EMBA is an architectural and urban design studio based in Barcelona and internationally oriented that develops projects in a wide range of scales and typologies for both public and private clients.
The presentation of the monograph will be held on Thursday at 20.00 h in the Naos Bookshop in Madrid, with the presence at the table of engineer Julio Martínez Calzón and architect José Juan Barba who will accompany Enric Massip during the presentation.
The 17 selected projects that are shown, are presented developed with plans and many details, with a presentation that uses scale as conecting thread, organizing from smaller to larger. The book takes a journey that goes from the remodeling of the Place de la République in Leucate, France, to the imposing Torre Telefónica Diagonal Zerozero which has more than 50 pages devoted to it.
Dialogue between Jaume Prat and Enric Massip-Bosch.
JP Whenever I visit a work of yours it puzzles me: they all look very different, but in all of them I can recognize you as if they were different masks covering the architect behind the work.
EMB Maybe. I am preparing for TC a book collecting some of my writings due out shortly after this monograph. One of the titles that I thought for it is “Coming from behind,” which is a classic move in handball, a sport I played for several years. It’s the feeling I’ve always had with architecture: getting upfront from back positions, and trying to score. I think architecture begins with each architect that gets to it. But it does not start in a vacuum, but from earlier strata, layers of history and biographical strata, and better to be aware of them. From here on you have to invent everything else, and I’d like to do so not only with my career, but with every project, without preconception. Perhaps a result of this is the perplexity you comment.
I work through reasoned intuition. Perhaps among my works there are no obvious connections, or a style in the usual sense of the word, but there is a continuity of concrete concerns. I’ve done very few projects without a commission, because I’m interested in working from a necessity and under determined conditions. I think that the condition of necessity gives full sense to architecture.
JP I have tried, as far as I could, not make formal conjectures with respect to your work. As I said, I’m very attracted by its diversity. You are an architect that has not limited to a single way of doing. However, I have come to identify three families of approaches to the project and a formal invariant. One family would be those works that extend in the plane and are organized by a continuous vibrating. Among them would be the exhibition “Borders” and the square of Leucate.
A second family would be composed of very horizontal buildings that fill the plane. The extreme example would be the Tàrrega penitentiary, but it also includes the three schools: Artés, Fontajau and Torelló, and the new Parliament in Andorra. The third family would be buildings that occupy relatively little floor area, more compact. This would include Diagonal ZeroZero tower and JP building, a project which interests me more and more.
EMB I had never thought in those terms, and I find it very suggestive. This classification you propose, in fact, is based on the occupation of space. A family would relate to the activation of a field, the projects you mentioned of the exhibition or Leucate, which I had never related but I find it very pertinent. Also the exhibition for the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona we just opened in Shanghai. Another would be to build a horizon and the third would be to build a presence. I suppose you could think that some other projects are combinations of these three families. The Intermarché in Riyadh, for instance, and maybe also Andorra, where we wanted to visualize simultaneously the mineral condition of the site and the immateriality of the new democratic institution.
JP Some more come to mind... The invariant I have detected in all projects is an interplay, a work on textures and vibration, which I think it has to do a lot with an urban, or perhaps civil, condition of your buildings.
EMB I find it very interesting that you see it that way, because this actually is a conscious option. From the start we think all projects considering the city in a very literal sense or in a more abstract sense, although never metaphorically. Therefore, our projects want to establish a relationship of equals with the city. Not of subjugation or of imposition. Yes, there is a tendency, or an elective affinity as Goethe would say, by which the buildings... you say they vibrate.
I like to talk about reverberation, particularly in Diagonal ZeroZero, but also in the residential complex we’ve designed in Taiwan. In the other projects is a non-fixed, changing and vibrating presence. In Volpelleres, we used visual reverberation of façades to generate an urbanity that the place did not have. It is an extreme gesture, but sometimes exaggerated gestures should be made to state a position. In this case, to monumentalize public action in a pusillanimous environment, and to generate centrality.
We have always worked in very limited projects from a budgetary point of view, and almost all for public administrations. As commissions, they have been usually more finalists than experimental, with very determined programs and typological conditions, with models set. This reality is not very inspiring, and fossilizes in architecture obsolete operating social modes. Still, we found margins of interpretation or manipulation. It is what I call a work on type, trying to overcome this poor immediacy through non-immediate invariants. I am interested in thinking about ancestral types... basic in the literal ¡meaning of the term ‘type’. Of tectonic formation of space, without other considerations.
JP This could be related to transcending what is social. To the need of being simpler... I do not know if we should be talking about simplicity. I have a prevention with the word “simple”: sometimes it does not refer to a real process of simplification, but of discarding.
EMB The more neutral, universal, deep as structure in the linguistic sense of the word, that is, the simpler the type in this regard, the more able it will be to be appropriated, reused and reinstated in other ways interpreting and using it. This is connected with the idea of an architecture without attributes, without adjectives. Later maybe we can talk about it. It can be adjectivized, but only temporarily, not substantially. For the Tàrrega Penitentiary, for example, the basic idea is to transcend the immediate program and create a system of relationships which will permit its conversion and reuse in the future. In this sense, it is a work where the voids are more important than the solids, reversing the usual type of these buildings.
The social function of architecture also has its limits. Architecture, I believe, goes beyond the society that makes it. Indeed architecture lasts longer than people and societies, and many of us inhabit spaces and buildings made in other epochs. This leads to two interesting topics: the space-society relationship and the architect-society relationship. The best architectures have been always creating a certain distance between the terms of these two relationships. It seems obvious that Kahn and Mies were not very concerned about the society of their time. They were worried about a certain idea of humanity and eternity. Which, in the end, is a way to worry about society. But also other architects linked to a concrete time and society, with a less institutional or an anti-solemn discourse like Aldo van Eyck or Hertzberger to mention but two Dutch examples of the 1960s, envisioned and embodied transcendence in their projects, learning from social uses but not being limited by them. I feel unease with those discourses praising the small scale, the small intervention, social immediacy, because we are defining our working conditions with very little ambition and, in reality, in the mid-term scarcely transformative and not sustainable. But this is a dominant discourse now, especially among younger generations.
JP You are also professor. How do you see the role of new generations?
EMB We started classes recently. When we do, I try that we all know each other a bit better. We explain where we come from and how we get to the school. I also ask the students how they imagine themselves in a few years. It is a way to start a dialogue with people with whom you will share few months to a very high level of relationship.
None of my twenty students imagined themselves working in an office, less so on their own. Some said they had tried it and were bored. Many said they imagined working in a third world country linked to NGOs, others said they thought they’d work in a foreign office. None of them wanted to be an architect in the classical sense of the word. One even said that he doesn’t want to be an architect: he likes architecture enough to finish his studies, but did not want to exercise. When it was my turn I said I wanted to be an architect since I can remember. An artist architect I said, in order to create controversy. That is, an architect responsible for his acts of creative decision.
I was very surprised that none of them had this willingness. I understand the difficulty of the new generations not only to join the labour market, but to have a distinctive profile in this maelstrom in which we find ourselves. But at least they should try, however difficult it may be. Perhaps it’s not that they don’t want, but they feel insecure to become a voice in the face of a social pressure to discredit the architect. We surely have not explained well what we are and what we serve for. But I think this is one of the deficits of audacity we have. It affects generations which will be professionals within a few years. And we cannot afford that.
JP On the other hand, there is a trivialization or social recreation of audacity that devalues it. This discussion leads us to think about the social context in which we operate.
EMB Audacity must be conquered. The boldness which is worth pursuing is the one which is difficult to assume, because it is a conscious decision to take a step forward. We need people who have the courage to want to be a voice. The issue is how this voice is. Is it an integrative voice or a voice that occurs in a whimsical fashion? Or even being individualistic, is it a voice that tries to find a social benefit? I think the relationship architect-society is now critical for us in many ways. I’ve been concerned for some time about what we might call the social legitimacy of our work and try to give it new forms.
In this regard, I’ve been codirecting since two years ago in St. Petersburg an Urban Design Master Program, called Building The city now and accredited by UPC-BarcelonaTECH, in which we are experimenting, I think for the first time, collaborative and interdisciplinary design applied to the design and construction of the city. The meeting place is the design workshop, regardless of the students’ background: we have architects, sociologists or economists. All collaborate from their experience in discovering what are the important questions that the project should respond to. Afterwards, each proposes responses from their knowledge and are tested on a crossed discussion with a common goal. But the idea is not to dilute their own abilities in a certain consensus, but rather on the contrary, to reach a shared proposal from the polarization of these personal skills, which sometimes go beyond the strictly professional.
This is where the social value of our work should be reassessed, and for that there are no protocols. It is a trial and error process to be defined from personal positions. After having an antiformal attitude for many years at the beginning of my career, based more on the value of context and processes than in results, now I value more the fact that contexts change, processes disappear, and architecture mostly remains. It has a persistent condition of which it is best to be aware of from the beginning. Form, understood as materialization, is what remains, what may redeem architecture, whatever its original ‘sins’ might be.
JP What is the relationship between form and technique, two concepts which a priori have nothing to do with each other?
EMB Technique is what makes this redemption possible. For me the question of technique is intrinsic to architecture. This, surely, is the product of an Iberian, polytechnic education, but I think in this triple relationship idea-technique-form resides the essence of being an architect. Technique is the tool that allows us to translate an idea into form. But I do not think technique has an absolute, i.e. defining, value in architecture. I am interested in its role of mediation between the cultural component of architecture and its material component.
JP And the cultural component of technique?
EMB It means technique is not objective. Any justification saying that one solution is better because technique so requires it is false or perverse.
We live in a technified society, and technique has the triple condition of being pervasive, being flexible and being invisible. Therefore, it does not have in itself a qualifying capacity defining architecture, but requires to take a cultural or subjective position to be useful as a mediating element to build architecture. Another thing is that some close their eyes and do not want to have this responsibility about the use of technique.
In EMBA we have had from the beginning an international vocation that has allowed us to have a vision of the transversality of technique and, at the same time, the responsibility to give a local response. In our projects in Moscow and Riyadh, to name two climatic extremes, we have sought similar protection goals using similar technical systems, but they are not interchangeable, they are specific.
JP You’ve almost never built a sloping roof. Why?
EMB We always try to make our roofs usable, however difficult it might be. Even Diagonal ZeroZero roof is free of any machinery, located in an intermediate floor. It is a fantastic, usable terrace open to the Mediterranean coast and to Collserola range. An extreme case is the High School in Girona, which is a flat, clean roof without elements, but which by demands of the School Directive had to be tilted to comply with regulations of its rainfall area. Like in the school in Sant Joan, properly the only slanted roof we’ve done so far. In the case of JP Building the roof will be a garden, an orchard for the elders. The arrival to the roof is a space of relationships, a porch. Here, the effort consisted in ordering all chimneys and heating elements in a very powerful hypostyle landscape, capable of filtering the city and of creating a recognizable environment with its own identity.
JP There is an interest in how the building ends.
EMB And how it starts. The problem is not to cover a building, but how to finish it.They are two different questions.
JP You have always written and maintained a certain publishing activity. Our task is twofold: to ourselves and outwards. Tell me about how much of what architects do has to be explained to society. If we have to explain it at all.
EMB I think it’s an important issue, but I do not know if there is a possible answer. Surely we have to try. But to me it seems more urgent to generate a debate among those already interested in architecture. Barcelona’s milieu has been extraordinarily poor in terms of debate for decades, and it’s not the only case. There is fear or reluctance to speak ideas aloud, putting them in crisis or confront them with other ideas. A debate environment should be created. Wheter it is live or virtual will have different consequences, but in any case we must be able to do so. Now we have not even a journal in which to publish these ideas. This adds to a double condition: a spectacle and consumerist society, and electronic media of brutal speed and ephemerality. You write in a blog, so you know first hand.
I believe in open debate. On the other hand, we are also witnessing another phenomenon, which is that in society, despite the attempts to infantilize it and the increasingly banalized university reality, more people access to a certain level of knowledge and discursive capacity and, hopefully, critical capacity as well which might augment this open debate and perhaps lead to a greater social awareness of architecture.
JP You participated in one of the most important books ever published in Catalonia: the biography of Sixte Illescas. It is a central book. I wanted to ask what it means to participate in a book like that. Illescas was not just any architect. He was the last member of GATCPAC that did not exiled. What does it mean for you this legacy? Do you recognize yourself in him?
EMB It is a book due to the intelligence and generosity of Albert Illescas, his son, and it has a context. Josep Lluis Sert, Germà Rodríguez Arias and Sixte Illescas were three of the founding members of GATCPAC, and were lifelong friends. Each, after losing the Spanish war, took a different path. Sert was exiled to the United States. Rodriguez Arias chose for an internal exile and went to live in Ibiza, a remote island then, and Illescas chose to stay in Barcelona and try to get a professional rehabilitation. It was very hard for him: a lot of criticism from old peers, a lot of pain to meet the requirements that Franco authorities asked for... I think, beyond architectural considerations, that the three friends represent the three possible paths of Catalan dignity. Sixte Illescas is still a splendid architect doing architecture tolerated by the regime. He never did neoclassicism like Duran Reynals, an enigmatic figure. What fascinates me about Duran Reynals is how you can be an architect from head to toe, but with no attributes. Or without style.
JP It’s funny: I have asked for Illescas, which is a necessary architect, and you answered me telling me about Duran...
EMB Illescas is essential to understanding the evolution of Catalan architecture and Duran isn’t. Illescas, after the war, designs buildings acceptable to the Francoist authorities but he was never a copycat like Duran or Mitjans were in that grey period.
I think we should try an architecture without attributes, or without adjectives. An architecture not defined by additives, but by itself. I believe in the autonomy of architecture and in the need that it transcends its contingencies.
JP But this lack of adjectives, doesn’t it bring us closer to Duran than to Illescas? That is, to a preponderance of the metier above other considerations?
EMB No, on the contrary. It returns responsibility to the architect to define his or her proposal beyond the specific circumstances of the project or of the times. Depending on how you define it, it will be more or less relevant culturally.
JP Then with what position would you identify yourself more, with the Sixte Illescas building Vilaró house, the first rationalist building of the peninsula, willingly representational, a manifesto building which has constructive and typological shortcomings but which nevertheless don’t diminish its importance, or with Duran Reynals solving very well some buildings without history?
EMB Aren’t there more options?
JP Any you want, of course.
EMB Thinking in local terms, I prefer Gaudí, as architectural intelligence. Beyond his overflowing formal capacity, his is an architectural intelligence that always amazes me. His ability to link ideas, form and construction, which are three concepts that have originally nothing to do with each other, three completely different things, and link them to create space and generate emotions, which is the work of an architect... his architectural intelligence goes far beyond the mere metier. Although it is true that Gaudí’s architecture occurs outside his time...
JP The word metier does not enter the Gaudí equation. Would it the word discipline?
EMB I don’t think so. To speak about it is to speak of a regulation, of standards, of a shared code. Beyond technical or other sort of limitations which define the basic ways of functioning of a moment or of a society, it is not the case of Gaudí, and not mine. If there are rules, I do not know what they are. And this is how I make architecture.
