Arquitetura Entre Vistas ABROAD Ana Catarina Silva

Our 16h stop is at aoa (Seoul, South Korea) to meet Jaewon Suh. To say “aoa” is the same as to say "architecture of anyone, anything and anywhere”.
For aoa, architecture is nothing. “When I say that architecture is nothing, it means that it is a very fundamental thing”, like air, for example. 

As a reaction to  Valerio Olgiaty ’s “non-referencial architecture”, a self-explanatory “hiper-referencial architecture”. “I want to be inspired by our reality not ideality”.

Feel free to see a cat / a minecraft game / a Sol LeWitt’s sculpture, where there is a house. “To the children, my building looks like an ice cream. It’s a way to connect people and architecture.”

“I think autonomy of architecture has to be destroyed by our culture” and as you listen to this conversation you’ll understand the meaning of these strong words. “Some banal things destroy order but I intentionally use these things as a satire of society.”

In the end “the most important thing is how to organize the elements with each other to make a system. (…) Architects make a building using a column, a slab, a stair…very fundamental elements. We only do that.”


Guest: Jaewon Suh, aoa  (Seoul, South Korea)
Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)

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Today, we cross the globe. In this episode we talk with the architect Richard Stampton.



Whom consciously decided: not to go into competitions; not to extensively show his work (which is different from hiding it); as well as to resist the urge to think further then what he is actually drawing.

Did you know this also a possible approach?

“I was very conscious, when I started my practice, to be small in a meaningful way.”, he claims.

Do you know what it means to be “ramen profitable? I didn’t either.



Richard confesses his pursue for a deeper understanding on the haptics as well as the essencial counterpoint of letting go certain parts: “a building often gets to a scale where there needs to be a blanc wall”.

Do add up to the equation: “The building you do, if it it made out of cardboard or if it is made out of gold leaf, it should still work. The design should work almost regardless of the material.”

As simple and complex as that.



This is a triadic situation between: what the client wants, what the author thinks, what the world needs.

Truth being told, “the level of control an architect has is usually highly exaggerated…throughout history. Architects don’t make cities.”

“I love that there is a limitation over what we can control over a project.”







Guest: Richard Stampton (Phillip Island, AU)

Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)



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Our 14th stop is at GAFPA (Ghent, BE) alongside Floris de Bruyn.



GAFPA is recognisable for it’s pragmatic approach. But there is much more to it. Somehow, they always manage to uncover the specificity that hides behind generic approaches. It’s about “trying to make something specific with a generic tool”.



For every project, a primary structure.

But what is this “primary structure”? “The primary structure, when you dismantle it, it is a very pragmatic structure, but at the same time it already includes both the identity and the generosity of the gesture.”

Everyday is complex enough, so “it’s important not to invent complexity”.



“You just do exactly what is needed and , somehow, nothing more then that.” but this is not the same as to say that “heritage” is the only possible path to follow.



“We like to compare different things in series, because we like the evolutions, the steps, the mutations, the discussions of how from one idea you step to the next. Because when you understand this logic, you can apply it yourself. When it is an isolated reference the danger is that it becomes model.”







Guest: Floris de Bruyn - GAFPA (Ghent, Belgic)

Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)



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Our 13th stop is in Porto (PT), alongside Elói Gonçalves, and in Zurich (CH), where António Mesquita is currently at.



A fast and furious architecture, not just because…but because the fast pace has excelled the competition, fast pace is eminent anywhere. Things are always very fast, as so, the faster you adapt…the better you keep up. “Change and adaptability is part of our genetics”, they claim.



What we might expect from them is exactly what they expect from materials: António and Elói are amused by materials that have unlimited possibilities - “materials that are always ready”, as they call it - as so, unlimited possibilities is what they explore.



After all, “Architecture is like this...It is about being always ready”. “We don’t know what is going to happen in the the afternoon or the next day or in the construction site. So, being always ready is kind of the only possibility.”



Let’s picture, in our minds, the beginning of a project: the client has a plot and a program and maybe some ideias; the architects also have some ideias in their mind.

One thing is for sure: none of these is what the project is going to be.

“We have no idea of what we are going to do, but we are sure that we are going to find a lot of things.”



“Architecture is like chocolate for people that like chocolate, you could eat it forever.”







Guest: Elói Gonçalves + António Mesquita (Porto, Portugal + Zurich, Switzerland)

Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)



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Today we travel the longest way so far, today I am really honoured to welcome architect Takefumi Aida, born in Japan in 1937and, for 86 years, has never stopped playing.



I bring good and bad news.

Bad news first: age won't bring us certainties.

Now the good news: age won't bring us certainties.



After over 60 years thinking about architecture, Takefumi Aida confesses he is “continuously thinking about what architecture is”. Maybe…this “thinking about what architecture is” is architecture itself.

It’s polemic…but the probability that "architecture is not 100% expressed in the realised architecture” is a strong possibility. Fortunately, its guaranteed we find Takefumi Aida’s full intent out of his models and drawings. 

“The importance of architecture is in the thinking. The building is one kind of result.”



He has approached architecture with a 3D kind of though, playing with Toy Blocks.

He has approached architecture with a 2D kind of though, playing with cards and parallel walls.

Currently, “I want to design architecture by a one dimensional thinking way. (…) I have started to think about that but I haven’t yet developed a design method for it.”



I bring more bad news: “There is not a single project that I am satisfied with.”

I also bring more good news: “I still have the same motivation I had when I was a young child. That is why I don’t stop.”



Beautiful.





Guest: Takefumi Aida (Tokyo, Japan)

Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)



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Our 11th stop is at Lütjens Padmanabhan (Zurich, CH) alongside Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Pahmanbhan.



They experience the joy of building when they draw or build a model. To draw a line over a paper, to fold a paper into a model or to build out of folded metal sheets, is the exact same thing 



Oliver and Thomas are extremely faithful to their 1:50 models, in their office, there is a saying: “The model is always right”. So, if anything deviates, the question must be “why is our drawing not as good as the model?”. These models are tools NOT to overthink, we’ve come to realise.



Probably, their platonic love for thinness arose “out of laziness” (their words) from their first model in which "the skin of the building became thinner and thinner and that became into a theme that has stayed with us ever since”. To add up, insolation (and so on) doesn’t allow us to build in a monolithic way anymore “that is the new culture we need to embrace”.



Thinness is a language. “We think that if you use language, you should be serious about what you are saying. But it occurred to us that when you say serious things, you may as well say them with a light tone in your voice.”



“Architecture is self-conscious about it’s own fragility”. Name a more beautiful thing.



“If you are a painter or a musician and you fail, there is not much left. It is really risky. But we still have toilets and a dishwasher that works, and you can cook and sleep and it doesn’t rain in. So, we have a safety net. We can reach net level or we can go beyond it”. Or go beyond it, I repeat.



"You don’t pay us for the architecture, the architecture you get for free.”





Guest: Oliver Lütjens + Thomas Pahmanbhan -  Lütjens Padmanabhan (Zurich, Switzerland)

Host: Ana Catarina Silva (Porto, Portugal)



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