Practice
“Not a game, not a game, we’re talking about practice, man. What are we talking about? Practice? We’re talking about practice, man!”1 Those words from Allen Iverson, former basketball player and childhood hero, repeated over and over on an infamous interview bring to light the importance of practice. Or not.
For a virtuoso like him practice probably isn’t a fundamental thing, for us it is. We practice, we practice a lot actually. Sometimes we find ourselves deluged in practice. It is a good thing, believe me.
Our kind of practice is affected by our clients wishes, wills and personal experiences. Every practice is born out of its circumstances, ours is no different.
From the beginning it was clear that we couldn’t practice an architecture that was held on genius moments of sophisticated design and construction techniques.
Our circumstances shaped our perception of architecture into one that has to deal with the ready-made, the low budgets and the ever-changing scenarios. Adaptation is therefore a word that has been always around.
We feel closer to being curators rather than sculptors, explorers rather than creators. In no way we complain about the kind of practice we have, we are a result of our circumstances, not victims of it.
The Ugly & Ordinary coined by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-brown in Learning from Las Vegas has been contagious to us. We don’t look for the same result, but we can’t avoid the quest of finding beauty in the ordinary.
Building on a budget makes you face a scenario of dull and cheap materials to work with. Materials deprived of any personality that therefore can reach the biggest possible market. They are never good, only just good enough, but they block you on a budget.
There is one alternative though, and we love it.
The temporary construction materials. They are truly free in their character. They are not aimed to last, they are not aimed as an end result and therefore they are as raw as they can possibly be. Their shapes, colours and materials are solely defined by their function.
They are not soft.
There is a need of being iconic. Most of those construction elements are not designed to blend in the context, rather the opposite, they are designed to stand out. You should be aware of them and of the dangers that they carry.
Those elements are born as eyecatchers, but always seen as ugly and ordinary.
That’s precisely what we love about them.
As we often say we are always ready, and so are the materials we work with.
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1. Allen Iverson, “NBA Post-season press conference”, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2002
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