kooZA/rch Interview - an almost roman theatre
On www.koozarch.com. 21st February 2021
Q - What prompted the project?
A - Probably, it was just as innocent as taking the tram one day next to the Central Market of Zaragoza and realizing that right in front of the tram stop was a huge advertisement covering a party wall that seemed to have been there for a long time. The intense investigation around the Central Market surroundings, its history, and the different stages of time that starred in the construction and transformation of that site revealed a complete game board of elements, architectures and urban interventions that have prompted this place to be what nowadays is. Not a place itself, nor a non-place.
In this mestizo panorama, the key was to understand the right words that could redefine what the Central Market square of Zaragoza used to be, understand its limits and transcend them. For me this word was theatre, but I believe it could have been so many others, I only had to find an excuse to transform the site radically.
Q - What questions does the project raise and which does it address?
A - I don’t exactly know what questions it raises actually. I think while the project was on going and once it was finished, people that I talked to about it, friends, mates or professors, raised different type of questions in relation to its ideas, design proposals and strategies. This free interpretation that the project, and I think every project, prompts to an interlocutor that is trying to understand its nature, nurtures more ideas and important conclusions that, in this case, I first was not seeing while thinking about it, and so includes new perspectives that I was not taking into account. So maybe this part of the question is for the ones who now will visit KooZA/rch and extract their own conclusions about my project.
What I definitely know is what sort of questions, also in relation to those who other people raised from it and told me once, I would like to address with this almost roman theatre:
+ About heritage, the iconic one, the weight we give to it in our cities nowadays and about that unimportant heritage we are not paying attention to, abandoned, ruined, or just forgotten but not useless. Hidden party wall of an abandoned building can mean more than just demolition.
+ About designing virtual boundaries and so re-interpreting the real ones. Work with the context not as a restraint but as a puzzle. Transgress the urban morphology with the invisible and the visible. A crossover of squares, the virtual and performative and the real and daily one.
+ About the shapes of matter, I guess. The different forms in which we can compose it to design our context. Shapes of matter as new grammatics, syntaxis. Intervene in language and so in relations as architects. Garage door, flamingo sticks, folded hanging roofs as design strategies.
Q - How does the project approach and re interpret the role and definition of the theatre today?
A - I think the point was not that much to re interpret the role of the theatre, but to understand the theatre as a performative space in all of its possibilities and so use it intentionally and opportunistically as a medium to foster new urban relations and radical transformations of the abandoned building. The theatre is an alibi, the lure. The trespassing of the fourth wall behind the stage, here interpret as a moving façade/ party wall triggers the new imaginary I want to put in practice in this Central Market square that now comes into the building as another urban corner for the city.
Q - How does the project insert itself within the cultural and historical fabric of the city?
A - Linking to the previous question, I like to see it as the cultural and historical fabric of the city inserts itself in the project. A non-extremely qualified space like an audition hall, conceived more like a big void inside the building with big grades on it, transforms itself into an urban square where the daily fabric of the market, the historical quartier of the city and the everyday life of it flows in. When the door is open the incoming city life in conjunction with the performativity of the representation space requalifies not only the indoors but transforms the current urban context into something else, an added value, with the “garage door” facade as a mediator of heterogeneous programmatic relations.
Q - What informed the visual language through which the proposal is explored?
A - I wanted to stay a little informal in everything related to the representation of the project. Avoiding seriousness first because Zaragoza is my hometown and I wanted also to transmit what this city could be from my point of view in a future and also how I conceive it more intimately. And secondly because the project also asked for it, every solution designed, structure, building technique or even invent, as I consider some of these decisions, from the first moment invited me to tousle the traditional ways of representing plans and images/renders to offer a personal perspective of the project. Dreamlike in some parts, a little surrealist, carefree, colorful always, these characteristics also ease a lot the conception of new different perspectives, the storyboard, the approaches, etc. making me look at the project in a particular way, and also tell its story and its process in accordance to this individual way of narration, disheveled, informal and celebrative but also rigorous, sensitive and purposeful.
Q - What is for you the power of the image within architectural discipline?
A - As architects, we have known from the beginning that image, traditionally drawing, is part of our communication tool set. It is the way with which we get more easily in contact to our context, faster than words, images are this radical device of information, as containers of facts, interpretations, realities or futures that don’t need a previous introduction to start a dialogue, but an attitude or purpose in their languages to better transmit certain kind of intentions.
After the project of an almost roman theatre, I have had the opportunity to develop an exhibition as head curator in Zaragoza called PRE_IMAGINARIOS2020. From the beginning we had the purpose of considering this moment we are living as an opportunity to reconsider our narratives as architects, introducing the architectural language to the city and the open public through a vast collection of images: Plans, sketches, renders and visual documents in general from different projects made and sent by architecture students and professional studios were exhibited as a collective imaginary of the future cities post-2020. Suddenly this idea of the IMAGINARIES became fundamental to understand this common field in which we all can relate to talk about what surrounds us and the cities we live in. Images are not only condensers of information, but also a great mental synthesis to explain ourselves some concepts.
I believe that more than power, images need to talk about intelligence. To communicate and to offer solutions, to adapt grammaticals again between different interlocutors and to uprise ideas and install them as a real possibility in some other’s minds. Speak without words, explain without sentences.
Q - To what extent is the medium the message?
A - In this sense, we could make a difference between forms and, I would say, translations. The medium could relate more to a formal quality of the message, and the translation or the interpretation of certain kind of data or information into a message might be its own personality. The first one might be the trigger of the act of communication itself and the filter of content a first step to orient the conversation. This is for me the labor I would like to put in practice as an architect, this intermediate role of data processing, filter, language interpreter, in which creative and design ideas came in as an input to reorder this data, define its own grammar, syntaxis and prompt solutions through negotiation processes between the remittent and the recipient. We are not alone in expertise anymore, we may be interpreters of realities, mixed in the social amalgam.
Q - What is for you the architect's most important tool?
A - For me it is LANGUAGE, and I am still in search of what this wholly means.
Q - What prompted the project?
roomo
2021
In this mestizo panorama, the key was to understand the right words that could redefine what the Central Market square of Zaragoza used to be, understand its limits and transcend them. For me this word was theatre, but I believe it could have been so many others, I only had to find an excuse to transform the site radically.
A new site for joining care for mothers and infants in the Dominican Republic...
Q - What questions does the project raise and which does it address?
A - I don’t exactly know what questions it raises actually. I think while the project was on going and once it was finished, people that I talked to about it, friends, mates or professors, raised different type of questions in relation to its ideas, design proposals and strategies. This free interpretation that the project, and I think every project, prompts to an interlocutor that is trying to understand its nature, nurtures more ideas and important conclusions that, in this case, I first was not seeing while thinking about it, and so includes new perspectives that I was not taking into account. So maybe this part of the question is for the ones who now will visit KooZA/rch and extract their own conclusions about my project.
What I definitely know is what sort of questions, also in relation to those who other people raised from it and told me once, I would like to address with this almost roman theatre:
+ About heritage, the iconic one, the weight we give to it in our cities nowadays and about that unimportant heritage we are not paying attention to, abandoned, ruined, or just forgotten but not useless. Hidden party wall of an abandoned building can mean more than just demolition.
+ About designing virtual boundaries and so re-interpreting the real ones. Work with the context not as a restraint but as a puzzle. Transgress the urban morphology with the invisible and the visible. A crossover of squares, the virtual and performative and the real and daily one.
+ About the shapes of matter, I guess. The different forms in which we can compose it to design our context. Shapes of matter as new grammatics, syntaxis. Intervene in language and so in relations as architects. Garage door, flamingo sticks, folded hanging roofs as design strategies.
Q - How does the project approach and re interpret the role and definition of the theatre today?
A - I think the point was not that much to re interpret the role of the theatre, but to understand the theatre as a performative space in all of its possibilities and so use it intentionally and opportunistically as a medium to foster new urban relations and radical transformations of the abandoned building. The theatre is an alibi, the lure. The trespassing of the fourth wall behind the stage, here interpret as a moving façade/ party wall triggers the new imaginary I want to put in practice in this Central Market square that now comes into the building as another urban corner for the city.
Q - How does the project insert itself within the cultural and historical fabric of the city?
A - Linking to the previous question, I like to see it as the cultural and historical fabric of the city inserts itself in the project. A non-extremely qualified space like an audition hall, conceived more like a big void inside the building with big grades on it, transforms itself into an urban square where the daily fabric of the market, the historical quartier of the city and the everyday life of it flows in. When the door is open the incoming city life in conjunction with the performativity of the representation space requalifies not only the indoors but transforms the current urban context into something else, an added value, with the “garage door” facade as a mediator of heterogeneous programmatic relations.
Q - What informed the visual language through which the proposal is explored?
A - I wanted to stay a little informal in everything related to the representation of the project. Avoiding seriousness first because Zaragoza is my hometown and I wanted also to transmit what this city could be from my point of view in a future and also how I conceive it more intimately. And secondly because the project also asked for it, every solution designed, structure, building technique or even invent, as I consider some of these decisions, from the first moment invited me to tousle the traditional ways of representing plans and images/renders to offer a personal perspective of the project. Dreamlike in some parts, a little surrealist, carefree, colorful always, these characteristics also ease a lot the conception of new different perspectives, the storyboard, the approaches, etc. making me look at the project in a particular way, and also tell its story and its process in accordance to this individual way of narration, disheveled, informal and celebrative but also rigorous, sensitive and purposeful.
Q - What is for you the power of the image within architectural discipline?
A - As architects, we have known from the beginning that image, traditionally drawing, is part of our communication tool set. It is the way with which we get more easily in contact to our context, faster than words, images are this radical device of information, as containers of facts, interpretations, realities or futures that don’t need a previous introduction to start a dialogue, but an attitude or purpose in their languages to better transmit certain kind of intentions.
After the project of an almost roman theatre, I have had the opportunity to develop an exhibition as head curator in Zaragoza called PRE_IMAGINARIOS2020. From the beginning we had the purpose of considering this moment we are living as an opportunity to reconsider our narratives as architects, introducing the architectural language to the city and the open public through a vast collection of images: Plans, sketches, renders and visual documents in general from different projects made and sent by architecture students and professional studios were exhibited as a collective imaginary of the future cities post-2020. Suddenly this idea of the IMAGINARIES became fundamental to understand this common field in which we all can relate to talk about what surrounds us and the cities we live in. Images are not only condensers of information, but also a great mental synthesis to explain ourselves some concepts.
I believe that more than power, images need to talk about intelligence. To communicate and to offer solutions, to adapt grammaticals again between different interlocutors and to uprise ideas and install them as a real possibility in some other’s minds. Speak without words, explain without sentences.
Q - To what extent is the medium the message?
A - In this sense, we could make a difference between forms and, I would say, translations. The medium could relate more to a formal quality of the message, and the translation or the interpretation of certain kind of data or information into a message might be its own personality. The first one might be the trigger of the act of communication itself and the filter of content a first step to orient the conversation. This is for me the labor I would like to put in practice as an architect, this intermediate role of data processing, filter, language interpreter, in which creative and design ideas came in as an input to reorder this data, define its own grammar, syntaxis and prompt solutions through negotiation processes between the remittent and the recipient. We are not alone in expertise anymore, we may be interpreters of realities, mixed in the social amalgam.
Q - What is for you the architect's most important tool?
A - For me it is LANGUAGE, and I am still in search of what this wholly means.