Quietly Brilliant: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos

Centre for Creativity, Córdoba

San Telmo Museum extension, San Sebastián

Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano are truly architects’ architects. They may not be a brand name known in ordinary households the world over, but they build fine buildings for which they have gained respect and admiration from peers. The record speaks for itself: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos has won first place in 25 Spanish and international competitions, and come second or third in another 20. They also received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2010. Not bad for a firm that’s only been around since 1999.

I meet Enrique at Nieto Sobejano’s Madrid office (the firm has a second office in Berlin) one Monday in late August, as the city is slowly returning to normal after the summer holidays. I figure the topic of competitions, and the importance of winning them, is as good as any to kick off with on a Monday morning marked by post-vacation depression syndrome. ‘Competitions are very important to us,’ says Enrique. ‘Up to now, 90 per cent of our built work has come from competitions. I say “up to now” because currently – thanks to the economic situation – Spain has far fewer competitions than it did some years ago. We opened our Berlin office as a result of winning a competition in Germany and have since won some in Austria.’ He goes on to tell me – in fluent English – that he grew up speaking German in addition to Spanish, and that he is also a professor in Berlin. Internationalize or perish: that seems to be the mantra for Spanish architects these days.

Do you believe that competitions lead to the best architecture?

Enrique Sobejano: I know of some offices that don’t enter competitions and that do very good work, mostly for private clients, with whom they enjoy a different kind of relationship. However, competitions can provide architects with certain advantages. In a competition, architects state at the outset what it is that they want to achieve. It gives them a stronger starting position in the relationship with the client. Apart from that – and even more importantly – regular participation in competitions encourages the development of a way of thinking. Competitions are conducive to intellectual development; it’s not just about getting jobs. Every new project that we do for a competition becomes a part of our ongoing research. The drawback to this way of working is that we are not linked very closely with a particular place and a particular community. We have only a few built works in Madrid. Most of our work is elsewhere, but I find that to be liberating. It frees us from local politics.

Does the competition system shape the way your office is organized?

We are not a big firm, so we don’t have one part of the office that does only competitions and another that does everything else. But we are not a small firm either, so we are often working on several competitions at the same time, especially since we opened our office in Berlin. Sometimes it’s complicated having to be in two places at the same time.

Your work seems to share certain affinities with the work of Team X and Dutch structuralism as practised by Aldo van Eyck, for instance. Is the study of architectural precedent part of your process?

Yes, we are very interested in the movements you mention, and in combinatorial ways of thinking. But ultimately we’re interested in a kind of economics of the conceptual. I’m not speaking about money here, but about not always over-designing things. We prefer to base a design conceptually on only a few building elements, and to repeat and combine these in different ways, exploring different possibilities. We are all aware that this is how life works; everything is based on modules, atoms or cells of some kind. Yet when I studied here in Madrid in the ’80s, this kind of approach was completely rejected. There were some Spanish architects from the 1950s and ’60s, such as Corrales and Molezún [designers of the Spanish Pavilion for Expo 58 in Brussels], who were also into the ideas we’re talking about – along with others, of course, including Bakema, Van Eyck and Louis Kahn.

Which Nieto Sobejano works do you consider paradigmatic, and why?

Exactly ten years ago we won the competition to build a museum and offices at the archaeological excavation site of Madinat al-Zahra, near Córdoba. That project represented a turning point for us, because Madinat al-Zahra made us aware of the incredibly rich tradition of Islamic architecture, which is – paradoxically – so contemporary. The thousand year-old geometric patterns of Islamic architecture are highly comparable to contemporary philosophical thought, to information technology and to open ended systems. And yet this museum was built very slowly, taking almost ten years to complete. Not because the builders were slow, but because archaeologists work slowly and methodically. For them we were too fast; their work is never finished. Contemporary architecture is often about speed, and we consider ourselves fortunate to have had the opportunity to build this work slowly, to really be able to think it through thoroughly. Most of our work is in the area of public cultural programmes, especially museums – buildings that receive a lot of attention. Museums have to be exemplary; fortunately, most museum directors understand this. But we are also able to meet tight deadlines: the Expo Zaragoza Congress Centre was completed in very little time, thanks precisely to an economics of the conceptual.

Your office is now completing a second museum in Córdoba, the Centre for Creativity.

Yes, the Centre for Creativity is a space for contemporary art. It is just across the river from the Great Mosque, one of the best architectural spaces in the world – a building full of lessons for architects. The system used for the Great Mosque is based on a module that is repeated, and in its present state it is also about transformation and hybridity. The Centre for Creativity is similarly related to the idea of a repetitive module, in this case one that is based on the geometry of a hexagon that has been separated into three unequal parts. A rearrangement of these fragments then becomes the pattern of both the plan, at the large scale and, at a smaller scale, the openings in the screen wall. Berlin artists realities:united collaborated on the screen wall. The surfaces of the small openings are illuminated by LEDs, and each opening acts as a pixel.

The San Telmo Museum Extension in San Sebastián, on the other hand, features a green wall.

No, not entirely. The San Telmo Museum Extension was conceived as an extension to the mountain that it is built into – Monte Urgull – as much as to the existing historical museum, which we restored. Intended to act as a buffer between the two, the extension has only a partially green façade. Plants grow in some openings, and others emit artificial light from the space between the double skin. The wall is transformative: during the day it looks more like a green façade – a landscape extension – while at night, when illuminated, it looks urban, becoming an extension of the city. Artists Ferrán - Otero worked with us on producing a standard cast-aluminium panel that could be combined in a number of ways.

Has Nieto Sobejano’s approach or process changed since its beginnings? Where do you see the practice headed in the future?

I don’t know. Some years ago we may have been looking more for the object-like qualities of buildings, whereas now we are clearly more interested in open-system geometries without a predetermined form. The museum we’re building in Graz, Austria, for example, pursues a similar line of thought to that of Madinat al-Zahra, as well as to our history museum in Lugo or the art centre in Córdoba: low, horizontal structures in which a series of patio-like openings become the defining elements of the work. I would say that our work has probably not changed all that much over the years, but it has gradually evolved. Regarding the future, as a consequence of the changing situation in the world, our field of activity might also extend outside Europe. In 2009, for example, we were among the five short-listed participants for the National Museum of Fine Art in Québec City, which OMA eventually went on to win. We are also starting to get involved in other countries, a move that is sure to introduce new perspectives to our approach, since we believe that architecture is always the result of a personal dialogue with the place – a balance between memory and invention.

As I leave Nieto Sobejano’s office and walk past the nearby Santiago Bernabéu Stadium – home of the Real Madrid football team – I am encouraged by the realization that architects can still gain international recognition quietly and through intellectual rigour, without making a lot of noise.

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #35]

Read More

Interview with Peter Eisenman

[This is an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Peter Eisenman in Santiago de Compostela in May 2010. The full interview is published in KLAT magazine #4, which can be ordered here]

Rafael Gómez-Moriana: I can’t help noticing that you give a lot of interviews.

Peter Eisenman: They are all on different subjects. In addition to my work as an architect I write, I lecture, I teach, so I end up giving interviews about everything from football to theory. Perhaps the least interesting topic for me is architecture. Architecture is basically boring as an interview subject.

RGM: Indeed, you’ve been interviewed quite a bit on the subject of politics.

PE: That’s because many of my clients are to the right-of-center politically, so interviewers occasionally try to get me to say right-oriented things.

RGM: Well, I hate to disappoint you, but most of my questions have to do with architecture; specifically the City of Culture of Galicia. Is this the most important project of your career?

PE: Now, the City of Culture is not boring, I am very excited by the buildings. It is certainly one of my most important projects.

RGM: It's currently the largest construction site in Spain, if I’m not mistaken, and probably one of the largest in Europe.

PE: It’s a million and a half square feet under cover,  which makes it larger than the Getty Center. So yes, it's a very large project.

RGM: Does building in Spain differ very much from building in the USA or Germany? Some like to say that Spain is different.

PE: All countries have different aspects. Take Europe and America. There is much more concern in Europe for public space than there is in the United States. In the USA, public space is mainly controlled by developers. You could not do a public project of this scale on public land in the United States; it would be taken up by developers. In Germany, the Holocaust Memorial sits on a prime piece of real estate in the center of Berlin. This would be impossible in New York because of real estate speculation. Europeans’ concern for public space manifests itself in the media. Every time I visit Spain, Germany or Italy there are requests for interviews with the press and television. Architecture is good media in Europe because cities are an important part of European culture. Galicia is different, though, because there is a certain longing for a return to the regional language and customs...there’s a certain “not wanting to be in the world”. Manuel Fraga is a very cultured and sophisticated man who, when he was president of Galicia, really wanted to do something good for Galicia. He didn’t want to do what Franco did at el Valle de los Caídos. He wanted to contribute to the culture of this place, or create a culture of this place. When he was Spain’s Minister of Information and Tourism he created the Paradores, and as Galicia’s president he had the idea for the City of Culture architectural competition. When we won, Fraga was insistent the project was going to be built, and built well. He worked very hard to do it. In Germany it was also a struggle to build the Holocaust Memorial, but there was general agreement that it should be built. Nobody questioned that. The disagreements were regarding what it should mean, how it should look, etc. There was more of a political consensus in the German parliament. Spain’s politics are more polarized. The politics in Spain are different, and you feel that when you're doing architecture here. Nobody has ever built a project of mine as well as these buildings are being built in Galicia. Yet we still find ourselves having to educate the people of Galicia about this project.

RGM: But isn't that somewhat ironic, since there’s a strong landscape metaphor in the City of Culture? Landscape is something the regional culture here values very dearly, I would think. I wonder if you could comment about landscape in architecture, because lately we're seeing a lot of architects likening their projects to mountains, rivers, glaciers and crystals rather than to architecture per se.

PE: Nature is never used as a metaphor in my work. Rather, the work is concerned with a very fundamental architectonic project. The philosophical background to the work is the metaphysical dialectic: the relationship between ground and object. That has been a dominant discourse of current thought, specifically poststructuralist French thought, which has argued that there is a problem in the hegemony of vision. It manifests itself in the figure in the frame in painting. In architecture this discourse is largely a visual one. Since 1978 my work has attempted to confound the relationship between ground and figure, so that figure becomes ground and ground becomes figure. That's why it is so difficult to photograph these buildings: they're not objects. They’re not “image buildings”. They are experiential buildings; actual buildings for people, not metaphors. The innate idea in the City of Culture is that it is a hillside that has erupted and heaved up from the Monte Gaiás, that it is a pre-existing object. 

...

Read More

Kitbashing, street remakes, and bisexual architecture: a conversation with Kim Adams

Research slide from the collection of Kim Adams





Rafael Gómez-Moriana: Kim, you gave a talk in 1988 at the Christiane Chassay Gallery in Montreal in which you showed slides of "street remakes": vehicles and buildings re-made by their owners, such as buses with beetlebody roofs, pick-up trucks with home-made campers and other creations of a do-it-yourself culture. What struck me about these often quite humorous images was that, collectively, they constituted a typological study - or a body of research - into a pop-vernacular building tradition. How do you come across all this material: do you just bump into it while motoring across the Arizona desert? And secondly, how does this research inform your practice?



Kim Adams: My research began in high school while I was skipping classes. I found street life more interesting. Later, I began traveling with a caravan as part of late-hippie culture: in those days, converting your bus was what you were supposed to do. Paint it yourself, make the roof higher, start having babies, start traveling. It was a freedom culture of sorts, and I did enjoy the idea of being a gypsy. I was a musician at the time too, playing in acoustic love bands. One day, I came out of an art gallery in Victoria and there was a vehicle that somebody had converted for hunting. From that point on my art practice changed and I just started seeing these things all over the place: a bus with a Fargo van on the top where the kids would stay. A lot of those finds were accidental but I was keeping my eyes open. People have also contributed to the slides - sometimes students will give me some when I do a talk. When I moved to Ontario this culture had disappeared. It's rare, it's really rare to find these things today. There isn't as much experimentation. Things are pretty well done and bought as is. The inventiveness is not there anymore. My father's generation could fix things with a little binder twine, while today we have to trade it in or have somebody else fix it. The old Volkswagen was something that could be rebuilt and made into something else. You made love in it, you listened to Jimi Hendrix in it, you got married in it. The cottage business or street industry is quite rare today. I mean, getting licensing in Toronto is very difficult: when we did the Curbing Machine in 1988, we had to get a permit and a license, and we had to lie about it. We got it under the category of being a dumpster, because it was on the sidewalk as well as on the road. So it was a dumpster. With the Toaster Wagon in San Diego, the officials seemed to run out of the office every time we requested a permit. We only got busted a couple of times, and they couldn't even describe it to head-quarters: "What is this?" "Well, actually, it's two VW buses. " "On the sidewalk? How did it get on the sidewalk?" And I would just say; "It's the back ends of two buses put together to look like a toaster." "Well, next time you come here, don't go on this side of the street, go on that side of the street."



RGM: Why wouldn't you just tell the authorities or whomever that it's art?



KA: Because then the conversation just ends right then and there. When someone would ask, "What is this?" and I would answer, "It's a Curbing Machine - do you want to try it?" they might become interested. But if I said, "It's an artwork," they'd ask "Who's paying for that?" The subject of the conversation becomes the taxpayer. But when a work just sits in an abstract, quiet way people do a second take on it. French-fry truck, that's right. Ice-cream truck, that's right. Satellite dish spinning around with man sitting next to it. That's not quite right. And then it's: "How much, how much?" "Nothing. Just try it." "Well what's supposed to happen?" It would keep the conversation going. When I did all three of my machines on Granville Island in Vancouver, which is near an art school and therefore a trained area, the trained people came up and said, "This is artwork right?" And I would reply, "No it isn't." "I know it's artwork! I saw the poster!" "Yeah right, OK. Go away, will ya?" I'm waiting for tourists. I don't need conversation about whether it's good or bad art.



RGM: You seem to enjoy a rapport with your audience. Earlier installation works, such as Leisure's Restraint at the Ydessa Gallery, consisted of rides that gallery visitors could actually enjoy. You would even be present to assist with the operation of the rides and to answer any questions. Where does this interest in your audience come from? Why do you care so much about your audience?



KA: My first ride piece was at the garbage dump in Victoria. The gallery thing had already been done and I was looking for some other venue. So I got permission and built an interactive possibility for whoever hangs out in dumps. That was my audience and it worked out fine at first, but then somehow it got press and became public. Media people were coming over from Vancouver, as well as bus tours. It got on the art circuit and that just completely changed it. Then I was asked to do a gallery show in Santa Barbara along the same lines. What happened was wild. The entrance ride came into the corridor and crashed through this truck. There was another ride called the Moon Ride - a half inch steel rolled plate that would crash into the main building support and shake it. A third ride involved going through a video room. I wanted an attendant so I became that attendant. At the dump, though, I wasn't an artist, I was just this guy, and people were asking "What are you doing?" I was testing myself. "What do you do with it?" "You get inside it and then it just moves." Then people would come back and bring the kids, and teenagers came on Friday nights. I was living nearby in my van at that time and got to know this other culture, as well as the police, who kept on moving me away. From there, this idea of movement went into galleries for awhile. The gallery itself was a learning experience for me: what do you do with that space? What is it? What is its meaning? The Curbing Machine came out of these questions, the idea of just planting this thing outside the gallery in the street and seeing what happened. And sitting at the same street corner for a month, there are enough lessons in that memory for a lifetime.



RGM: So being an attendant at these rides you created was really a pretext for observing people - for conducting more research?



KA: Sure, but it was also to see how comfortable it is for people to get up on a platform with a spinning disk - I had to provide something to hang on to.



RGM: These sound like architectural concerns. Indeed, it seems that many of your works are inhabitable or proposing some form of inhabitation.



KA: Almost.



RGM: Alright, almost inhabitable. I'm thinking here of the Decoy Homes and Auto-Office-Haus. Of course, as an artist all media are open to you but this isn't the case for architects. Architecture carries a degree of public responsibility, from which art is exempt. Do you ponder this question much? Does the fact that you're an artist make your architecture any different?



KA: Well, I would love to say it's architecture, but it's not. I learned that in 1988 when I built the Chameleon Unit. I flirted with the idea that it's possibly architecture, but just a little. The Decoy Homes come out of Donald Judd's work at that time, the earlier plywood boxes on angles. Riding a train across Ontario I noticed between here and Windsor there are more garden sheds than houses. Viewed abstractly from the corner of an eye, these sheds look just like houses; the same dumb shapes. The idea of a model emerged: why not buy three or four of them, stack them, and make a Surfer Shack. I was just borrowing what the urban realm offers, but in abstract. Looking at it as abstract forms allows you to borrow from it. I was finding stuff at Canadian tire. That was the beginning of my shopping. There was a whole period when I was building things from scratch and trying to re-invent the wheel; in fact I was often trying to make four wheels exactly the same. I didn't see the simple side: it took a lot to find it. And that was Canadian Tire. "Four lawn chairs and three garden sheds, please," and I would just set them up in the studio. But how they work as models is important because garden sheds are not made for people. So that's where the Decoy Homes become models, or maquettes. There is a little bit from the visual world of architecture, though. The Chameleon Unit, the truck piece, was the first piece I made that you could actually live in. I could buy these units that are made for truckers to sleep in and convert them into "apartment" units in the plaza in front of the new American Express building at Battery Park in New York City. It got reviewed in Architecture magazine as an ashtray, this horrible ash tray right in front of this beautiful piece of architecture. So in 1988 I learned that there might be a difference here, and now I never say I make architecture. Gordon Matta Clark's work was not accepted as architecture, even though he studied it. When he shot those windows out of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, that was an architectural show and architects dumped on him. I mean it was the art world that enjoyed the curiosity of the difference between art and architecture and it crossed over that way. When I worked in Germany there seemed to be a conversation with my work that I wasn't experiencing so much here, where I am a freak or a weird guy. In Germany I was taken quite seriously: Auto-Office-Haus was looked at as a serious proposal. They didn't talk a lot of art at all, but said it was bisexual architecture. I had to look more at the living possibility of the structure, effectively propose it as a small living space.



RGM: The history of architecture is full of proposals that have remained unbuilt, and indeed some proposals have been designed to be unbuildable.



KA: This is probably where we sympathize with each other. Unrealized projects are celebrated in Germany now; the unrealized has actually become subversive. The conversation came up a lot: "We'll realize this project." In Canada our problem is that things don't get realized. Here, the unrealized is a reality.



RGM: So all of your works are models, whether full-scale models, or miniature scale models. How did you actually get into miniature scale? Was it through constructing studies for your larger models?



KA: My first memory of sniffing glue at a young age was when I built a model kit of President Kennedy's boat. After that I was constantly building models. Especially cars. Model building was big. Then it disappeared. At the University of Victoria I got back into making model cars because It seemed to make more sense than learning abstract painting or something like that. The first car piece I ever saw was by Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim in the 1978-79 retrospective. He had a VW bus on the ramp, together with the survival sleds. And it just made so much sense right there in that gallery, which is basically a car park. Just think: Winnipeg, Regina, these prairie towns, they all have mini Guggenheims. I think that made quite an impact on me, just seeing a car in that high-art situation. I didn't understand the survival part. I was just thinking, “Ooh, cars look alright in galleries, especially old, rusty ones.”



RGM: Both your full-scale work, if we can call it that, as well as your miniature work, is assembled from off-the-shelf components, things you can buy, whether actual car parts or model-car kits. Where does the "craft" come into it? Is craft even important here?



KA: It's making these model-building kits look like the period. that's what the craft is. Painting it to look aged and square; they have to look how the kit's supposed to be made. But then it's also when you start "bashing" them. All my work is what I would call "kit-bashing." This is a common term in the model industry: you cross breed a Volkswagen with a Cadillac, and you've got a kit bash. They must do it in architecture too, although I don't know if they talk about it in those terms.



RGM: In architecture there's a lot of value placed upon a kind of originality that has to do with having things made from scratch. It's very much an Arts-and-Crafts ideal. In fact, a lot of architects have a disdain for ready-made products from catalogues because these products are associated with commercial building production. Meanwhile, you've even begun incorporating action figures in your work.



KA: The Breughel Bosch Bus is a proposal for an amusement park - Breughel-Bosch Land - at Niagara Falls. The work is a theme park at 1:87 scale, so the bus itself would be about twelve stories high. You take your family through this late industrial-age North American steel plant turned amusement park. The action figures are there to make the piece believable as a proposal for fiction but it's also about the shutting down of the steel industry in many towns.



RGM: Much of your work deals with the average middle-class family's two principal purchases: the house and the automobile. Yet, while the typical new house today is backward-looking, cars are cutting- edge design. There's a real irony to seeing a new "ye-olde" tract house with a sleek late-model car parked in the driveway. If you look at historical photographs of the villas of Le Corbusier, on the other hand, it is the cars that Le Corbusier liked to park in the foreground as symbols of modernity that look antiquated today, not the villas. In the Decoy Homes, for example, the house becomes a vehicle and the vehicle a house. A lot of your work is about mobility as lifestyle but it's a lifestyle that is less current today.



KA: It's from my parents' generation, no doubt. But I don't know what is going to happen with the next generation; maybe they'll have computers in the trailers. When I was invited to do Chameleon Unit and they gave me some money I felt guilty and I didn't want to make something that wasn't functional. If it fails as art, at least then you can still live in it! Or sleep in it. That work really came out of a fear of being homeless.



RGM: Are you still shopping at Canadian Tire as much as before or are you working with different kinds of components now that require other sources?



KA: When I first discovered Canadian Tire as a source for art materials I would get a buzz. Everything on the shelves - from ironing boards to cups and tents and fishing rods - turned into art supplies. Canadian Tire became an exciting place to be. The garden sheds were my first entry because they were always on display outside. Everything was there, including the hardware to put things together. No welding: everything had to be fastened mechanically and treated as a supply. But some of that excitement wore off after ten years. I still check it out - I keep my eye out for new models, such as the Space Saver shed - but I don't buy as much from there. In 1991, I made a new work because they came out with a new model. I've been increasingly investigating other industries. I'm looking for new shapes so that's what's making me move to other places. The computer has generated a curiosity for making shapes. Right now I'm working with GM and Ford, just for the new shapes and bodies - especially the new truck bodies. And working with a company here in Toronto that makes interesting computer shaped cargo boxes for trucks. We're working on a project in Vancouver that'll become a housing workshop that folds out so that a little truck comes out of there that has fake artworks made of wood, rubber and plastic stacked to look like hamburgers and desserts. The whole thing will look like a gift shop. With miniature models it's the same: they're all available materials. They're all industrially made, so pretty well anything I want to put together I can find. Specialized model stores have become a major new supply.



RGM: If you could do a residency in any factory, store or warehouse that you desired, where would you choose to go?



KA: Well it would be automotive, probably where they build the Smart Car in Germany. The place where Airstream trailers are assembled would have been wonderful earlier. In Europe, they're interested in having artists working in industry. I was approached by BMW but I wanted to take the shell off a BMW and make it look like another car and they weren't into that. They Just wanted me to paint one. I said "Can I drill holes? I've got to do something else with it!" And that was the end of that project.



RGM: In your earlier work you fastened things together that were always recognizable, whereas it seems that in your more recent work one can't quite recognize the components as readily.



KA: Yes, the recognizing gets a little bit more special this time. You have to look more carefully. The language has become more specialized. It's still off-the-shelf, but now stuff is kit-bashed in such a way that it becomes its own image. I'm always surprised at the many people playing with the Toaster Wagon who don't know the spokes. And then there are people who recognize it right away: "That's what I thought it was!” With others, I've had to tell them, "No, it didn't come like this; it's two old VW buses." With other models you'll recognize a tractor cab, but a corn feeder from combines? It's allowed me to expand into the full range of kitbashing possibility. It's finding the parts! I could design from scratch, perhaps using computers. But I still have to have that satisfying level. I think if I was asked to build some of these models I have here strictly from scratch I would be very unhappy. Combining things together is satisfying in some way.



[originally published in C International Contemporary Art #70, summer 2001]

Read More