The Brooklyn Rail

I sat with Andrés Jaque at his office at Avery Hall at Columbia University GSAPP where he serves as its Dean. His practice OFFPOLINN (The Office for Political Innovation) in Queens and Madrid often creates work that resembles performance, curation, architecture, or research. After our interview I now understand them all as architecture. Imbued with the material reality of life as an architect, his work reperforms architecture by interrogating its impact at every conceivable scale. In our conversation he diagnoses architectural practice as being ashamed and arrogant simultaneously, but that this conflict may be the center of an architect’s political agency.

Nile Greenberg (Rail): How would you describe your practice as an architect… right now?

Andrés Jaque: In order to respond to this, I would describe what I think architecture is about for me. I have the feeling that architecture is not about space, as normally is explained, but rather about composition. By composition I mean the way different forms of life and also non-living entities negotiate their coexistence and are articulated as a form of togetherness. This distinction is crucial. Architecture is about how diversity gets to be constituted as a form of togetherness: that means that chairs, cells, genes, trees, buildings, bricks, windows, and roads are all part of the composition where life is enacted. They’re very complex, never unified, never sterilized, and in a permanent state of change.

Ultimately, they are political compositions because they’re rigid and involve many different participants, each of them with a certain level of agency. From that, I can describe what I do, which is to intervene on existence. Once you understand and accept that, then there’s never a tabula rasa and you never start from scratch. You intervene on existing compositions and articulations. All architecture from that point of view is a re-articulation and every design is a redesign.

Rail: Does that make you the composer? Is that composition like the architect Andrea Palladio? What materials are there instead of stone? Are you arranging people, society, or bureaucracy?

Jaque: That’s the other thing: architects don’t have an absolute agency. If you think in a societal or eco-systemic dimension, we contribute to the production of architecture, but architecture is something that is collected: collected in order to produce. It’s a matter of how far or how close you get to architecture. Looking at architecture at a particular scale allows us to have the fantasy that, as architects, we make all the decisions. When you perceive it on a smaller scale, you realize that you’re not making that many decisions. Most of the materials we use are part of systems that we mobilize. If we go even smaller, to the scale of detail, we see that each step is an ecosystem in itself. For instance, in the clay which brick is produced from, there is a whole trajectory from the wire which cuts its shape, to the factory, to the ovens, and then the composition of the clay as a geological process. The architect is always kind of a co-author, together with those who design the sanitary systems, or the master plans. To maintain the illusion of architects having absolute control over buildings, you have to stay within a narrow color spectrum. When we talk about labor, we have to zoom out and see under what conditions people work in buildings. When we talk about interspecies relationships, we have to zoom in and see where the microbiological life, through which we live, resides. That’s a very technical question for me—but the architect has a limited agency which is negotiated with that of others. I don’t think we should be frustrated by the fact that we negotiate our agency with others, it is part of the urbanity of which we’re a part.

Rail: PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society, at Barcelona Pavilion, in 2012–13—speak on that project. In a way it’s a super realist portrait of the pavilion’s reconstruction by Mies van der Rohe. One where the agency of the architect is actually quite heightened.

Jaque: That’s an important project for me: I worked for a number of years on it. It started with an invitation to do an installation in the Barcelona Pavilion—the 1980s reconstruction of the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe. There were other people who had been invited to do installations, and I was looking at their installations and said I’d like to do something different; not to bring an object here, but rather to do something about the actual pavilion. A practical and pragmatic approach to what the pavilion is now. Beyond everything we know, beyond the myth, or inside the myth. What is the reality, or the pragmatic account, with which we can approach this building? So in the first visit as part of this work, I saw a tiny door that connected to a basement. It was hidden by one of the travertine slabs, but it was articulated and had a frame. Then I realized there was a “second pavilion.” This basement had all the mechanical systems: all the pipes, the boilers, the pond water filters, whatever. For instance, when things aged, or got broken, they ended up in the basement. So the basement was like the Dorian Gray portrait of the upper part! He was kept invisible, along with all the things that were making the pavilion real and connected to society, to industry, to the process of experimentation, to maintenance, to labor. It was where the microwave the employees used to heat up their lunch was located. There were two pavilions for me: one was the pavilion that was a collective construction, and then the myth of the pavilion that came from the royal brain of Mies. Materializing on his end in travertine and velvet, which was obviously a fantasy, right? In every possible detail. I get so much pleasure looking at the Pavilion, it is so beautiful. But I also like the tension of the pavilion being a societal construction; a collective construction.

Rail: To describe it a little bit, if one visited: you would be walking through the pavilion and in the ponds would be islands full of essential maintenance equipment. Vacuums, mops…things that keep it clean and perfect. That would have been a very jarring experience, but one people would recognize as part of the orders of architecture. To preserve some things and to hide others. This is a very good example of your definition of architecture, to compose things and to show things. Composition is often about visibility. Beauty versus non-beauty.

Jaque: Yeah, notions of beauty, right? That’s the thing. Probably, at this point in history, we need alternative notions of beauty, all those connections and extensions, where politics and our interests are allocated.

Rail: I’ve been thinking about your work as an update of Baukunst (a very Miesian framework). But there are new forms of art, which means there are new forms of architecture—that relationship is intrinsic. A lot of your work relies on performance. You have a wide range of projects, from performance, to writing, to architecture, to exhibitions. But performance has really stood out as something that’s emerged as a powerful contemporary art form which you’ve integrated into your practice. What do you think of performance in relation to architecture?

Jaque: That is an amazing point, what art’s relationship with architecture would be now. I’ve been curator of two art biennials, Manifesta 12 in Palermo and the 13^th Shanghai Biennial. I’m fascinated with artists because art has evolved into something different. We think of the work of Trevor Paglen, or Laura Poitras, or Joan Jonas, or Cecilia Vicuña, people that I really like, who I’m close to, from whom I’ve learned so much and with whom I’ve worked. They’re interrogating our societies in the way they’ve constituted technology and materiality. So they’re not far from architecture but they’re not producing objects that we place in space. They’re intrinsically operating in relational schemes, ones in which the possibilities of life are made available while others are constrained. I think architecture benefits so much from it. They are also operating in a way that is connected to the making of ordinary life. I think that the capacity of being in-between is important for me. To your question—what would be the equivalent of a mission in architecture of engaging with art—I would say it’s not enough to make beautiful buildings, we want to really interrogate what it means to place a pipe or to open a door on one side or the other. It’s not a way to escape the specificity of architecture, it’s the opposite. It’s looking, and getting much more into the specifics, but in an obsessive way. The last two studios I taught here at Columbia were about detailing, architectural detailing. I love detail. You can read a construction detail as a societal document, as a bureaucratic document that produces society, societies of silicon. When you start describing it, it’s so political.

Rail: I think your practice is one of the ones that best describes this relationship between art and architecture. You had a performance called IKEA Disobedients, in 2011-12, which was collected by the MoMA. To your point about details, and politics, I think of your recent exhibition at the Venice Biennial, Xholobeni Yards about the titanium coatings of glass in Hudson Yards, and how it affects transnational politics. Can you tell us a little bit about the finding in this project, it’s super important in your research on scale?

Jaque: If you go to Hudson Yards, there’s something that attracts everyone’s attention, which is the shininess of the Vessel, a level of shininess not known before. And the same with the glass, which is perpetually clean. I decided to do some deep research with my team and Farah Alkhoury. We ended up discovering that Hudson Yards is registering a change in architecture, corporate architecture, which is the application of titanium dioxide coatings: a relatively new change in the last five years. It probably has not been applied in such a massive way elsewhere in the world. Titanium allows particles to be photocatalyzed on surfaces, and then when it rains, they’re removed, as they become such small particles that they are easy to wipe down. And that ends up happening, given this kind of sense of shininess. But it’s not only in buildings. When we did this research, we learned that the most recent iPhone had this titanium surface, exactly the same kind of shine that you find in buildings like the vessel. We discovered that it was exactly the same. The advertisement for the iPhone is for titanium, so it’s weird how this move from something that we were investigating extended into something that was highly visible as popular culture everywhere. It marked the shininess, or ultra-shininess as the aesthetics of corporate hegemony in the time we live in. What is critical and conflicting, it’s that in order to produce titanium for these industrial applications, there aren’t many places where you’re going to find it. One of the few places around the world is Xholobeni where titanium is found mixed with sand, very similar to the sand we can find on most beaches. But once you remove the titanium from the sand, the sand becomes incredibly volatile. Once the titanium is removed, the sand is brought back to where it was found. But it becomes so volatile that it affects people’s health and it kills trees. So it kills the economy, and it’s directly related to the migration of people from rural areas on the east coast of South Africa, in huge cities. So a big part of the homelessness that is found in places like Johannesburg is directly related to the fashionable shininess that is now shaping the aesthetics of the times we live in. The shininess that can be found in western wealthy environments is very much at the expense of the nastiness of other areas. I have a feeling that this allows us to think that by having this information, architecture’s relationship with aesthetics and materiality is different and we can evolve into something different. The scale of a molecule has implications that affect transnational dynamics. An architecture that will take seriously the commitment or the engagement with scholarly thinking about materiality. That’s a new form of politics through design.

Rail: I think the glass is an interesting conflict for you. Because I don’t think it’s something you’re against.

Jaque: No, no, no.

Rail: You seem fundamentally optimistic, and desire these substances. You describe glass in another project as sensual. In this case, looking at iPhones and the use of Grindr, [Intimate Strangers, London Design Museum, 2016] and skin touching the glass as an essential act. And then also projects of climate remediation that use glass like the Rambla Climate House, 2018–2021, which is a project that is meant to address the climate and to incorporate it, and reduce architecture’s envelope. Glass turns out to be a very good subject in that conversation. How do you participate with this transnational material politics in mind?

Jaque: What you’re asking is crucial for me. I see myself as a practitioner. But a practitioner that needs to be responsible with the theoretical frame in which I operate. By being a practitioner you’re vaccinated from purity, and from the possibility of simplified moralistic positions. We’re fully embedded in the kind of ecosystem of guilt that our societies are struggling with; we live in a moment in which extreme capitalism is intersecting globalized engagement; it’s directly connected to colonialism and to racism. And on top of that, we see that patriarchy and technocracy are regulating our professions. I have the feeling that this is not absolute: there are pockets of alternatives everywhere, other economies that are not capitalistic. People are generous and not transactional, but it also translates into being confronted with precisely those things that we’re addicted to. And that’s definitely my case: I’m totally addicted to the beauty of glass, the beauty of ultra-clear glass. But precisely because I’m so addicted, I understand how it operates. And I want to know more and as I know more I want to be dissident to it. I came through very much of a lived experience of seeing those things that I was fascinated by, precisely because they have this capacity of persuasion and seduction the two sides where the complexes of our society are being enacted. I think this erotic condition of architecture is directly connected to its political dimension, where a space of persuasion is working, I don’t think I had a choice.

Rail: You’re saying that essentially desire is the center of the political and that’s the moment in which agency is most profound?

Jaque: At least in my practice.

Rail: The performance Superpowers of 10, which I saw in 2015 at the Chicago Biennial is essentially taking on the project from Charles and Ray Eames. You took something very impactful for you and performed it with new information. You’re taking something of a fascination and you’re interpreting it with the tools you have today.

Jaque: It’s a theater piece, or an opera, where we reenact this beautiful film—a film both beautiful and awful at the same time, and violent in many ways—even if perceived as sweet and cute. All the manipulation of the process of scaling out and scaling in or zooming out and zooming in, on which the film is based is a journey from a beautiful scene of a picnic with a man and a woman on a blanket, on a lawn, to the most remote part of the known universe, and then back to the picnic. Then it zooms into the man’s hand and goes all the way to electrons and atoms and by doing that, it narrates how bodies, plant cells, genes, protons, tissues, bodies, societies, cities, regions, countries continents, the world, the solar system, the galaxies, and the universe at large, are all connected by a cycle of order, or design. The narrator was Philip Morrison, the famous scientist; a leader of the Manhattan Project; one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, who was telling us in his own voice, that the coziness and the liveliness of our neighborhoods, were in danger. They were a very fragile exception. Revealing that that world of connections was actually being threatened. And of course, it’s all the catch-phrases, the “threat was very clear;” that the “attacks that would come from home.” Coming from someone [Morrison] that was so aware, an activist (after he visited the effects of the A-bomb in Japan), he became an activist against nuclear proliferation. That was the context where this movie was, but we did a reenactment where we could, by doing it, see where it had failed. Parts of the story had been explicitly removed: what was interesting is that there was documented testimony of active removal of things in the frames, which had then been removed because they were revealing and problematizing the continuity of the connection between teens, bodies, couples, societies, and the universe.

Rail: It was a performance that had a dozen actors. It was performed as walking, the scale of a fashion show; a runway, and narrating the same story, but with the missing parts, new parts, a critique of what’s there.

Jaque: It was on a world tour for years, we decided to stop it because we had to do other things, but we could have gone forever doing it all around the world. What fascinated me was that every side of the movie was conflicted. From the film that was used, Kodachrome, which was calibrated for white skins, and therefore was incapable of depicting other skins, to the lawn where it was, which was seeded with Monsanto seeds. So they were actually the result of ecological evacuation, and segregation. And so when you look at all of it, there is no way to claim that “yesterday” there was a scientific and objective account of life in societies across scales. It was so intentionally edited that it was a cultural and political construction. It’s kind of weird, because many architects love this movie, but they don’t perceive it as architecture. For me, it’s the opposite. This is the most architectural, this is totally architecture. They did houses and other things that maybe are not architecture, but this is totally architecture.

Rail: I’m curious what you think about scale. you’ve addressed it, but how does it affect your practice? How does architecture mediate scale? Can you describe your term transcalarity?

Jaque: Architecture is really a practice of transcalarity. It’s a fundamental condition of architecture, it is happening as things transition across scales. And I use the term trans because I think it’s really a transition in that nothing is stable in terms of scale. Things are constructed; they are enacted. If we think of wood, we see the wood now on this floor, and it was first a tree. And prior to this it was minerals and was energy that was coming from the sun. I will become something else; it will probably deteriorate, some of it is probably part of our bodies now, or my body, as I have spent many hours in this building. Nothing is stable, if we look properly and if we put it in the right time frame: nothing. It’s all moving from one scale to the other. I have the feeling that’s what we architects do, we intervene in the process by which things move from one scale to the other. We have a special capacity to decide that something in a forest will become a floor. And that this floor will become rubbish. And I think that’s really what is uniquely what we do. And there’s so much politics in those decisions, like to take a forest and turn it into a flooring technology opens so many questions that are disputed, that I think that what we do is fundamentally a political practice of transcalar action. I think it’s the political approach to transclarity. And if you think that allows us to explain this perspective, you can have a much better discussion about climate and architecture, for instance than one of sustainability.

Rail: A good case study on how you’re thinking of scale, both on a professional level of scale and architectural, is your early project 12 actions To Make Peter Eisenman Transparent. It is essentially a bureaucratic intervention in the middle of the construction project for the Galicia City of Culture. A large extremely expensive project in Santiago de Compostela. You’re doing two things with scale at once. One is being a small practice operating on a big project,which is like such an important desire when starting as an architect. The second is that your action is taking place on a scale outside of even any of the general contractors, outside of any regulatory contract. Two scales at the same time, to mediate between the public and the construction site. For instance each construction company wore different color clothing, material delivery trucks had point of origin and destination like a bus line for materials. Making the construction visible to the public.

Jaque: It was an early project that actually started as a fence. We were called by Andrés Perea, who sadly died a few days ago, who was the architect of record. He said, oh, you know, there’s a huge controversy with the public perception of what’s inside this construction site, because it’s a beloved landscape that was very green and sweet, and as they started the construction, it became kind of a minefield, brown and dirty, according to the public. So we were asked to do a fence so that people would not see the construction mess. But we proposed to do the opposite, to turn the whole construction site into a readable landscape where people could actually understand what was happening with their money. It was all built with public money. So we designed a clause that would be included in the contracts for all the contractors. It was such a huge site that there were maybe 15 contractors. Each one had an area where they were producing a part of the building. We regulated how they would operate, what the colors would be of the uniforms of the workers, signage, video recordings. They had to do many things with the intention of being transparent. It was kind of an amazing experience.

At one point, all the actions were removed because they became so controversial: no one wanted people to understand the project or the whole City of Culture. But what we were doing was actually providing tools for people to complain. And then to complain better. Then many of these things were abandoned, but not the uniforms, not the colors. Many things remained because they were in the contract so they could not change them. It was a fascinating process to see how an entire community would be empowered by a means to provide a level of transparency for how things were being organized, and where the money was going. For me, it was also a way to turn what is normally organized as a black box, like a construction site and something that can only be understood by experts, into a much more participatory environment, politically. And I think that it was very influential for my entire career, on what I did afterwards.

I always keep that project in mind, because it worked so beautifully. It was so nice to go there and I had to go there very often. It was a massive project, and we were maybe only three people in the office at that time. It was challenging, going there to supervise meant that we would spend two days going around the building site. And we were just three people. So no one was left in the office, it was kind of weird, but very educational for us; we were learning from everyone there. It was a new city, as its name says. But the builders were not the ones who knew best: it was all these retired people that were spending their lives watching. And with all the strategies that we introduced, they were empowered to read what was happening there. The people knew much better how to build this idea and what the problems were. Yeah, it was really fun,

Rail: In some ways, it’s about empowerment, and about bringing people into architecture. Architecture is a popular art that thinks of itself as an elite one, but everyone has an opinion about it. And everyone has engagement in it, as you’re saying many people are losing their homes, or they have respiratory illnesses because of some architecture/construction project on the other side of the globe. But I think that’s a fundamental optimism in your work though, that a lot of the problems stem from the fact that people just don’t know. They just need to be more engaged with architecture. I think you read popular things as architecture, which is also different. You had an exhibition that looks at Grindr [Intimate Strangers, 2016], the dating app, as a kind of architecture through the air. In reference to Buckminster Fuller’s “architecture of the air.” Also assigning the label of architecture to popular forms of communication, which is a truly optimistic view of architecture. Do you think that your interpretation is optimistic?

Jaque: As architects, we’re both very proud and super not proud of our discipline. Both very arrogant about it, and ashamed, there is kind of a trauma. When you look at the details of many of these inventions, like Grindr, there are always architects involved, or an architectural thinker. And that is applied in Grindr, which was invented as a spatial condition; or even a reflection on density. Why what happens in a place like Paris, does not happen in Mamaroneck. Mamaroneck is upstate, I think, it’s this kind of wealthy suburb? I’ve never been to be honest. For two years I was having conversations with Joel Simkhai, the guy who invented Grindr, and he was always referring to Mamaroneck, the town or suburb where he was a kid, and a teenager. And he was saying, why when he was in Paris, when he was in NYU on an exchange program, did the density of the city allowed him to find guys very easily, with a teletext tool, where people were posting adverts.

Rail: Before Grindr, this was the early internet.

Jaque: One of these kinds of green screens, phosphor, whatever…It was actually on TV. You would send them a message somehow. But he said, why does this work in Paris and not in Mamaroneck? Because there’s a distance, and people post things, so you should only get those people that are close to you. And then he invented this tool, together with two developers and it was incredibly successful. But it went beyond being just a tool to connect people. It produces space in itself. And I think that the discipline that has the capacity to explain Grindr is architecture. We can explain that in terms of kind of urbanism, in terms of an infrastructure that is inhabited. And that it has had a huge effect on cities, and even real estate. At this point, Grindr is a real estate space. Maybe I’m obsessively looking at everything from an architectural perspective. But I definitely think Grindr is an architecture or at the center of it.

Rail: Do you want people to think of that as architecture?

Jaque: Yes. I think that what in the past was done for walls, now it’s done through apps. I would say walls work in association with apps. I was talking with the people in West Hollywood which is the Grindr neuronal center. I asked them where people travel to switch on their Grindr app. People move, maybe for an hour or even more, to go to a place and switch on their app. And that happens all around the world, people go to use their app. So the proximity is not something that is a given you to produce, the people produce that proximity by traveling, by going to different places where they want to have a particular proximity to others, to a type of person that they believe can be found there. We were tracking that because that’s the connection also with desire, where people desire the projection. Where do you need to be so that you are next to the people by whom you feel seduced. People were traveling to places where they have high-end apartment towers. It’s not by accident: there was a huge investment in porn sexual advertisement, allocating products and the desirable life in high end condominiums. And I was stuck in that also with the work of people like D-Box and how they were looking at porn like the one that was produced by the New York gay porn studios Cocky Boys that were placing sex scenes in front of amazing windows with views on the city, in high end apartments. That was not by accident. We cannot underestimate the critical capacity and the persuasive capacity and the constructive capacity of popular culture. What is desirable ends up shaping cities, territories, and people’s lives.