I THOUGHT TO MYSELF YEARS AGO: NO WAY!. In Treatment [M]

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Let’s talk about the beginning: in 2003 I started as a very young architect in Nodo17 helping Manolo to found is own office (after a partnership failure) and participated in a lot of projects he had in that moment. I remember during my first meeting writing in a A3 sheet all the things he wanted to do and I asked him this tremendous question: How many are we? And, well,  I’m pretty sure you know the answer. During that intensive and low-cost period, I had the opportunity to set up an event called Ractiva04 in the School of Architecture of Alcalá de Henares. I was an outsider and I managed to negotiate with the Mayor, the University, the Region and of course the School to organize a week of workshops in the streets with the permission to do whatever the teams wanted to do.

I was nobody and I created something really big, and I think this workshop session influence all those urban action’s event coming up last years (in someway, I know because I helped them to do it). I Also invited a selection of very good young architects to lead the workshops and in some way I became someone, at least the “workshop guy”. Everybody was happy with this event, but unfortunately we couldn't achieve a second edition, mostly because of a lake of endorsement by students and the directive of the school.

Any way, after three years with Manolo I started to work with ecosistema urbano. It was love at the first sight. They where part of the young architects invited to participate in Alcalá, and I really connected with their message as an innovative and “outsider” office. We started presenting any kind of strange and non conventional competitions and trying to create an international network. After a few months we realized that I had other abilities very interesting for the office, and I was more useful in office management, marketing, commercial and strategical development. I mean, my task was to make everything possible, and faster. And I was really happy with that, 95% of failure and 5% of success, but at the end making possible to pass through one of the darker storm for the architect´s offices in Spain. The big challenge was to try to sell pure innovation, and implement inside the company the mechanisms to regulate and optimize creativity without killing them.

In the meantime I co-founded urbanacción, a platform for urban voids re-use in the city centers, and develop workshops and events in La Casa Encendida with the publication of a book early in 2010.

At the end of 2010 my wife was pregnant with our second child, and bedresting since the first moment, and I realized that my professional world was not so fantastic (no comment), and that I needed to make some drastically changes.

So I started changing  a few things: quit ecosistema urbano, start a new company in Madrid to offer consultancy in strategical vision and new business model generation for architects offices (outsidethebox), started an other company in Brussels with a partner coming out from one of the biggest office in Belgium with the idea of making an investment with me (Lateral Thinking Factory). After that we decided to move to Brussels so we could manage our first big client coming from the North. Well, big changes indeed, and again very fast.

Coming back to the first sentence: I really thought that I would go anywhere else in the world, but not back to Brussels. That is why I suggested to Jose Juan to write about it, and I told him: Please, I really need it, how much I have to pay... But in fact, I think I will definitely talk about the experience of being an Entrepreneur as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman defines it: "You throw yourself off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down", of course at Brussels.

IN TREATMENT - METALOCUS.

DIRECTOR: JOSÉ JUAN BARBA. COORDINATION: INÉS LALUETA. ORGANIZACIÓN: INÉS LALUETA, PEDRO NAVARRO. VERSIÓN INGLÉS: KAREN SIMPSON. INVITADOS 1ª SESIÓN: JOSÉ JUAN BARBA, MARINA DIEZ-CASCÓN, SERGIO DIEZ-CASCÓN SOLER, LARA FERNÁNDEZ GONZÁLEZ, CARLOS GERHARD PI-SUÑER, MONTSE PLA GARCÍA-CASTANY, XAVIER NICOLAU CUYÀS, FERNANDO RIAL PONCE, VERÓNICA ROSERO.

PUBLISHED IN METALOCUS