In Conversation with Manuel Cervantes Céspedes
Casa en Valle Santana
Courtesy Manuel Cervantes Estudio
Ed Burian: In recent architectural theory and criticism, and in practice there is considerable discussion regarding contemporary architecture responding in some way to the complexity of contemporary life. For example, there are those in architecture schools who advocate parametric design based on mathematical equations that produce very complex forms that in some way engage contemporary conditions. Even things utilized by some architectural theorists and practitioners such as complexity theory—a theory from the biological sciences—purports to engage the complex conditions of the present. Yet some scholars and architects have recently returned to a discussion of simplicity in the contemporary architectural discourse. In this context, the 8.0 issue of PLAT was focused on the idea of simplicity in architecture and took on the challenge of considering simplicity as a navigational device for complexity. This conversation is thus a follow-up and response to the topic of simplicity and we would like to organize the interview with you in three parts. The first part is the design process, the second is experience, and the third is construction.
That being said, what are your thoughts about the idea of simplicity in terms of integrating complex constraints and opportunities in design?
Manuel Cervantes Céspedes: You're asking me a lot of things in this interview, but let’s begin by talking about the design process. It is interesting that you have brought up these three issues—the design process, experience, and construction—because for me the design process is about construction and about the experience. You were saying earlier that there is a lot of, let us say advocating for, parametric design and other theoretical ways of doing design. And as a Mexican it is pretty simple to say that, if you want to build things, if you want to be the one to design things for our economy, our culture, and our way of life, it is very difficult to spend your time on these sophisticated ways to design. We have many shameful, unmet, urgent needs, and so we try in the studio not to get lost in theories or in complex ways to design things.
We prefer to establish a pragmatic approach to design, understanding that feeling and experience as the final goal and the construction as our medium. So, the design processes is about how to create emotional experiences, how to build things for our economy, for our sites, for our real necessities. And by also working like that abroad, we now have projects in the U.S., in Germany, and in the U.K. where we are trying to do the same thing—and people are responding to this process. I think people are responding because they understand that our approach is perhaps more humane. It is more from person to person, rather than from theory to publication. So, our design process is to start understanding not just who our client is, but who the people are who will be part of the process.
Designing a house is not the same as designing a school or a public building, or if you're designing an urban project. The architect is not the director; the architect is one of a group of consultants and decision makers. Today, and especially in countries like Mexico, you feel that an architect willing to do everything, or willing to claim to have the “absolute truth,” it's impossible. We need to understand that times are changing, and the decision makers are the clients, the developers, politicians, the social influencers—and as architects we are just another part of that chain.
Ecuestre Puebla, Mexico
Courtesy of Manuel Cervantes Estudio
So again, the design process is about how to understand every part of the design’s development, and to understand the many facets and the very real necessities, including economic issues. During the past decade we see architects wasting money from communities or from countries… it's not the right way. So now we see a lot of projects that are having problems, in danger... I was reading a month ago about the Philharmonie building in Paris by Jean Nouvel. The French government has filed a lawsuit against Nouvel because they exceeded the price of the construction by, I think, three times the original amount—and if we think about this objectively, it's common sense! We can't design without thinking about all these factors. So, our design process is about that. It's about understanding all the issues, the economy and culture, and the reality of construction.
As you know, in Mexico we don't really have sophisticated construction technologies… we also don't have the kind of labor that exists in other latitudes. And that's not a problem, that's just a reality. So, we've tried to understand the reality of the places where we work, and that's how we begin the design process. Working in the U.K. and in Germany, from my perspective, is the same. My regular clients, people that just want to build a house or a housing project, they don't have the budget that the government or Olympic Games have. It is not just about Mexico, it's about the regular people—and when I say regular people, I'm talking about the 99%.
Casa Tepetate, Mexico City
Photo: César Béjar
Estefania Barajas: You’re talking about a process that is so much a part of Mexican culture, and it's related to construction—but what is the primary intellectual intent to create simplicity? It is not just simple because of the method of construction; you can fully understand your work. You can see how things come together. Is it because of an ethical or social responsibility to reveal the hand of the craft or is it because things should express how they are? What is the intent to make it look simple?
No, I mean it's simple. It looks simple because it is simple. I try to use what I have. If you have a tight budget or if you're in a remote place, it is difficult to impose difficult ways of doing things. In the United States, people are finally understanding that by importing or exporting things, we are destroying the Earth. We are transporting things around the globe and in that process we are destroying the planet. And it is not that we want to push an agenda to promote the local and avoid the global, but because the simple things in life are the things you have around you. And by using those simple things, you also create an experience that feels right to a place, to a site, or to a landscape.
Casa Avandaro, Valle de Bravo, Mexico
Courtesy of Manuel Cervantes Estudio
It’s not about an agenda. It's about how to relate to our projects and how we create stories, how we create places for people to create their own stories in a simple and nice way.
The second part is about experience. The experience for me is about how you relate to a place. And again, with the globalization of brands and companies over the last decade, they have decided to create the same quality of experience all over the world. For example, let's say that the “Four Seasons Hotels,” have decided over the last 30 years that their customers will have the same experience, no matter where in the world they are… It doesn't matter if you’re in Denver or if you're in Prague, or if you decide to go to Indonesia—you will experience the same quality and the same standard of comfort. You will have the same fixtures in your bath… you will have the same smell in your room… and you will get the same treatment from the staff of the hotel. And that's pretty sad, because by doing that they create a global world. For me that is a terrible thing to think and to do. The most important part of traveling or visiting places is that you are experiencing things and you're learning from their latitudes. Architecture needs to be the same. If you travel or visit another landscape, another climate, another culture, you need to understand those elements in order to learn and to absorb.
If you design a house at the beach, it needs to be totally different than if you design a house on a mountain, because you're dealing with different climate; and if you're dealing with a beach in the U.K., or if you're dealing with a beach in Mexico it is totally different because of the culture, the materiality, the construction systems.
So that is maybe why it looks simple, because it is. It’s simply the landscape informing the architectural elements that you have around you… So, in a way you can say that that's the theory of how we tried to create simple architecture. But again, it's not about the theory, it's about common sense.
Salazar House, Mexico
Courtesy of Manuel Cervantes Estudio
Ed Burian: We know it's a very delicate situation in Mexico right now. How does the political process in Mexico affect the architectural design of a public project? I know you've worked on some public projects, but is there a whole other attitude that you have to bring to the design when you're designing a public project and working with politicians in Mexico?
Well, if you put aside the human condition of politicians—and when I say human condition I mean that if you have two, three, or six different political parties, you will have a problem because the nature of these different parties is to be against each other, right? So, it is pretty difficult sometimes to deal with public projects when you have so many different parties involved with the process. But besides that, I think the public projects we have been doing for the last 10 years were easy to understand, and simple to be approved, because we were putting the public goals for the project on the table instead of our architectural goals. We put the budget, efficiency, future maintenance, and to create a pragmatic perspective on things instead of pushing our architectural or philosophical ideas.
Cuatro Caminos, Naucalpan De Juárez, Mexico
Photo: Rafael Gamo
So, our experience on rural housing, social housing, and the multimodal, mixed use subway station projects, I think that it was relatively easy. It obviously took us many years to develop this project, but considering the scale of the project, it was not hard. It was easy, because again, we were putting on the table common sense and a pragmatic understanding of how to design things. A great counterexample of that is, or was, the recent design of the Norman Foster airport for Mexico City. It was totally out of budget, on a very difficult site. It was this amazing engineering idea of having the biggest airport with the largest membrane structure—in some of the worst soil conditions in the world. So, what I am saying that we try to be pragmatic, and that airport was totally contrary in this regard.
That airport was a dream about structure, about an icon—about, probably, a series of airports from that office. And the new government decided that it was a “kamikaze mission” in that it was too much for our economy, it was too much for our budget, it was too much for the soil of the place—and so they canceled the project. So, we've been trying to understand that in our public projects, and in our public relationships with authorities. And it was not easy, but the process was simple.
Ed Burian: Is simplicity a response to contemporary life? Especially in Mexico City, a metropolis of some 22 million people, with all of the obvious challenges of traffic jams, noise, pollution, and overcrowding. Do you think simplicity and tranquility are related, especially in the context of Mexico City?
Well, we have been taking many different approaches to the reality of contemporary life that you're describing. Again, it's not the same when we design a housing project in the downtown area or a private house in a suburban area. It's totally different. Contemporary life depends on what you are talking about. So, Mexico City is very complex, and what we are trying to do is to resolve these different issues—understanding, again, the nature of the projects. For example, for a housing project we have been trying to create places with a great location next to subway stations to assist people in moving through the city. We have been doing projects in historical contexts, and the relevant part of that is engaging the local systems and the history of the city.
When we design a private house in a suburban area, we are talking about a specific Mexican cultural materiality. Mexico City is so huge that you can't have only one way to design things. Right now we are working on a tall building in the downtown area. It is 27-story building, and this is building engages the underground complexity of our soil and how the response to earthquakes have been changing architecture and structures for the last decade. The last earthquake we had was four years ago, and that earthquake changed regulations, norms, and the way we design things. This building is a response to that and the building’s aesthetic will be the result of the soil.
That’s why I don't like the idea from these architectural firms that distribute buildings all over the world with exactly the same aesthetic, thus creating a style from the office. I think that's a sad way to practice architecture. Even in our city, every single project has a different aesthetic, a different structure, because they relate to the different situations that we have in the city. In the city we have the lake area, we have the transition area, we have the mountain area, and it changes the design completely. For me, it is difficult to design a building with the same approach if you are on the lake or if you are in the mountains.
Estefania Barajas: You are talking about designing with a different set of rules and a different philosophy, and this is all part of the process. Do you design with an initial image in mind, or is the image a result of the construction and its own process?
Yes, definitely. I think that like everyone, when I initially visit a site, I have a vision—and to be honest, 99% of those visions go into the trash. Because again, it's your vision. The reality is, you don't build for you, you build for people. So that 1% is probably when you have a connection with a client who says, I love your idea, let's do it! The other 99%, of the time, they think that there are other options… that there are simpler and cheaper options. So I always have an initial vision, but after analyzing, talking, proposing, and debating—not only with clients but also with the other people at the office or with partners on the project from other offices—all those conversations likely obliterate the initial idea, but they also transform the initial idea into a better one, or into a simpler or a less expensive one. So, yes… I have those initial ideas, those initial feelings, but later they evolve. And it's funny because sometimes I change my mind and eliminate the initial idea, but after some time I return to that original idea.
Viviendo Rural, Durango, Mexico
Courtesy of Manuel Cervantes Estudio
Ed Burian: Let’s discuss the role of construction and simplicity as a response to conditions of materials and labor, especially in Mexico. I think it relates to what you talked about before, but is the simplicity related to directness and construction? And if so, how?
I will show you the building that I was telling you about, [Manuel Cervantes Céspedes shares a current tower project in the office with the interviewers] because we were talking about the vision of an idea and the development of that idea, and I think that this exemplifies what I mean. This is an analysis of the intangibles of architecture. You start with a diagram that summarizes the regulations and requirements. Then you have an initial resultant massing, but it's horrible, and then you articulate that massing and you end up with a massing that you like, but also with an integrated structure. As you can see, all those triangular forms are the contrafuertes [buttresses]. But it's not about columns and beams…you need these kinds of triangle forms. So that's a result of structural analysis. It's impossible to have an idea of that. We talk in the office about the reality of Mexico City… the stone, the tezontle, and all these things, and the result is that the design is a very, very thin structure.
Ed Burian: When you have the basic massing and the parti of the building, does the process of detailing of the building and putting the building together, the design development and construction documents, does that start to influence construction? Or is it more your idea? Does the logic of the detailing adapt to the form of the image in your mind?
No, no. I mean, this building came out of a rigorous, pragmatic analysis. It was never a preconception in my mind… the thing that was in my mind was only the color of the stone that is found in the downtown… so at the end of the day it is not about all the detailing. It's about site, it's about history. It's about our city, not about us as an office. This is an extreme case of a design process that is not the result of an initial gesture, but the result of a pragmatic analysis.
Ed Burian: It seems you're really not interested doing “signature work.” You're really looking at each project as it develops out of a kind of logic about the site, about construction, about the client, about experience, all of those things. And they're going to vary, across countries and are going to vary across sites.
Estefania Barajas: Following up on that, how does the construction process in the U.K. and U.S., where everything is highly regulated through a formalized system of contractors and subcontractors—how does that change when you’re on site?
Ed Burian: As opposed to Mexico, where you're very much directly talking with the workers?
If you're talking about Mexico City, it is much the same as if you talk about the U.K., Germany, or the United States. But if you talk about rural areas of Mexico, or India, or Indonesia, it's a totally different world.
Take the project that we are doing in the U.K. —it’s a small cabin on a beach. And it's a project with all the regulations you can imagine because we're doing something in the Southampton area where regulations related to historical context constrain us, in terms of materials and form... But for me, those regulations are not a problem, they are just a way to work. It's a very beautiful beach, but it is cold, grey, melancholic—totally different than Mexico's beaches.
Ed Burian: It's not the sunny, palm-lined beaches of Ixtapa, Gro…
No, it is not Ixtapa. And then when we visited some beautiful old stone structures and some abandoned barns near the site… I realized it was important to understand that my client was in a certain stage of his life, he is in the process of retirement. He wants to spend more time in this area. Much of my understanding of this project was about understanding him and his state of mind. So that's why I have that mental picture, and why I was talking about the person, and time, and how that person relates to his activities. You can see some diagrams of how he moves between the bicycle storage and his boats, and his “man cave,” and all of the things he has outside of the house. And so later you also begin to understand these pictures of his friends and the family, but also we talk about the existing context, the buildings, the history, the structure, the construction systems, and the material. This is Bron-Yr-Aur in Wales, and for many this is a very powerful image because this is the house where Jimmy Page and Robert Plant composed the first two Led Zeppelin albums.
Estefania Barajas: In this context, a minimalist environmental sculptor such as Donald Judd goes to extraordinary means to hide connection details. Instead, do you think your work utilizes expressive construction processes? Are these expressive construction processes both trying to integrate the details, the opposite of what Donald Judd is doing?
I don't see the purpose of wasting time and money covering things in general…Whether you want fast, or cheap—or fast and cheap—you don’t have the time to think about this. You wouldn't have the time to find the right way to cover it.
So, when you can expose the structure, I think that it is a beautiful way to relate to the architecture that you are in; we use structure to feel things.
Manuel Cervantes Céspedes received his architecture degree from Universidad Anahuac in Mexico City and founded Mexico City-based MANUEL CERVANTES ESTUDIO (formerly CC Arquitectos) in 2005. The firm identifies itself as, “part of a constellation of Mexican architects belonging to the same generation, late heirs to Mexican Modernism and an architectural tradition that can be traced back to the first pre-Hispanic settlements.” Recent projects in Mexico include: the Finestre Villas, eight beach villas in Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo, Mexico; the Equestrian Project, a rural Mexican country home and stables; El Mirador, a single bedroom home; and the transit terminal Azteca Multimodal Terminal (Mexipuerto) in Ciudad Azteca, Ecatepec de Morelos; and the Multimodal Mixed Use Transit Oriented Development Cuatro Caminos in Mexico City. Current projects include: a Mixed Use Transit Oriented Development at the edge of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City; urban housing in Mexico City; a hotel, and several private residences located in Mexico as well as the U.S. and Germany. The firm is the winner of several awards including first place in the architectural design category in the XIX Architecture Panamerican Biennial of Quito for the Equestrian Project; the Luis Barragán award in 2013 from El Colegio de Arquitectos de la Cuidad de Mexico; and the Medalla Anahuac in 2014. The firm was recently the subject of a full-length monograph in the Spanish publication, El Croquis.