works, make good architecture. It seems to me that we are going the easy way. We do not have to go through the collective, the social action; it is distorting. We have to be super critical, do not let it happen, put the points where they have to. The academy is the one that has to contribute that lucidity.
