They confess that they have rarely stopped to think about what the ideal city should be like, but what they do know is that they like cities that are alive, even with chaos. “I love historic centers, cities with history behind them, I like old houses, getting lost in those streets, which give me freedom, because the other outdoor spaces are usually addressed. Historic cities cannot be copied, you have to understand their nature”, comments the Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura (Porto, 1952), winner of the 2011 Pritzker Prize, who believes that “hygienist cities” must be avoided.
At his side is Rafael de La-Hoz (Córdoba, 1955), who adds that the role of cities has traditionally been to solve everyday problems. “I like cities that don’t betray themselves. When a city wants to imitate Dallas or be something it’s not, that’s when problems arise. Never be pretentious.”
De La-Hoz recalls Ricardo Bofill’s comment when he defined Zaragoza as a crossroads of the Madrid-Barcelona highway with the Ebro river. “As long as that city does not betray itself, knowing its origin, it will be authentic. This is what happens to Porto”, explained the author, among other works, of the Telefónica District, the Repsol Campus and the renovation of the Mandarin Oriental Ritz.
The conversation with Five days was held this week at the Matador club, hours before the presentation of the short film The sense of architecture at the Teatro Real in Madrid, a premiere attended by the protagonists – except Ricardo Bofill, who died last January, and who was replaced by his son, Pablo Bofill, who was unable to make it to this interview, and Carme Pigem, from the RCR studio Arquitectes–, with which Kronos Homes, the Kronos residential development brand, celebrates its eighth anniversary. The premiere was also attended by one of the firm’s ambassadors, Támara Falcó, who reappeared on the same stage where the architects posed, in a massive appearance, to confirm her breakup with her fiancé, Íñigo Onieva.
If the pandemic has changed anything, it is the relationship with interior and exterior spaces. “It has been seen that outdoor spaces were necessary to live, and it is something that is increasingly valued more. What there is is not a model city, but those that attract me the most are those that are alive, like Bordeaux or Ghent, which have a perfect size”, he says Raphael Aranda (Olot, Girona, 1961), from the RCR Arquitectes studio, Pritzker Prize 2017. He cites as an example that of his hometown, which was previously a cul de sac [una carretera sin salida] and now it is an open city, among other reasons, because it has a university. “The city needs all strata. The university has helped because young people give life, but this model is not sustainable in such small cities”.
Souto de Moura likes Madrid, “because it has a strong identity, it has character”. Instead he laments the loss of character in chaotic Naples: “they have closed traffic in the port area, now there are people jogging and it’s sad”. Chaos, a certain chaos, ensures that it is healthy.
Because the clean city concept of contamination is, according to De La-Hoz, “a catastrophe, because that means that the paradigm is the field.” A cleaner, safer and greener city is far from the model of this architect, who wonders: “since when is New York clean and safe? There are cities that have had their decline and all of them progress, but what is exemplary is not useful for architecture”.
The decline of cities also comes from lack of population. “This is seen in crises, which is when people migrate to places with a better future. There is a program of the Government of Portugal so that people go to the interior, where there are more and more old people”, Souto de Moura qualifies. De La-Hoz elaborates on this point: “I am fascinated by what Eduardo says, because it is also the problem of an empty Spain. Portugal is a line of 20 kilometers because the rest does not exist”. On the other hand, there are cities, assures the Portuguese, that develop in the heat of universities, as is the case with Braga, which has “a huge campus.”
What is not right, says Aranda, is breaking down university studies in different locations. “Has no sense”. But this only happens in Europe, continues De La-Hoz, because in the United States they are all campuses. “There, the city is perdition, vice, sin, and people cannot be educated in perdition, that is why campuses are created outside the cities.” Spain has also copied this model, creating universities far from the city center. “In Paris I want to go to the Sorbonne, and lose myself in the Latin quarter,” she concludes.
Architecture endures over time. “It is the memory of history and the clothing of humanity,” he says. Ricardo Bofill at the beginning of the documentary, which adds that, furthermore, it is “the structuring of space and time, which leads to making buildings that exceed your own life”.
In the words of Carmen Pigem, by RCR, architecture is born from a dream. The same that is reflected in the project and that for Bofill begins at the moment of sitting down in front of blank paper. The same role that Souto de Moura wants to transfer reality to transform it with thought. Everything, with a goal that Rafael de La-Hoz also shares: that the project and its environment are indivisible: “It is a way of life, it is a way of understanding the world, of seeing it, of interpreting it.” For Aranda, there are no half measures: “It is not a means of living, but a way of life.”
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