Interview with Andrés Jaque

Cecilia Andersson:
I’m so impressed by the rings you produce. Your idea is that its wearer signal s/he consumed 100 liters of water today. Tell me a bit about this - how you as an architect became interested to communicate facts that reach beyond an architects’ remit?

Andrés Jaque:
For many years, during what has been called the modern parenthesis, architects were occupied trying to invent new realities; new cities, new houses, new infrastructures. And these new entities where supposed to be without doubt better. But now I think architecture is not so much the making of new realities but the rendering of reality as a public affair, as a matter of concern. On the one hand making visible the connection between different realities where our action happens, and making it possible for anyone to take decisions depending on his or her sensitivity. Architecture is becoming less scientific, and more political.

Cecilia:
Tell me a bit about the processes involved in your way of working. I’m for example curious to hear more about the role memory plays, and how you dig into memory when working with a client. Teddy House would be one obvious example.

Andrés:
I ask myself, where does the respectable knowledge rest? This is the question architects face when taking decisions. I believe architecture should be a parliament, rather than a temple. It is not about constructing a pure and idealized object, but give representation to the concerns, hopes and sensitivities of all the actors involved in a building process (humans and non-humans). Knowing that many of these parts would never be compatible without the mediation architecture can provide. Architecture is in my opinion ‘society technologically represented’.

Cecilia:
Bruno Latour talks about the parliament of things, and that modernity basically was concerned with classifying objects and subjects. We’re in the process of slowly shaking ourselves out of modernism, approaching a hybrid existence where the technological and organic interstice. How would you envision this parliament to function in an ideal way?

Andrés:
As Latour explains, it is important to understand politics are embodied neither in humans nor in objects, but in a network of associations between humans and non-humans (technology, institutions, animals, future generations). The only chance for democracy to survive is for democracy to be installed in these associations, in what has been called an object oriented democracy. In my opinion this way of thinking challenges modernity as a context of reference for architecture. We can now see how architectural events become issues that concentrate public disputes. I agree with Bruno Latour, associations between washing-machines, windows, users, resources… are in great need of a chamber where their relations can be accounted for. And in this process we architects can decide not to take part or become compulsory pass point. I myself chose the second option.

Cecilia:
You’re talking about an ‘invisible’ design - more of a process than resulting in an object. Would you say this is mainly a socio-political ambition?

Andrés:
Exactly. But it is important to see this not as an immaterial process. After 1968 architects turned to leave the pursuit of immutable objects for a revendication of immateriality. Even today this idea of architecture without matter is quite sexy and desirable. In my opinion reality is constituted both by material and non-material things. The sand of the beach managed over time by the surf, the naturist ideology of body exposure or knowing how to swim. Innovation can only succeed with a parallel respond to the way reality is constructed. With evolutions that on the one hand transform the material constitution while simultaneously transforming the immaterial devices they are connected to and act together with. There is no divorce between matter, social institution and architectural devices, whether we wish this or not, and create and exclude possibilities for both. In my opinion this is one the central issues that make a clear distinction between many architects of my generation and many of the previous ones. We know the idea of a generic architecture that would serve with the same efficiency to different social constructions never really worked. Architecture is not the neutral background for life, neither a passive and apolitical agent. A loft is not a neutral house where any micro society could happen, it is only the place where educated occidentals without too many environmental limitations imagine anything could happen.

Cecilia:
What would you like to see happening in Madrid in terms of its architectural development? Considering the city has grown massively during the past few years, and now more or less on a complete stand still.

Andrés:
Madrid is a city with lots of evidences, lots of big and expensive facts. It is time for these facts to be connected with people’s dreams and concerns. How can we create a residential fabric that liberate people from their heavy mortgages and that let them change jobs when they feel like it (without having to question if they will be able to pay the bills). How can we make it possible for people to move about, go to the movies for instance but without ruining the beautiful landscape that people loves. How can we build so that people employed on a building sites can be provided with reasonable incomes and safe conditions while at work. Madrid, like most cities is a great machine to achieve things. It is urgent to use such machines to produce the things that we, as a democratic society, desire.