intervista a Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra

Joao Alves and Alessandro Tessari: Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra, “Andalucía de Arquitectura 2007” Prize. This is an award to your professional path of development. We would like to start this conversation by asking you how architecture has influenced your life.
Vazquez Consuegra: I have always been lucky enough to establish a continuity between my private and social life, and architecture, dissolving their limits to the point of making them disappear. This is why I can say that architecture represents my life. I am convinced that it is the most beautiful profession, because it allows you to see and get to know the world, understand cities clearly, not just from a point of view of buildings but from a more profound social perspective. To become familiar with a city, it is essential to capture its soul, its essence.
J.A. A.T.: In your speech of thanks for the award, you said: “I wanted to bring to my land the values that I have seen outside of it and, at the same time, incorporate southern values into my external projects”. Can you explain more clearly to which values you were referring?
V. C.: Architecture is made up of exchanges, cross-breeding. Architecture advances in this direction, appropriating itself of influences from other architecture, other cultures. I believe that tradition must continuously renew itself, in order not to fall into sterile isolation. We architects must know how to interpret and re-formulate the messages of tradition in the modern-day era, without being tempted to literally reproduce or camouflage; to interpret it means to produce a creative act. Architecture founds its roots in tradition, in its own local culture, but it is constantly nourished, “fertilised” by the introduction of other experiences.
J.A. A.T.: What aspects of regional architecture in your land do you consider deeply rooted in your work?
V. C.: I have always been fascinated by the sequence of spaces produced by Mediterranean architecture; ambiguous spaces, of intermediation between architecture and the city, where the limit between the building and the street almost vanishes. These aspects are almost obsessively recurrent in my work, in which there is a profound echo of indefiniteness; public pathways which are converted into lobbies, terraces and patios, combining different dimensions in order to stimulate emotions.
J.A. A.T.: In your opinion, what is the cultural heritage that these spaces reinterpret?
V. C.: The weighty force of the city often ends up by subordinating architecture. Almost all great Andalusian buildings emerge from a kind of process of aggregating urban fragments, a patchwork of interstices and voids which leave a significant margin between the public and private dimension. The plazas de Toros originate from the gradual re-designing of rectangular urban squares into a circular enclosure. The “Corrales de Vecinos” follow a similar genesis, stunning clusters of houses grouped around courtyards, which act as a communal space. So the convents or noble buildings are portions of various buildings, which become a “unicum” around a number of urban spaces that organise them. They are never built from scratch, but are always fragments of the city which are converted into building, playing with the fascinating density of the urban fabric. They are spaces loaded with ambiguity, intense social interrelation.
J.A. A.T.: …the Andalusian patio house also plays a determinate role in this sense…
V. C.: Yes. The Sevillian house, a direct heir of the “domus romana”, is an emblematic example of these spatial sequences; the entrance lobby is a shaded transitional space, which leads to the bright, airy internal patio, separated from the street with which it visually interacts. The hierarchy of these houses is provided by the empty spaces which organise the internal functions and create the rhythms, rapports and dynamics of the pathways; furthermore, they effectively and simply resolve the theme of energy sustainability in the houses. The patio is an ingenious defence mechanism against the high summer temperatures of our region. During the day, windows and doors are kept closed to avoid excessive heating of the rooms, while at night they are left open thanks to appropriate grilles. In this way, the patio acts like a chimney, which captures the heat from the house, drawing it upward and cooling down the rooms inside. The vegetation, which always adorns these spaces, creates an ideal internal micro-humidity. The white marble floor permits this humidity to be maintained and to give a visual feel of greater freshness. The age-old Arabian and Roman architecture has still much to teach us regarding these themes; the passages from the heat to the cool, from shadow to light, from noise to silence, from dryness to humidity, are characteristics that give architecture a “sensuality” often forgotten by the great tradition of the European modern movement. I believe that these values should continue to influence architectural reflection, bringing us back to the important lesson of dignity and coherence, which is what emerges from local architecture.
J.A. A.T.: Who were important references for you during your architectural training?
V. C.: The University of Seville, where I did my training, was a very young school of architecture which had reached its third generation of students. There was an absence of great masters, so I began my path of self-training which in a certain sense continues to this day. Ever since then, I have always looked in many directions and I could obviously mention the influence of great masters such as Le Corbusier or Mies, or the profound rapport with Italian rationalism. However, I should also add a profound, long-lasting interest in the North, perhaps owing to the attraction exercised by opposite poles. Aalto, Asplund, Jacobsen, Scandinavian empiricism and its lesson of attention to materials, a more organic, abstract architecture, of powerful impact, of explosive force. In addition, very early on I had the privilege of meeting Lewerentz, whose work was still unknown and which stirred up powerful emotions in me; Juan Gelman, Argentinian poet, described poetry like “a tree without leaves providing shade”; I would like to use this metaphor to describe his architecture, inasmuch as it is expressed through an essentiality taken to the limit, which welcomes and shelters you with such intensity and almost Spartan austerity, in the sense of stripping itself of everything inessential, solving the problems of the city and of Man.
J.A. A.T.: In the early 1970s, you were involved in international seminars held in Spain, in which among others Aldo Rossi participated; in what way, do you think, has the Milanese experience of “tendency” been perceived in Spain?
V. C.: Aldo Rossi was a providential presence for me, particularly since I met him shortly after my graduation, in a stage of my life where I was still wondering what I would do. First of all, he gave me such an incredible passion for this discipline that I can most certainly say that if I hadn’t met him, I would undoubtedly be a different architect to who I am today. Rossi’s presence has been fundamental, above all in Andalusia; after his first visit to Seville in ’73 we travelled together across the region; he was fascinated by the great pieces of architecture like the Alhambra in Granada and the Mezquita of Cordoba, and he organised a series of conferences in the cities of Andalusia, meetings with architects, students or building professionals, leaving his indelible mark on the architectural culture of the region. For me, this was very important because it fired my desire to adhere to a concept which directed our gaze toward the past, toward history – as testified by the Architecture of the City – leading us to observe Seville and to study the city, something which during the university period, we didn’t do. I began to carry out more in-depth research, which after ten years of work and study, was translated into an architectural guide to Seville. Although this work was only published on occasion of the 1992 Universal Exhibition, it brought to light the importance of Aldo Rossi’s teachings for Spain, but above all, for Andalusia.
J.A. A.T.: How do you conceive the theme of “place” in the practice of design?
V. C.: A project suitable for a place is a project suitable for its culture, geography and history. The rapport between building and place is not easy to grasp, since it is not direct, it is not a literal, cause-and-effect rapport. The architecture must suit the site, i.e, it must be able to give it sense, or in other words, an architecture which does not suit this place would lose its raison d’être. A place, therefore, is not a defined space, a physical perimeter but a sequence of experiences; every place leads to other places, other cultures, other horizons. In this sense, I think that places flee from their own physical territoriality. I believe that architecture must look towards other places, maintaining its feet well planted to the ground, rise up from the soil in search of other horizons. If this doesn’t happen, then architecture loses its ability to reinvent itself and remains trapped in its own past.
J.A. A.T.: Your architecture is always moving in a dimension of profound dialogue and interchange with society and Man. Can you explain how this rapport comes about?
V. C.: Architecture has always organised and designed spaces for man to live in, work in, celebrate in or simply occupy. At the same time, however, it is essential that it comes into contact with people, gives itself up to them using elements such as touch, materials, texture, light and colours like words of an intense dialogue. The artistic avant-gardes and cultural movements have always endeavoured to give body and expression to the tensions which society is not yet able to do, succeeding in shaping Man’s desires. In the same way, architecture must know how to respond to the needs and frustrations of society, but it must also know how to make one step further. This is what I intend by this second, more arduous ambition of my profession, that of constructing a territory of resistance from which to irradiate and expand a both profound, intense meaning to the activities in our lives. A territory capable of converting reality into the object of our imagination and into the substance of our dreams.