Francisco Cadau received the highest award at the recent Buenos Aires 2022 International Architecture Biennial. A recognition of his genuine trajectory that, from technique and materiality, consistently manages to position his favorite location on the map: The city of Campana on the edge of the Parana River in Argentina. His works in this place, such as House of Sieves or Damero Building, are references when it comes to thinking about project models where "construction and technology constitute the ideas themselves".
Fabian Dejtiar (FD): What is the inspiration behind your architecture?
Francisco Cadau (FC): I am an architect from the University of Buenos Aires. In the final stage of my career, I developed a series of national competitions with classmates and colleagues that we were lucky enough to win several first prizes: The urban-environmental recovery park for the entire Costanera de Vicente López -a project that involved five kilometers of coastline from the Federal Capital to San Isidro- and the building for the judicial city of the province of Salta -at that time the largest project in Latin America with 30,000 square meters that concentrated all the courts and offices of the province. This allowed us to come into contact with large-scale works and develop medium and high-complexity projects at a very early stage, but due to the different vicissitudes that tenders and realities sometimes have, especially those of the public administrations, this did not allow us to make this our livelihood.
The project of establishing my own office in the city of Campana, the place where I was born, was conceived with the idea of leaving a mark in that territory through a journey and a work extended in time. A somewhat isolated position on the one hand would allow me to work and research the topics that interested me, while at the same time maintaining a link with the city of Buenos Aires, especially through my more academic role. Although at that time it was an idea and a project, I verify quite a lot about that approach of being outside and inside at the same time, or outside and connected. That condition of isolation allowed me to somehow affirm a certain personal trait of the work and develop it. I think that was one of the keys to how I forged my own way of working. Thinking from there allows you to think universally but from very particular conditions. It is a double condition of being outside, but at the same time thinking about global problems.
In the early 2000s, I set up my own office and started developing work, mostly small and medium-scale housing. I also continued selectively doing some other competitions that had good luck in terms of winning prizes, but not in being able to carry them out, which is something that happens very often. So turning to work materially was also due to a lack of competition. I always developed ideas and projects, but the condition of not being able to carry them out also accentuated my interest in material things. The possibility of being able to materialize was very attractive to me.
FD: What were the references that guided you in terms of technique and material?
FC: In that sense, I have always been very interested in architects who have not only been important in terms of their projects, but also in those who have made some kind of contribution in terms of material and technology. For example, if I were to think of brick, I would think of Eladio Dieste, or if I were to think of concrete, I would think of Félix Candela. Rafael Guastavino with his ceramic developments. That is to say, people who have had the dual role of being in the world of architectural ideas, but also where those architectural ideas have a strong technological material component, and who have also been great builders in the history of architecture.
It is impossible not to think of two architects for my work who were already there since my student days, such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. They also had a relationship with technique, in the case of Mies quite consistent, in the case of Le Corbusier quite diverse - from the brutalist but also almost the opposite, the annulment of material expression to the point of making it abstract.
FD: How do all these interests translate into your work?
FC: The material plays a determining role in the sense that the construction, the technology, is not a means of facilitating ideas, but it is what constitutes the ideas themselves. Many times technology or materiality becomes a way of translating the idea into form, but it does not give rise to ideas in itself. I believe more in the process where the material condition itself, the construction itself, generates ideas. That does not mean that they are the only ideas that are part of it because the universe of architecture is fed from multiple fields such as history, culture, philosophy, and theory. Often the world of architecture unfolds these two facets as if there is a stage of ideas linked to these first and a later one that facilitates how these ideas become constructed. I am of the idea that the fields of construction and technique intervene at the same time as theory, philosophy, and history. They enter into friction early on with these other notions and constitute ideas as well. The process of materiality becomes quite nourishing in the project. In the other project model, the best that can happen is that the construction does not distort the ideas, at best, that it is innocuous, that it is functional, and operative, and does not distort or contradict them. In the project model in which I believe, the material and the technical constitute ideas.
FD: How does your team work?
FC: The studio is small. We are a handful. There is fairly horizontal work. Regarding the material, I think there are some techniques that we apply. For example, we use a lot of one-on-one testing, in materials, and construction tests. Many times we use a work to test things for a following work, as a laboratory because sometimes it is difficult to have a space to build those things.
We usually work in one of the rooms of the studio, which we call the 'sample room', where we have physical samples of almost all the materials we use. These samples often come to the classroom, to the work table, and accompany us, as if they were a sort of palette of materials that we are shaping as we are projecting. Therefore, those samples are there, to understand questions of texture, color, brightness of materials, and temperatures, and they shape a material sensitivity that dialogues with other ideas and nurtures the project from its most primary stages. I believe that this tactile relationship with the material, omnipresent, means that the problems of materiality are under discussion from the first steps of the project. I would almost say that a project cannot settle without at least an approximate idea of how its material organization is going to be.
FD: You are widely linked to academia, how do you see the relationship between what is taught and professional practice?
FC: Ideally I think that professional practice and academic development are a continuum. Obviously, each area has its specificity, but I tend to think that studios have to function as architectural workshops, as architectural teaching workshops, and that conversely academic spaces also have to function as true architectural offices. In the sense of being able to transfer between these spaces freshness, capacity for theorization, and multiplicity of ideas, from the academic sphere to professional practice, and conversely to send from professional practice to university spaces professionalism, technical rigor, and management of material and economic variables. I believe that to the extent that these things can be transferred from one to the other, one could tend to think that these places function with enough continuity.
Regarding your second part of the question, that has improved quite a bit. In general, there are a lot more people in the academy today who teach what they think needs to be done. It may be that later on they may not be able to do it because of other impediments. But there is not so much of a split between teaching one thing and practicing something else. Maybe decades ago that might have been more present, that split between teaching one thing and doing the opposite. I tend to think, at least in what I do, between academia and practice. So much so that there is a lot of continuity and I think there are many teachers today who are on that plane trying to, let's say, translate, teach and develop a genuine practice. One has to work on what one believes in.
FD: We have already talked about your career, where is it going? What are your next projects?
FC: We are in an interesting stage that is more related to projecting the studio outside the limits in which it has always been pigeonholed. This pigeonholing has to do with its location, with its radius of action or intervention. It also has to do with the scale of the projects and also secondarily with the use of certain technologies. The study always aspired to be a study of a scope that was not limited to the local. That is why I believe that a large part of the studio's actions at the cultural level, via the academy or via events, was a way of expanding its limits. This recent period of the studio, which is related to those limits and those areas of intervention and actions, is already concretely beginning to expand, intervening beyond the vicinity of where it is located, developing projects at a distance in other cities, in other provinces, and also in relation to other programs and other scales. It allows us to access other architectural issues that are not always present in local and small and medium-scale commissions.
We are starting our first project in Buenos Aires, which will be a residential building, and we are carrying out another medium-scale project in the province of Misiones. In other words, we are intervening in new cities, new locations, and new programs. I could define this as a stage of growth for the firm. Not necessarily a numerical and spatial growth of the studio itself, but of the area and the scale where it can intervene. These new challenges of the studio also imply growth at the strategic and organizational levels of the studio, and at the project level, new techniques and forms of production of the works have to be addressed due to the distance or scale. We are in a very interesting stage, very mobilizing, and this series of recent awards we have received, such as the Buenos Aires Biennial, give us strength and energy to address these new challenges that will obviously demand the maximum from us.
Works by Francisco Cadau Oficina de Arquitectura:
- Damero Building (2021)
- Quincho los Gauchos (2016)
- Casas Guardabarrera (2013)
- 4 Houses with a Front Patio (2008)
- House of Sieves (2003)
