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HUO: Smiljan and I met for the first time at
Kazuyo Sejima’s Architecture Biennale in 2010.
That Biennale was very special because questioned
how to exhibit architecture. Kazuyo thought it
would be nice to have an oral history of the
exhibition, so she invited me to talk to all the
architects in the show. I wanted to start, Smiljan,
by asking you to tell us a little bit from your
perspective about your experience with that
exhibition, but also the piece you did, which directly
relates to what you all see today...
SR: I think that Biennale was really great for
all of us. At that time I worked with a sculptor
Marcela Correa, who is my wife, and this was the
beginning of my work in an architectural space
but more like a piece of art maybe: we don’t know
the limits too well actually. When Sejima called
us there was a really heavy earthquake in Chile
in 2010, and at the beginning we said we couldn’t
do it, because we were interested in doing
something in Chile to help. But then we invented
this piece called ‘The boy hidden in a fish’, it’s a
piece that is really important for the next pieces
we did because there are some themes that we
repeated later: the theme of recreation, the theme
of ekphrasis, the theme of playing with the text
and of putting together art and architecture. I
feel that all the new projects I’ve done were sons
of this piece.
HUO: It would be interesting to hear you talk
more about the dialogue you extend from
architecture to art...
SR: The beautiful thing is I couldn’t speak about
art in general terms. I know the art of Marcela
because she works on big pieces with technology
that is industrial, but at the same time to make a
bit of handcraft, and it really stimulated the
sensation that the art is getting bigger and bigger,
and occupying the space of real architecture, but
at the same time my architecture is getting smaller
and smaller because we need to experiment quicker
than we can do in a building, and I think the digital
period we live in pushes us to do something with
our hands because architecture is more than just
visual, it’s about density of the materials, it’s about
experimentation, about light. And the point of
contact of both is in the word ‘refuge’. ‘Refuge’
means to have an escape that you can have
in between.
HUO: It’s little-known in the architecture world
that you’re also a great collector and archivist of
historic documents, of 60s avant-garde, the studio
of Archizoom, these extraordinary models related
to 1960s neo avant-garde, New Babylon, etc. Can
you tell us a bit about how the David Hockney
lithographs for example are part of that imaginary
museum you’re building up?
SR: David Hockney’s piece, it’s from an exhibition
in 1969. It’s a lithograph about the Grimm Brothers
stories. Hockney experimented a lot with this
kind of thing. He was learning how to do the
techniques and there are some really beautiful
lithographs about the boy hidden in a fish, the boy
hidden in an egg, and the prince. The story gives
the sensation at the same time of refuge, you have
something primitive, and these are the two poles
I work with. At that time, you know, there is a
tradition in architecture that many architects
or painters have a text and they don’t know how
to build the words, they have a description of a
building but they don’t know what it looks like.
For example, Noah’s Ark, the Temple of Athena,
the Temple of Solomon, any of those kinds of
buildings. They have to imagine how it was. And
that was our exercise, to imagine how we could
build the same atmosphere of the lithograph, not
literally the fish and the boy, but the sensation of
calm that you could see in the boy hidden in a fish.
It’s an exercise called ekphrasis is a normal exercise
in the history of architecture. With this exercise
I could feel inside the story, it’s about the image
and about the illustration. To do a really good
illustration of something, it has to be a moment
of conviction and the boy hidden in a fish is a
moment of conviction about the image by
David Hockney.
HUO: And besides Hockney, there is
also Constant...
SR: Oh yes. Because I read your interview with
Constant, and I feel that you have the masters,
like Le Corbusier and you have a second layer of
people who go against them. They admire them
but they go against them, especially against Le
Corbusier, and I always feel he was someone people
have to refuse. So I go and collect this second layer
looking for radical architects. They pay attention
more to atmosphere than shape, more to the curves,
the light, the perfumes... In your interview
Constant said Le Corbusier was the enemy, and
it’s really funny, because Le Corbusier was the
person who challenged us to do other kinds of
architecture, and this is really important for the
generation from the late 1990s to now.
HUO: But what you’ve obviously also got in
common with someone like Constant is the
extraordinary activity of drawing. Can you tell us
a bit about that?
SR: The drawings are always a therapy. It
suggests a therapy, it’s doing something to produce,
because at the end you just have your hands.
Normally you are travelling or working in your
office on some models and in the digital time the
programme gives them to you. The software gives
you the things that are programmed, but theA Primitive Refuge
Hans Ulrich Obrist in
conversation with
Smiljan Radic
models and drawings give you other things
connected to reality, to something that does not
occur in a programme. It occurs like a gift, and
that’s really good because with a drawing, you can
get something in the end, you can get something
really strong. That for us is really important. The
drawing is an instrument you have to use depending
on what is your panel, who are the people in front
of you.
HUO: I mean it’s an instrument, a tool of course,
and it’s deeply enmeshed with your practice of
building, but when we spoke, in the process of the
Serpentine Pavilion [ built in London in 2014] you
told me there are some drawings not connected
to building, that you draw autonomously. Can you
tell us about those autonomous drawings?
SR: That is about therapy I think: it’s just drawing
and drawing and drawing small sketches. You
never know about it, it’s an exercise of thinking
I think.
[...]
HUO: I think in Europe there’s still very little
knowledge about the previous generations of
architecture in Chile in the 60s, 70s and 80s. You
talked about the influence and inspiration you
got from architects like Constant but I was
wondering if you can tell us about some Chilean
influences, your teachers or any inspirations from
the Chilean context.
SR: There are some important architects coming
from Spain, from Barcelona and Madrid, like
Teodoro Fernández and José Cruz: all of these
architects returned to Chile at the end of the 80s
or beginning of the 90s from Spain. And we know
what Spain was at that time, it was a really huge
experiment of architecture, because they had ten
years working in a free political space too. And
the other one was the architect Montserrat Palmer
who is coming from Spain too, or Rodrigo Perez
de Arce who is coming from London. There were
many people returning to Chile at that time. And
so maybe we didn’t have them as teachers, but as
references, and that was important.
HUO: Besides your deep connection to
architectural history, we spoke also about the
visual arts and literature. We talked about Thomas
Bernhard’s Correction and the novel’s character
Roithamer, who was obsessed with building a cone
for his sister to inhabit in Kobernausser woods.
She died after seeing the building and Roithamer,
irritated and disappointed, committed suicide
hanging himself in the same forest. Then there’s
also Aldo Rossi’s A Scientific Autobiography. I was
wondering if you could tell us a bit about writing,
how you connect to writing and if you
write yourself.
SR: Never. No, but both books were reallyThis text is an
extract of a
conversation which
took place in Paris
in October 2015
during FIAC