We All Have Our Obsessions

Yves Moreau, Claudia Shmidt, Sofia von Ellrichshausen, and Mauricio Pezo interpret Amancio Williams's legacy with Francesco Garutti

The following conversation took place in February 2024 during the opening of the third exhibition, Domestic Monument, in the series Out of the Box: Amancio Williams. In addition to a video recording, a shortened transcript of the conversation is presented here.

FG: The beginning of this process was really an exercise in curating the curators: a selection of figures who can relate to the work of Amancio Williams, but who also have a different relationship with the subject. This triggers readings from different perspectives, and when you put people together, you always hope that things are going to work out. After all of your research, what about Amancio’s profile as an architect speaks to the present or to your way of practicing architecture today?
MP: There are many potential interpretations of Amancio’s legacy, and there is a subtle but important distinction between the archive, as a collection of items, and the legacy, as a repository of a set of values. Normally, if museums have photographs or paintings, those are works of art that belong to the production of an artist. But in the case of architecture, there is always a crisis because the work is a building that has a different function. In Amancio’s case, there is one project that falls into the category of being documentation of a work of architecture. But most others are unbuilt projects and therefore are idealizations of a potential building. Everything that he managed to do, which is the intention for a future project, belongs now to the Collection. And that is very relevant because it shows the continuity and endurance of his practice. As a legacy, as a message for new generations, the capacity of an architect to be following intuitions with this obsession about them is important. And of course, one could also read it as something that some practices are not able to do. Because perhaps if you follow this path, you are bound not to build. But maybe it’s a good path for many people, to embrace the possibility of architecture, of being more idealistic than the practicalities of life. Of course we need architects building the world, but we also need architects that are speculating or trying to build, but without concessions, without falling into the dirt of the circumstances.
SvE: If we were faced again with the same archive, what would we look for? Because there’s always a first search. And then if you have more time, you go over it again. The more I look at things, the more I’m fascinated by the fact that the language he uses is almost atemporal. You look through projects that are from the 1940s or from the 1960s, and if you would present them today, they would be just as valid. There’s a strong architectonic language, a strong faith in the power of architecture that is atemporal, despite having this modernist undertone. There’s something that speaks to very basic relationships of what we would now call ecological concerns, but I think they are almost atavistic concerns. They belong to every epoch and to every human in the world.
CS: He loved to talk about his atelier as a research centre. And for many years, I think during all his life, young students wanted to go to his atelier, to have the experience of working with him. Not for money, of course. He had no money. And that was not the goal. Most of them went to the atelier to see the maestro, to see how it is to design like that. And of course, I think that he took some basic ideas of concretism, of concrete art. He was close to the concrete art group from the very beginning and he maintained the idea that abstraction and beauty are on the top of any design throughout his career.
YM: There are two or three notions that we [Studio Muoto] think are important and relate to what we do in the office. To return to this question of obsession: we all have our obsessions, and it’s good to have them because they drive us through the years. The second thing is the notion of time, and I have the impression that many of his projects were ahead of their time. I mean, he was not into fashion. And somehow that’s quite important as young offices, because if you are into fashion, then tomorrow you’re out of fashion. If as a practice you have your obsessions and you try every time to somehow reinvent yourself, to keep going forward, then you don’t run after what’s happening on the latest website that talks about architecture. And then there was a third thing we really liked in his work, which was the quality of his drawings. Of course, there was also an obsession of drawing and redrawing, and making multiple versions of each project over the years, but the quality of the drawings is amazing.

Exhibition view, On the Horizon, 2023. Photograph by Mathieu Gagnon

Exhibition view, Far from Nostalgia, 2023. Photograph by Mathieu Gagnon

Exhibition view, Domestic Monument, 2024. Photograph by Matthieu Brouillard

FG: You’re mentioning the notion of time, which is a topic that has been touching all of us: you as practitioners, researchers, and curators, but also all the CCA teams who have been working on the project. There is also, to me, this contrast between being ahead of his time but also being very pragmatic and trying to be in the present.
SvE: In a way, his career was like a cyclical return to some ideas and very few built projects. It’s a fantastic lesson also for this moment, where there seems to be an abundance, like more is better, faster, bigger. He started his career with a very strong piece, the Casa sobre el arroyo, which proves he was able to take ideas into reality. It was so precisely and beautifully solved, very mature for someone who was only thirty years old. I wonder whether he was anxious about building more; maybe through the letters you can see that he was. But maybe it was a relief to have done that very excellent work early on.
YM: It’s quite interesting that he provoked his own subjects for his projects, because he had no commission for the airport. So he said, I have an idea of the airport and this is what I want to do. And I think this is an attitude which is quite interesting. In our office sometimes if we want to explore new typologies of projects, we just do them. And of course, we have absolutely no chance of building them. Amancio was making projects all the time and transforming, using, and redoing a project and not necessarily thinking about a career trajectory in that way.
FG: Another question that I wanted to raise is, what type of modernity was Amancio imagining or building?
CS: His modernity I think was one with the intention to make the life of the people better. His projects should be for everybody, and they should be built by the state, any state. That was a goal: he always wanted the state to do something for all the people. But again, there were a lot of military governments and not a complete democracy in Argentina, so the situation may in a certain way be parallel. In his modernity, he was trying to think, who is in charge of building? And modernism always in a certain way believed in the state and the general governments to build for the people. I think there is also that challenge today.
MP: I see it as a political move because clearly, one could interpret modernism as a form of colonial conquer, of bringing education and professing a certain view of the world. Many tendencies were translated into the local cultures as an imposition of the truth. Modernism became a flag for governments to clean, to have a modern society. But in a way, Amancio and his contemporaries were always considered to be the Latin American chapter of something that was invented and implemented elsewhere. In many history books, this is the case. It’s sad, because it establishes a hierarchical relationship between the “originals” and the “copies.” And I think that might be the wrong way of addressing the work. The most successful work, the Casa sobre el arroyo, proves the opposite, proves that there is something rooted in freedom and detachment.
CS: It was almost like they [the modernists] believed that there was no history behind them, so they could have done whatever they wanted from the South American side.
YM: Our interpretation was that he was a strong believer in the fact that modern engineering could solve all the problems. It could solve architecture and could solve society. And there was a spiritual layer on top of the European modernity that he tried to import into South America. That’s why we had the impression that he had a particular notion of the horizon and this vertical connection, a spiritual cosmic relation… There was also something in his work about not touching the ground, about keeping the ground sacred. So there was a spiritual layer that came upon the modernity of Le Corbusier, et cetera.
SvE: Because of his time, his projects picked up the language of modernism, but ultimately it was his own expression. The projects could operate in a vacuum temporally or spatially. It was like, “This is my spatial vision and it applies to the word humanity.” That says everything. It’s transversal. He put it out there and happened to be in Argentina, but his projects could operate anywhere. His modernism radiates from him outwards. He picked up on a certain language of that epoch.
MP: I want to go back to the idea of preconceptions in working with a collection, with material that we treat as a work of art, when in fact it wasn’t meant to be a work of art: it’s instrumental, it’s process material for the execution and translation of ideas. We accept as a fact that the drawings were made by the author—the author being the architect—but in fact we don’t know if there were collaborators and whether the lines were traced by someone else. We also accept the fact that the authors know what they’re doing while they’re doing it, and that they have a certain ethical consistency to endure with the same ideas over time, which is not necessarily the case. Even for the author, I would dare to say that maybe after thirty years, they may forget about their intentions. And maybe that’s the right of the author, to have the right to forget about your own intentions and to see your own work in a more naive way.
CS: Because I am an architectural historian, I go through a lot of archives. The emotional aspect is always the same, and you need to move quickly to make a dent. I always work with architects’ archives, and I always imagine the architect working not on works of art, but on how to put everything together. I am not a psychologist. I want to note about architecture that, of course, it’s made by human beings, so it’s difficult not to try to be a psychologist. But I want to understand the language, the tools, if they draw, if they write, the net worth of their relationships, the ideas that were in that moment.
FG: The archives are not a sequence of projects; they’re basically constellations of fragments telling you the story of a human being. It’s inevitable to me that any type of reading comes with a feeling of a relationship.
SvE: Through looking at the work, you definitely see that it’s a mirror of Amancio himself. And then obviously it’s three mirrors of us, but also a mirror of the CCA. We’re all somehow creating this kaleidoscope of visions, which are not over-imposing. They just create a filter in both ways. We’re looking at him and he’s looking back at us.