Guillermo Santomà

I think what I liked most was your reworking of Mark Fisher. I mean, I don’t know how to explain it now, but there was something about putting Mark Fisher (who is, after all, a straight, white man, and a philosopher) in a place where you were decontextualising him from his own framework in relation to the dialogue you and McKenzie proposed. And I liked that taking of Fisher out of his place, or at least the contrast it established.

I think my generation is a little more of a hinge generation in that it’s somewhat more connected to the post-industrial. We come from a place where architecture and design have always been closely linked to craftsmanship, and I think it’s our generation that’s begun to try to see the object from another perspective. To contextualise objects from another place, to invent new ways of living, or to, at some point, begin to understand or provide solutions to the problem of what it means to live today. 

Ultimately, architecture has to solve these problems, and coexistence and community are key in that respect. I don’t think creators are making work or objects just for themselves anymore, but objects and creations are developed collectively. To a certain extent, there’s something pulling us more towards anonymity. 

In other words, we’re trying to erase the underlying essence of the object, decontextualising it, and trying to change it on a syntactic level. I think there’s a change where it moves from being like a noun to an adjective—like a transition that allows the object to begin to be understood as something alive, you know, a bit like writing. Or like memory, because the same thing happens with objects: You have to remove all their meaning so they can be what they are, or you have to completely decontextualise them so we can begin to relate to them in a different way. 

I hardly have any books on architecture. I’ve got books with other types of writing, essays on other topics that interest me. I think one way to decontextualise the object is through fiction. We’re always interested in working in spaces beginning with a story. Also, in relation to construction because we build everything ourselves. We invent a process of construction as a way of inhabiting each project. And it’s important that the construction process is fictional, invented, because it determines the way in which we’re going to live. Ultimately, the way you build something is the way you’re going to experience it. If you build it out of context, you’ll end up living out of context. And the work starts long before the building; it’s there in the relationship with clients. In forming this relationship, we’ve already started building an idea of the client or the person who’s going to inhabit the space. In other words, the story begins from the moment you start talking about the project.

It’s like always trying to use new constructive processes which haven’t been seen before, or finding solutions that you didn’t know a priori. There’s something about experimentation there, something imagined, as if you were part of ‘nature’. Nature exists in continuous experimentation. I believe what’s alive is always on the point of mutation, and, for me, the constructive process, or culture, if you begin to understand it as what’s most alive, becomes almost like a viral language.  

It starts to be immersive from the moment you start thinking about it. And I think there’s a point of connection with literature as well. Often, my ideas come from finding the right words or trying to describe something, rather than with drawings or models. It’s more like a set of instructions or a way of creating rules or ideas, constructive processes. 

There’s just something that seems so fictional about birds. There was a sighting in Barcelona in 1990 of a giant bird flying through the city, and the performance at the Design Museum was a mixture of images of what the bird was reported doing in the city. I simply decontextualised it by using the voice of a bird to describe the architecture as seen from above. I was interested in the bird’s perspective because it no longer has fixed planes—its horizon line changes. It’s like rising up and seeing the city from above, it changes the history of architecture on a practical level, which is what’s happened with Google Maps. Ultimately, that’s when we began to understand a city’s footprint as something continuous, (which can now almost be 3D), where your perspective is completely changed.

I’ve always understood construction itself as a performance. A few years ago, we built some pieces here to show our studio processes, and this idea of performance and construction has evolved and taken on different formats. These days, I’m not so tied to physical work because I had back surgery. After so much work and lifting, I had to have a hernia removed, and now I’m forbidden from attempting strenuous movements. I’ve had to modify that distancing, that performative aspect of building, which has always interested me, and take it somewhere else. And the bird or the performance at the fountain with José María Torres Nadal are examples of how to take advantage of any opportunity to put your body into another space. Your body is the physical thing that experiences decontextualisation; if you don’t involve it, you can’t reshape reality. It’s like you need to reshape yourself for that to happen.

I’ve been working for 10 years, and I had back surgery five years ago. Before, it was full construction; that is, I’ve always been a builder, like a labourer, using brute force. Then, I started teaching at a foundation, which is here next to the studio, teaching electrical work, tin soldering. I put together a team of students, and we got to work.

Well, it’s not thought out; it’s organic. Just like I didn’t plan to do what I’m doing now, they don’t necessarily have this in mind either, or they have to define it based on what they’d like to do. That means the collective itself is also part of the experimentation. It’s not so much my decision but about what they want. It’s an open conversation where we can see what we want to be and how we’re evolving. I don’t know, it’s all very fluid, and the issue of authorship has never been thought about directly, but their names are everywhere. The people who know us know how we work.

It’s work by inertia, not by decisions. I think collective work is something I’d like to write about at some point.

That there’s something that unites us all, like this point where we’re not here just to work. In other words, what we’re looking for is more a way of living or a way to make something work in order to make a living from it. But there are no schedules here; the team often stays overnight, or we stop work and go for a bike ride if we feel like it. Work isn’t thought of in terms of production, but as a way of living and of creating a space at the same time. This space is always changing as new people come in. Recently, we cleaned up and threw away six tonnes of old work and material, and the person who’d been in the studio the longest couldn’t understand why, while the person who’d joined most recently wanted to clear everything out. There was a tension and a discussion that they had practically without me noticing. So, I think it’s a little bit based on that, on not being afraid of redefining things.

I’ve always felt like that. It didn’t matter how many commissions or projects I had, I’ve always used 100 percent of the resources that have been available. There’s no speculation; there are no savings and no future.

There are still times when I don’t have any resources. Right now, I’ve got 200 euros in my account. I don’t have the resources to work.

It might happen. It can’t be ruled out.

I don’t know what would happen, and I don’t know what I’d do, but I’d continue creating, for sure. I’d have to change things around, but that wouldn’t be the end. There’s always some inertia; there’s some kind of muscle memory—like when you throw a stone, the stone already has its set trajectory. I think we generate our trajectory much earlier than we think we do.

Because I don’t have it. 

And it depends on what you mean by things going well. For me, it’s about not stopping doing what I like and understanding that the team has to do what they like. In other words, there’s also an evolution and a reshaping generated by the team itself. It’s good that everything happens in the moment and contributes to the unfolding story with each person saying what they want and learning about what they like. Since I’ve always hated being told what to do, I don’t tell other people what to do. The important thing is to get there by communicating, drawing, through processes—having a shared vision of what we want to build and building it from there. But there should never be an imposition of ideas. Everything is quite processual, as it’s happening.

If not, there’s no aesthetic tension, you know? In the end, money is still energy, and you’re paid to expend your energy. There’s an idea, at least in construction, that brute force is highly valued, and even intellectual force can be brute force. This space is also a place to sleep or shower. We want to be stocked up on all the essentials to be able to stay here and work here. For example, at the moment, we’re aging meat, so those processes of building and cooking are already completely intertwined—one thing must be produced alongside the other because there comes a point of not just seeing it, but knowing it’s all interconnected.

Yes, it’s like when you’re cooking, those colours, those smells—they play a decisive role in our processes.

Apparently so, as almost all my clients are gay. I mean, I’ve never had a straight client yet.

Well, like the bedroom, you’ll see.

No, that’s right, but there is an effort to change the body. In other words, it’s also traversed by the infrastructure of the work itself and the relationships between everyone who works here and the attempt not to have a hierarchy. Our spaces are part of understanding that architecture. Every day, one of us cooks—maybe whoever’s most tired, or whoever wants to do it most; someone does the shopping and cooks whatever they want.

In Raving, the good thing is that once again the spaces she describes create a free space for there to be relationships outside of the conventional. It’s not time that fills the space but the forms of life that inhabit it. A bit like with a simulation—they’re spaces that can be activated, not from a place, not from history, but as lived places.

It’s more about sensations, it’s something related to the corporeal. There’s a point at which you’re working as if it were an afterparty. There’s no distinction between sleep and wakefulness anymore, but there’s still something about keeping day and night latent, which I think is something that’s also interesting and brings a new temporality at the same time.

Like a fluid sensation where nothing is definitive, where you don’t want to go to sleep. Obviously, you are going to go to sleep, but it’s not a clean cut.

It changes, and, as ever, colour is tied to form. For example, with Gucci, we used a completely round edge in search of an almost maximum abstraction of space. A space that almost disappeared because of it; green was the most chromatic colour we could find within what the carpet market offered. But there was this idea of using such a strong colour, and the trouble with the photographs was that they became analogue at one point. When you were there, it was really very powerful because the green also combined with some red furniture and your eye shifted the colours, depending on where it was focusing—the colours were skewed—and in continuous light, it almost turned grey with the reflection of the green. It was a trick of the mind.

Because it’s Gucci, after all, and it has to be something people understand. The first colour I chose wasn’t green. It was a very strong orange. But it was impossible to produce because we couldn’t get the dyes to make such a heavy orange. Basically, the mock-up we put together was more salmon with the white, and then we found the green. But it’s no coincidence that green is used, we know that the human eye is able to see the most tones in green, because we’ve always had a close connection to this colour, through our environment, in nature.

Of course it’s futuristic, it’s highly refined. It’s getting at something that people understand. It’s a conceptual work.

I think because it’s easy to understand, although we don’t try to explain it. You can understand it has depth or attempts to make you appreciate things in a different way. The intention is understood.

More than changing, the work interests me as a living thing. A thing that doesn’t look dead, that isn’t a fossil. I think the art of the second half of the last century hit a point where everything was transformed into a fossil, the commodification of the object transformed the art object into something really dead, even with how it’s staged in museums. And I think the more artistic proposals emerging now are about trying to reinfuse those things with life. But culture and aesthetics are also in a process of quite intense change, and we still don’t understand where it’s going.

There’s this general feeling that fossils don’t interest us and, above all, that memory can’t become a fossil. We can’t believe the future is going to be cancelled. And, for me, that’s part of doing things differently every time.

It’s more like a change of speed; we really move at the speed of light in the sense that we’re looking at a screen all the time. Information moves at a speed that it couldn’t before. My interest is linked to production technique. Practically the only way to differentiate yourself from everyone else is to do it yourself. You know why? Because the very act of doing it yourself means it will be different. In other words, you’ll enact an unrepeatable process, one which you’ll not even be able to repeat yourself.  

In the sense that you’re talking about, the problem is that everyone ends up using the same pantones, or everyone uses the same production companies. That’s why it all looks the same, because everything tends to be monopolised. There are lots of people who use aesthetics as a business rather than as a way of making culture. So, the question is, How do you differentiate yourself? Does it make sense to continue believing in aesthetics or to continue believing in doing things? Perhaps the question is more the why. 

I think the last architectural typology is the datacentre. It’s as if the history of architecture ends in the datacentre, and then from the datacentre, what’s going to be the story of new architecture? Because houses and cities are fossils and, since they are fossils, they’re not alive. It’s impossible for something interesting or alive to happen within the framework of the city. So now everything that’s alive is digital, you know? And then what that digital architecture supports—or that transition or understanding of what digital materiality is—is what will allow us to think about the architecture that’s coming. 

If you think about typologies of architecture, Rome carries a lot of weight. In Rome, we discovered the temple. The Pantheon is like a typology of domes; it’s what’s going to be developed. But, above all, it was the homes, the courtyard house, which in architecture is a square in the centre of nine squares. And that grid is repeated as a typology throughout architecture at the housing level and is worked on through Palladian or Renaissance architecture.  

All modernity tries to make variations on that grid to break it, and little by little, the grid or the dome is defragmented. In other words, form and function have always been the same in architecture. The dome is the important one because the width of the circle is directly proportional, the plan and section are the same, so we understand it. And the struggle of modernity is to separate form from function. An early Gehry work was his Binoculars Building, and then he completely managed to disarticulate form from function in the Bilbao Guggenheim, creating a structure that has nothing to do with function. We can safely say the typology of the last century, in addition to skyscrapers or corporate buildings, is museums. And datacentres appear to be the museums of the future. It’s practically where the memory of culture is going to be stored. For the first time, it’s all together, it’s a library, it’s a museum, it’s a new site of memory.  

Not all architects will manage to build datacentres; it’s something an architect can’t really achieve, as it’s a work of engineering. Yet, at the same time, it was an architect himself who wanted engineers to design things for him, because Gehry is pure engineering. The interesting thing about Gehry is that he used software to design airplanes. He used CATIA for the first time, which is engineering software for aeronautics. So again, there is this reshaping, this taking a technique out of context in order to achieve a different result.

I think we’ve been sold a lot of temporary disillusionment, as if everything has ceased to exist, or as if the search for a future aesthetic is no longer interesting. It’s really very difficult to break the idea of home. Just as with a museum, or a datacentre, the shape of the human body would have to change so that the starting point might be different. We would have to shit, piss, and eat in a different way, which is something that’s apparently not going to happen in the near future. Changing your desires is already very architectural—the basis of typology is reproduction. The typology of the human is the human, to those ends, and the typology of architecture is repeated in the same way, but from the moment bodies cease to be understood as beings that need to reproduce, it can start to change again. That seems to me to be a bigger change than artificial intelligence, for example, which doesn’t imply such a philosophical shift. 

Matadero was public, I think.

Libraries, I don’t know, a cemetery. 

I love Montjuïc Cemetery, I think it is one of the best structures in Barcelona, I’m telling you. It’s just that it’s a real infrastructure. It’s like Archigram, the English utopians who proposed a city of cranes. You see the cranes in the port with the ocean liners and shipping containers in front of this whole mountain that was a quarry from which the City of Barcelona was built, and there’s this structure that was already there and functional—and now all the dead are there, looking at the sea.