Enrique Ferreras (E. F.): Many of your design reformulations stem from a social change, an overcoming of the post-Fordist model. They say that architecture is a "facilitator" of social forms. From a spatial point of view, for a long time, architecture has worked on the idea of dissolving the room. You recover a later typological tradition and work with the room but from an anti-hierarchical reformulation. What advantages do you find compared to an open space?
Martino Tattara (M.T.): The room is the object we always deal with when we design. When you are a student and you must design a house, a typical job, you do it composing, designing, and putting together rooms. Any architecture is a kind of assemblage of rooms. The rooms are unquestionable architectural data. One of the referents is Louis Kahn, who reflects on rooms as the origin of architecture. At the same time, the room, or the private room, has a strong connection with the political and social dimensions; It is a sign that through architecture you find the idea of privacy that has been built. It hasn't always been this way, the private room at least. This has occurred in the very long history of domestic space. At first, the house was a collective space, perhaps a room, but not for a single person or a couple; there lived different subjects.
Illustrations of the project “Do you see me when we pass?”. Image courtesy of Dogma.
The room has this sort of original architectural condition. At the same time, you must be aware that it is not an innocent space, because it comes with implications for how society has been defined and built. We did an exhibition/ research focused on tracing the history of the private room. He begins by quoting Virginia Woolf's famous book, “A Room of One's Own”, where she acknowledges that the bedroom is not just an abstract or indifferent domestic space, it is a political space where women, who normally did not have the possibility of having a room ( in this case, for her to be a writer) she needed to have one at home, which was a kind of disruptive act within the society of the time. Within this framework, we are interested in the room, as well as in the relationship between architecture and the city. Some of our work tries to address the larger-scale, more systemic nature of the city. We declare the same interest both in a small element and in its possibility of impacting the largest. The room is the unit through which we have the possibility of impacting beyond its scale.
Illustrations of the project “Everyday is Like Sunday”. Image courtesy of Dogma.
Verónica Rosero (V.R.): With this premise, we can connect with the following: public space has traditionally been outside of architecture. How do you negotiate this relationship between the individual and the collective and how do you incorporate this public space into the interior? How do they make this decision without affecting the budget?
M.T.: The easy answer: our attempt is often to project the domestic space driven by the attempt to minimize the private and maximize, I would not say the public, but rather the collective within the home. Of course, there is a need to calibrate this condition carefully: a project involves the issue of ownership, of negotiation between interested parties. How that happens implies an attempt to make it more affordable. In addition to the economic issue, we insert into our projects the idea of reformulating well-being: housing is not just a place where we could live together or where the private and public are negotiated; It is a project that provides things that are not normally provided in the house itself. Economic reasoning must be set out in this framework. Thus, the house becomes something that offers more than the traditional domestic space to which we have become accustomed in recent decades. With some of my students and researchers from the university, we have been looking to see if there is a trend in Europe regarding co-housing. In Northern Europe, it occurs less than in Mediterranean Europe. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not simply about sharing a garden or a room. It's not enough just to have a space where people can come together. The idea is to go further and see how through this relationship between the public and the private we can renegotiate and address how living and working have been socially codified.
Illustrations of the project “Do you hear me when you sleep?”. Image courtesy of Dogma.
V.R.: The real estate sector is trying to manipulate and pervert this idea of the relationship between public and private and present the private as a public space...
M.T: Yes, and we must be careful. Those projects use this type of rhetoric to increase profits. Now there is a trend in the big metropolises to provide convivial spaces, especially for the younger generation, where a lot of the advertising is that you have a common bar, a common gym, etc. But the prices they must pay to gain access are incredibly high. Therefore, I insist that the issue of ownership is crucial: we can talk about something we share when we share it in terms of how we own it. If you only own part of it and then we share our garden or have access to our collective gym for which we have to pay a very high entrance fee, it has nothing to do with the real essence of this idea of rethinking privacy and community.
Illustrations of the project “Do you hear me when you sleep?”. Image courtesy of Dogma.
E.F.: During BAQ XXIII the association between your architecture and the social condenser was recurrent. There is no doubt that at that time architecture was understood as a tool for political action. If we start from this assumption, how far does the field of action of the architect go?
M.T.: I don't know where the limit is. We were dissatisfied with how architecture has been conceived or understood spatially. When we were students and even today, the house was generally thought of as a problem-solving job. The way architecture ensures engagement with problems seeks to find a solution: it asks questions about problems to offer alternatives for how we live. In this sense, we have been working in the last two decades on the project as the possibility of addressing a challenge. We try to involve parties that are not normally part of it, for example, in housing initiatives, with groups of people interested in developing something different, with the cultural sector, rather than just producing projects for traditional clients. All these forms claim a bit of political space for the work of architecture.
Illustrations of the project “Do you hear me when you sleep?”. Image courtesy of Dogma.
V.R.: BAQ XXIII proposes a kind of reconciliation between project and theory. Dogma works on research through design and academia, an increasingly polarized and less common integration. How do you approach this relationship methodologically in your office?
MT: Yes, good question. We are both engaged in teaching, design, research development, and critique. The ambition of the Biennale is great because it tries to meet this condition. Given that the public is most professional and young, I think it's something very laudable. How to do that? I don't have a recipe, but there are many ways to live this relationship... each one does it in their way. Connect with your previous question: we don't just wait for the client to develop the project; we are more proactive; we commit ourselves to a problem and look for the conditions within the project to be developed, or the problem to be solved. We have decided to develop a research project in the office in the same way, we do design projects. We have developed a series of exploratory works, for example, on the history of minimal housing, and the private room. Now, we are doing a kind of global survey on the longhouse as a typology. Therefore, we try to have the conditions to develop them within the office, which is not very common. Of course, we are also involved more traditionally at the university. We try to combine work and teams exploring this topic in practice with real project research with students, young researchers, and Ph.D. students.
V. R.: How much time do you dedicate to the academy vs. his office?
M.T.: Most of the time is officially dedicated to the university, but beyond the official data, it is an intermingled relationship. It is not so easy to separate professional work from the university. It's not just management, which is unfortunately what we're becoming… it's about producing and discussing ideas. If you look at it from that point of view, it's hard to say if the ideas come while I'm with my students or in my office. The idea is just an idea.
Some of the paper publications by Dogma.
E.F.: There is an idea that seems interesting to me: the debate on the generic and the specific. For a long time, architecture has sought its identity in formal singularity, but its architecture starts from contained forms, it seeks the generic. How is this idea related to identity? Does the notion of identity make sense and validity in an increasingly globalized panorama?
M.T.: In most of our work, we try to understand what the architectural representation would be and what would embody all the themes that we have just discussed. We are fascinated by the power of abstraction and the way it generates something both very specific but more open and less tied to a specific theme. It's not just about generic, it goes beyond. We have tried to get rid of stylistic dimensions. Within the tradition of abstraction is the capacity, possibility, or necessity referred to the place, condition, or historical moment.
Martino Tattara at BAQ XXIII. Photograph courtesy of BAQ XXII
