Alejandro Zaera (Madrid 1963, Dipl.

ETSAM 1988, March II Harvard GSD 1991), is

a design critic in the ETSAM, and a Unit Master at the A London. He has been a
member of O.M.A. (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) in Rotterdam, and is
founder and director of Foreign Office Architects, recent winners of the competition
for the Yokohama International Port Ter. minal in Japan. He is a permanent
collaborator of El Croquis, and his texts have been published in Quaders, AD, Arch+,
de Architect, Archis, etc.

In the last five years, you have had the opportunity to construct several projects in
which the strategies vou used in vour initial desians have somehow undergone
important changes. From a fundamentally craftsman's practice. forged over an
enormous attention to detail, you have had to step up to the execution of large projects
and the consolidation of a relatively big studio with assignments in other provinces of
Spain and other countries such as Japan and Germany. At the same time, you have
begun to be published internation-ally, and you have taught at several European and
American schools. How
would vou describe vourself at this point? How have vou manaced to assimilate these
changes? To what extent have you needed to produce a discourse that somehow
surpasses the specific conditions of your local practice to let you operate on a broader
scale? To what extent do vou think it is necessary to propose a more paradigmatic,
more mediated argument to be able cope with this new situation?

The most interesting aspect of the period I am now moving out of is that having
established a more consolidated practice has forced me to work on different problems
at the same time. My studio has grown a lot, but we still have not reached the size at
which the design teams are perfectly well organized and are mutually independent.
This is a relatively small studio, and our form of managing things is not fragmentary.
Projects overlap each other, people move through several projects, through several
tasks, depending on what is most urgent at the time. The other important thing in
recent years
has been the opportunity to build our projects. Constructed work gives you enormous
freedom of interpreta-tion. The need to rationalize things at the start of a project is
very different from what happens during the construction process. At the begin-ning,
there is no interpretation. We would like the series of projects in this issue of El
Croquis to be an exhibition of the work running parallel to the construction of the big
projects we have undertaken over this time. They are tasks that probably take the
liberty of beginning in a less complex way, of starting with something that is already
part of your work, of a suggestion, of a test...

It is not quite like in other projects, where you start from zero, where the whole
project has to be ready. In some way, bullding the works gives you much more
freedom to deal with them: it enriches them tremendously. Our working time in this
period has been a constant time, in which things have been added to measure which
the construction process itself has arranged. When these big jobs finish you find you
are left with all this material that has grown in the shadow of the construction process,
which suddenly reveals a less directional process of investigation. I belleve that the
important advances in a studio happen in such periods. when the sequence of work
changes and you have to rediscover a plausible pace of work. You have to appreciate
the act of doing things to find that pace. Il does not depend on the effect of chance, of
the assignment, of the situation...

To date. the themes I have worked on have been very consistent, also by my own
choosing. They have almost always been in fringe areas where the urban settlement is
yet to be proposed... they are always related to previously specified public works...
They have also been the result of a public works construction process that has taken
place in Spain. This is an interesting situation, because your work is added on to a
more global project such as building the infrastructure for a city, even it it is on a
small assignment.

Starting to have assignments in different parts of Europe or Japan makes you reassess
your modus operandi-- the way you explain things, what you have to offer... This is
the point where one begins to question the need to start operating in what you call a
paradigmatic mode... But I am not really convinced that that is possible. I do not
know whether you can establish a set of working rules that are valid in any situation...
I do not think that you can go in front of your work, pulling it along, but rather in
some way it is the job itself that directs things by means of small deviations.

It is true that you have worked almost systematically outside the city. Is that by
chance- is it circumstantial or has it been by choice?

Perhaps from a realistic point of view you could say it has been accidental, but I
would say that interpreting projects in a certain way makes it a choice. We could
claim, for example, that when you are working on the fringe you can decide what side
of the line you are standing on, whether you remake the city or whether you are more
Interested in giving shape to this fringe in a more abstract fashion. Obviously. this
decision tinges the other projects, and it possibly tinges the other assignments. even if
they are in a more urban environment... When you suddenly start to work in an old
quarter it is not the site that ls peripheral but rather time. Time becomes peripheral
when you start to work with XVI century build ings: they are the fringes of the
present. What happens here is that the strata ol time are what you cannot define
precisely, and you have to redefine them again.

This shift from a casual spatial location towards a modus operandi is very interesting,
both in itself and in relation to the specific situation in Catalonia over recent years. I
think that architects can possibly be classified into portrait architects and landscape
architects: into architects who work with configurations or variations of a
configuration, and architects who work with textures or rhythms. Although I imagine
that you are reluctant to be part of a
"school", the Catalonian case is quite revealing. In the 1980's, I think, it gave rise to
an important generation of landscape architects, in perfect consistency with a highly
specific geographic and cultural situation in search of new points of reference. I think
your work includes many techniques that typify that trendpropensity for disintegration
of forms, for defiguration, for operation with mutually inconsistent textures and
rhythms, for the delicacy or instability of
construction, for the elimination of spatial references-- above, below, left, right,
centre, edge... The fact that you explain your work as the transition from a casually
peripheral situation to an intentionally landscape situation is almost a mathematical
verification of the hypothesis....

The distinction you make is very nice, and I have no objection to appearing alongside
the landscapists... Do you know why? Because many of these works reflect an attitude
of apprenticeship, of appropri ation of things. I believe that on the landscapist side
there is a greater freedom of operation: a confrontation with a more complex reality.

Shifting to the other side, however, I would say that the modus operandi is more like a
portrait painter. What happens is that ideas are not. fixed to an image of a city, to the
idea of a street or the idea of an historic quarter .. When I start the portrait of a street
that ends up dissolving into the landscape, I probably have to seek the way to work
with it... but my intention is still to fix things. One very elementary technique that I
am fond of is to treat everything as equal: to consider the placement of a tree, a
specific programme, a building, all in the same way... I learned this with the Igualada
Cemetery, where I managed to build a place devoted almost exclusively to the
protected growth of trees. It is impressive lor a project to be placed in time through its
use... In buildings, there is always an inauguration, but later comes its use, which is
always rough... That is one of the most impressive things about a project, when you
have the sensation that the thing is working on its own.
There are parts of a job that are left to their own devices, simply left to be cleaned, or
to get dirty or to the rain.., that is a bit like what happens on the periphery- abandoned
places that function alone, because somebody leaves their chattels there...

That has to do with the ability to interpret signs, to read decodified configurations that
lack recognizable significance. Your work seems to put a lot of effort into the
analysis, into the register of the data of the place: the contours, the shadow lines, the
tracks set by the inhabitants... One could say that the work process you use originates
in this graphic register of the conditions of the place, which changes with
developments that are not determined from the outset, but rather evolve in an erratic
line that changes course depending on the specific local conditions....

At times marks have a meaning. II somebody knows how to interpret them, they
understand them. But you often have to stop like a stranger, like when you find
inscriptions on a rock. I am interested in that task of accepting the results as they
appear.

In that respect, I would say that it is not so much a line as a beam. A project consists
of knowing how to tie multiple lines together, multiple ramifications that open up in
different directions. My way of working is closely linked to the idea of almost
glancing around, of amusing yourself. Once the problem is set, the next step is to
almost forget the purpose of what you were doing, almost
as il lo distract yourself. Later you reestablish the problem, but there is a part like a
distraction, like erratic behaviour where the jumps are fundamental, but they are short
hops. nol long leaps.

That is interesting, because it seems to reveal a radically pragmatic, experimental,

short memory style of work. Firstly in your doubts about the validity of paradigms as
a basis for operation, your skepticism about setting the para-meters that are to define
the form of action; the way you explain the history of the projects as a succession of
experiments with no solution of continuity. but are nevertheless clearly specific in the
time and space in which they arise. The literal translation of a part of one project to
another is curiously paradigmatic of a modus operandi and knowledge linked closely
to the process of making, of producing, rather than to one of inventing first and
materializing alterwards. Here, the ideas seem to originate in a prior materialization-
the codes are constructed via the maner...
Well, I would not go so far as to say that there is no idea, not because I am afraid of
saying so... I think if you work from the register, rather than imposing you are
checking from the outset. I would replace the word idea with the word dialogue--
conversation more than idea. The worst part of a project is most probably its
imposition. What is happening in Berin right now- all of those enormous projects- is
no less than a fullscale imposition. So obviously you cannot discuss or ask..

Many of my projects are built in this way-- discussing with what exists. It is almost
the classic conversation. There is a bit of "Where is the idea, and where is the ideal?"
In the common contents that make these things agree with others. I would say that the
ideal content lies in what family you relate the data of the place to, where you are
taking the place. You place the idea behind, never in front...

Is that why you claim that it is in the constructed work, a posteriori, where the
optimum conditions arise for efficiently interpreting the task?

Put llke that, I realize that essentially you think just the way you haye learned from
the lask, from comments made by other people... Like the way you learn to read or
understand other people: always via the consequences. It might be simply that you see
a finished job as if some body else had done it... you find it and you look al it. What
interests me about constructed work is that the
more complex it looks, the more schematic it is. finally freed from the doubts of the
process. The only thing left Is what was really important. And at the same time, it is a
schem-aticism that is not the same as what was produced at the start of the project, but
what has been enriched during construction. It ls a mark that has not been made by
you...

It is only in time that you understand the thinking better, the shape of things, when the
urgency, the need to decide, disappears when things settle. That is what is interesting:
to maintain certain forms, or certain models of reconstructing a space. In these recent
works, i have tried to prevent some of the projects from ever being alone--to continue
what was necessary to create a project-- to never understand projects as terminaled
pieces. That is why I am increasingly interested in movements as a technigue. In
essence it is a technigue to break off from mimesis as the fundamental operative basis
of traditional architecture. Accepting the mimetic or repetitive condition of things is a
value--- it is hard to sus-tain today.

Maybe mimesis is a fantastic learning mechanism, but it can never be a valuable

mechanism. That is something | have been experimenting with recently with my
students at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. I asked them to build a project on a given
site, and move it to another in the middle of the project, so that the object they began
to build would serve as an instrument to reveal a whole range of problems that exist
somewhere else. That is how we avoid the type of tautologies between the hypothesis
and the results that we architects often perpetrate.

My work also includes this translation of information from one project to another, as
if the search were taking place in several territories at the same time. Maybe that is
due to the overlap phenomenon I mentioned before. For example, the gates and
crosses at the Igualada Cemetery were thought up for houses that were never built,
and the site of their perfect emplacement is
the cemetery entrance. Perhaps the most extreme case is the Camy-Nestle Bridge
project, which is built from a literal shift of one piece of the project for the Valencia
Classroom Building, which was never constructed. The Camy Bridge is a test. I had
never done it in any previous work, and it probably cannot be understood as a method.
It is like a bad chessplayer's move. It is not particularly elab-orate, but it is a test with
a more crystalline character: sacrificing the specific nature of the situation to the
application of a distant reality... I think it has to do with a very deep conviction that
projects are never completed. They rather enter successive stages in which maybe we
no longer have direct control over them, or perhaps they are reincarnated in other
projects we design...

The way you describe your form of thinking is like a process of accumulation
between simultaneous interlinked developments. They pass information from one to
another. Withour being able to essentally identv the evolution or ideas or determine
their origin and their end. I know it is probably a difficult subject, but doesn't this idea
of the unfinished project ultimately confirm the primacy of style over the specific
problem? Now, I am by no means saying this as something negative, as an obstacle to
a potential intelligent dialogue with reality, but as a quality that is probably
fundamental to a modus operandi linked to neither a specific territory nor a paradigm.
Is it a sort of deterritorialized code that is reproduced in multiple variations,
depending on the idiosyncrasies of the environment? Don't you think that one of your
great
talents has probably been the development of a refined style? How would you define
the fundamental traits of your style, your manner of production?

From the outset, I would like to insist that I do not take style to be the systematic
repetition offormal gestures. It is something that comes from a way of operating. The
gestures that determine my work are born from a series of specific interests,
irrespective of the spatial result they acquire. It is a sort of systematic repetition of
certain acts that provide things with coherence. A great deal of my work is produced
almost through accumulation, by repetition. I repeat every sketch I do thirty times,
and my colleagues repeat it likewise. I believe that repetition is aimed at finding the
precise structure of the physical conditions of the place, the scale, the dimensions...

I understand very well why Palladino, who was not a great theorist but rather a builder
and a great inventor, had to remake all the sites of his projects to publish them in
architectural texts.

When you meditate on an architectural preblem, deep down you are operating on a
very elementary level: What is this site doing? It has the shape of a square, with a sort
of irregular hexagon on one side and on top there is a rectangular chunk... How many
of the projects we normally work on are absolutely delemined by specific conditions,
which are not ideal conditions.
One usually works with absolutely irrational profiles. The job of rationalizing. of
making the real state consistent with the proposal is ever more important the more
abstract the proposal. In my projects, you could hardly blame the result on the shape
of the site. None of them are directly conditioned by those dimensions. The work of
repetition is very important to the production of
the embodiment- of an idea It is the longest task, where the architecture becomes
recognizable beyond the specific initial data. I work with constructive, not visual
criteria, and so repetition is extremely important. Each new sketch is an operation of
oblivion, and the laws that are generated have an internal coherence. That is why
geometry is so important for me as an instrument for articulating specilic situations. It
enables me to forget, to do less recognizable things. I always try to find the criterion
of consistency in the precise dimension of things, which is the task that probably most
interests me.

The repetition of a graph as an instrument of erasure or decontextualization, and

simultaneously of accumulative construction of information seems to insist again on
that praqmatic process in which the separation between concepts and their production
tends to disappear...

I wish that saparation did not exist: ideas are in things. I believe, for example, that one
of the most characteristic things about my style of work is that I never have a prior
idea of the space I am trying to construct; I always work from ground plans, never
from elevations or three-dimensional configurations. From those initial registers. |
design plans on different levels, which are
what in the end automatically construct the sec-tions. The three-dimensional form
only arises at the end of the process, never before the production of these horizontal
sections. This coherent overlapping is what ultimately gives meaning to a task. The
necessary physical register of all the levels is also a problem of density of the mater
ial you are working with. It is the point at which you begin to assess the material you
are working with: the density of the ground, the density of the air, the awareness of
being 3 metres or 15 metres from the ground... This style of working is more abstract,
more conceptual than working in section: a section has an archaic character, of
profiling things, as if we were still working with classical orders, the dado, the
capital.. I am much more interested in this process of productive accumulation than
profiling or stylistic reading, whether the choice is one style or another...

But your plans also seem to include a simultaneous mechanism of dismantling, of

destratification. which does not come from a prior lenathwise or crosswise
orientation, but rather where the geometric requirements of construction demane

Exactly, because the very form of working or building, constructs space. Let us go
back again to Palladino, in one of those halls with four columns whose rise produces
the little corner vaults that later merge in the central vault...

The information of the section is not so much the rhetoric of construction but rather
the generation of the information necessary to determine form. Plans are always built
for somebody who could read them to have the information necessary to construct
them. I always try to make all the documents include all the necessary information to
produce the object. The result of understanding the plan dos not lie in the plan itself
so much as in the head of the person reading it; they are not representative plans, but
informative documents.

That is why I am telling you that my stylistic definition is more in the working
mechanisms, my obsession with geometry, structure and con-struction as instruments
of the project's coherence, more than in the images, the symbols or the
representations. And this runs into other attitudes, into mechanisms that are avoided
systematically, for example the use of perspective as something that gives form to
things...And it immediately shifts to certain gestures that are repeated in different
projects, for example the inclusion of the horizon in the room space as a technique of
flattening the perspective..

In any case, apart from a method that gives priority to construction over repres-
entation, that works fundamentally with geometry, with the material organization and
structure, I believe that it is very difficult to deny the existence of certain preferences
when you use these techniques, which we could call stylistic traits It is a sort of
psychomotory structure, a form of empathy with certain configurations that incline
you to use certain geometric operations or distri butions and densities of matter
instead of others. I am referring to a certair tendency to doble lines, for example, to
decompose the
construction into mainly light, linear elements--- almost antigravitational... it is almost
like the sculptural substratum. Do you acknowledge these preferences as the
generators of a way of doing things, of a style?

That is like the story where the boss asks the employee "Would you mind doing
this?", and the employee replies systematically *I would honestly prefer not to." Yes,
there is a preference for certain things...

I think that this is something I can recognize in other activities, not just design, for
example the way I organize a class or a lecture. I like the pieces to have a
recognizable character of their own, so that they can be removed from everything
without completely losing their identity. The term empathy you propose is very
appropriate. I think I often work by empathy, by identification with the objects I
produce. I often imagine people moving around the building, moving through the
walls and the pillars like in a field of forces in which the occupants are an integral part
of it. If we were to register the weight of the building, we would see that the flow of
the inhabitants sometimes accounts for a third of the building's weight.

I am always obsessed by making all of the parts of a building accessible to that human
mass that moves around the building I think it is a sorl of legacy of the work under
construction, of that necessary condition in any construction in which the space has to
be accessible for it to be built. I told you before that for me, a work is never
completed; it is almost a way in which the building itself retains its scaffolding
permanently, in its very nature. In almost all of my works, this necessity for absolute
accessibility ends up confronting an access with a structure, or the facilities with a
boiler room or the air conditioning machinery. I am interested in when a building
provides access to the precise points that have to be reached for their construction. In
some classic buildings, this is quite clear: the dome is always served by four secret
stairways that climb its soffits, which shape the empty space of the vault.. So you can
always rebuild, fix things, and that is very important.

How do you explain the trend towards formal complexity that seems to be one of the
main points of your work?
I tend to operate by variations... When one thinks about the construction of a wall, to
Use an example of a very elementary object, I am interested in thinking about all of
the possibilities that this element can or could contain. It is hard to think of a wall
without thinking of the possibility of a niche, which reveals the depth of the wall
space. It is difficult to ignore the structure that
makes the wall possible, the counterforts. the columns, or the multiple layers of the
wall which open up the concept of the wall to a multiplicity of readings... These are
material qualities, they are independent of subjective interpretations or
generalizations. When I assert the idea of variation, it is because I want the elements
to be able to incorporate this variety of material
conditions. I never work by reduction: I try to reveal the multiplicities, the
singularities...

Are you aware of being part of some tradition? When you speak of your style of
working, of the absence of paradigms or determined lines of operation, of the
identitication between ideas and the handling of matter, geometry, structure,
appreciation or the landscape, the construction process as a permanently unfinished
activity... you seem to be developing a series of extraordinarily consisten connections
with a local genealogy that goes back to the gothic masters, and which continues in
some way up to Jujol and Miró. To what extent do you consider yourself to be a
participant in this tradition?

I feel I am part of the tradition that values making, manufacturing, as the origin of
thinking. I feel much closer to this form of operating than to the tradition that seeks
the abstract idea as the origin of the building activ-ity. I have recently been looking
back over Taut's work. I am very interested in his project for his own house. Do you
know it? He did it as a discipline to describe what a house could be, through an
operation that consisted of isolating each room of the house to design them separately.
Each room, which ends up as an approximate pentagon because of the shape of the
house, becomes an independent element from which it would be difficult to be able to
reconstitute the form of the house. You would not even know how to set one room
beside another. An independent logic arises in each piece that demands absolute
independence from the discipline necessary to build the house. I think that Taut is a
clear particip ant in the tradition I consider myself to be part of- more interested in
surprise, in variation, than in the general concept of the project. The result of the
house is excellent thanks to an extremely skillful work on detail, on the placement of
the pieces, on the unity between door, table, window, radialor... It is a tradition which
instead of making you the heir to forms or ideas, teaches you to observe in a certain
way, to discover things. This idea of variation does not necessarily imply geometric or
material complexity. In some 'minimal works, for example, the sense of variation is
produced through highly sophisticated mechanisms.

The absence of the variant in the creation of a wall or a box some-times makes the
variation more obvious. The purity of the best minim alist works lies precisely in
making the absence of variations obvious, to reveal them. One
example that interests me is Richard Long's metal wall. It has the ability to evoke
everything that it does not construct literally…. Nevertheless, I do not think that these
notions are particularly valid within architecture, and the often become an immensely
superficial description. The task of variations in a project is much more neces• sary,
because that wall is ultimately not a wall- it has to become part of a much more
complex system. These are Taut's rooms: connected units, with laws of appurtenance
to processes of a higher entity. In architecture, the unit is not allusive or
representative, but instead, neces-sary, operative.

Your reference to the minimalists as, shall we say, an opposing tradition iscurrous...

No, I have never perceived it as something opposed. I have regarded it as something I

have never been greatly interested in. To reach a schem-atic formal result that
establishes a direct relationship with minimalist schematicism or purity has no interest
whatsoever for me as an architect. What in a piece of art or an installation can be
appropriate to the extent that it can establish a dialogue with a highly specific reality
is not easily transferrable to an architectural design.... it is a type of corset..

That fits in perfectly with the attitude you have been outlining throughout this
conversation in which ideas do not exist before their materialization. that ideas
crystallize at certain points of an erratic, short memory, construction process that is
not determined by either an origin or an end. In this sense, the reductivist, and to some
extent static attitude implied by the minimalist orinciples does not appear to determine
the type of operations that you have been proposing. One could say that in your work
there is a need to materialize the concepts or to produce them materially, that they
have no place in min imalist attitudes.

Yes, ideas are a physical product in my work. It is the same as what I said before
about a building having to be physically accessible at all its points. Otherwise,
without this physical contact, the multiple ideas, the variations, cannot be admitted. I
do not like there to be secrets. As a discipline, not as a perceptive quality. I always try
to make the rela tionships physical: you have
to be able to see through, to reach, to touch... I am not interested at all in allusive
reality, where connections are made backwards in time, towards history, or forwards,
towards a uto pia; or towards a given paradigm or language... What interests me is a
sort of incorporation, of infinite integration.