EMERGING VOICE 2013
PRODUCTORA
Mexico City’s PRODUCTORA creates architecture that seeks a single “gesture,” often exploiting the tension between the partners’ personal interests and the demands of site, context, program, and client. Setting its research in formal, spatial, and tectonic systems in opposition to a project’s conditions, the firm frequently uses wit or play to find fresh solutions to design challenges. In addition to designing homes throughout Mexico, the firm recently completed the Call Center Churubusco in Mexico City and has entered numerous international competitions for public buildings. The office is led by Carlos Bedoya, Wonne Ickx, Victor Jaime, and Abel Perles. On the occasion of the firm’s lecture (video below), the four partners sat down with League Program Director Anne Rieselbach to discuss their practice.
Anne Rieselbach: This series emphasizes the voice of practitioners. How would you describe your voice?
Carlos Bedoya: To me, the question of voice has to do with the way we work and the way we think about architecture. It is very important in our approach to architecture to talk about emotions. Nowadays, with the role of the architect constantly changing and almost all new firms approaching their work in terms of opportunities and strategies, we persist in thinking about emotion. We try to produce something that might suddenly change your feeling about a place, might make you realize that something is happening there. It’s something very simple, but in the end we think it’s critical to keep this a part of our architecture.
We’re always trying to solve the architectural puzzle with a single gesture.
Wonne Ickx: It’s a question we wonder a lot about ourselves. Now, after six or seven years of work, I think there’s a special voice, a particular design language, coming up through the office that does seem to bring a sort of formal vocabulary to our whole body of work. For us, it’s interesting to see how we can make very strong compositions based on classical strategies, existing technical solutions, or simple programmatic organizations. It is a process of reduction rather than of adding more elements. We’re always trying to solve the architectural puzzle with a single gesture.
Rieselbach: You often describe the starting point for your firm’s projects as a gesture, along with a simple set of rules that could organize a building. Is there a basic underlying geometry that provides the starting point? I’m wondering specifically about the grids. Do you order your work both in plan as well as three-dimensionally?
Bedoya: It comes back to this idea of trying to surprise people in a space. For instance, we feel it’s stronger if you have just one gesture and then suddenly something changes. When you have something very simple, and then you introduce a twist, it is perceptually stronger for the user and the client. We call it our “detour strategy”: one gesture that suddenly changes the point of view and allows access to one’s emotions.
Ickx: It’s a really important part of the architectural puzzle. When we get a competition brief or a commission, this idea of finding one single gesture or one single form—one could even say, although it’s dangerous, one single idea—demands that we be very precise. We do not work from an architectural strategy where the design is evolving in multiple directions simultaneously, where something can still be added later, or where form can grow in different directions. Our approach is a rather demanding, inflexible, time-intensive way of working. Since we often start with a very defined geometric shape, those first decisions determine whether the project is successful or not. That’s why we have to make so many models, and why our initial design process takes such a long time. At a certain moment, the project clicks, the puzzle is solved, and all of a sudden we see that we have some special tectonic and programmatic solution embedded in this first form. At this point, two interesting things happen: the first is that the project essentially starts to develop itself through its own characteristics and needs; it demands its own solution bit by bit. The other interesting thing is that every time you force an exception to this self-generating logic of the project, you create a very special moment.
Victor Jaime: We also find that it is important to impose our own rules in order to maintain collaboration amongst four partners. Because we are working together, our design cannot depend on one very personal experience or thought, it must be articulated to the group. The rules force us to explain to the others when and why we are introducing a detail, changing geometry, or altering a color.
Rieselbach: You all talk a lot about the value of the sketch and about the advantages of tangible versus digital models as design tools. Has this changed as you’re tackling bigger projects?
Ickx: No, it has not changed. We’re completely convinced that it’s the only way we can work because if we don’t have it in our hands it becomes very difficult for us to understand what might happen in the space. We each have our favorite tools and techniques of exploring the building we’re developing. Carlos would like to make axonometric drawings on a small sketchbook with a BIC pen, Victor would prefer to start off with volumetric models and organizational sketches, and I would always work first in plan and section with a felt marker on transparent paper. I think the simultaneous contribution of these different analogue techniques is one of the key ways of understanding how we develop a project. I will draw a plan of Victor’s model or he will model someone else’s drawing—it’s a continuous, dialectical approach.