The Domaine de Boisbuchet founder, Alexander von Vegesack, and its director, Mathias Schwartz-Clauss, sit down for a conversation at the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid.

Alexander von Vegesack never thought to go in for design, but he was a collector from early on. He founded the Vitra Design Museum, and worked with Vitra for much of his career. His life, marked by a postwar German childhood, was always bound to the values of living and working together, so it is not surprising to see them crystallized in Domaine de Boisbuchet: a castle in the southwest of France that each year gathers artists, designers, and

architects in multidisciplinary workshops. Internationally renowned not only for the attendees, but also for the caliber of the lecturers, these workshops are only part of an experience that involves close cohabitation and intimate engagement with nature. Mathias Schwartz-Clauss has directed the workshops since 2013, and in the following interview helps us trace the origins of this ambitious project.

Mathias Schwartz-Clauss: I would like to begin the conversation with the future instead of with the past. Do you worry about your legacy? About what will happen to Boisbuchet in ten or twenty years? And are you happy with what we have achieved so far?

Alexander von Vegesack: I think neither of the past nor of the future, I prefer to think of the present. I’m very much interested in what I can do now to secure Boisbuchet’s future. But its future development will be taken care of by younger people, like yourself, and others following up, and will keep changing, the only constant in life is change.

MSC: Alright, but if you look to the future and simultaneously to the past, back to your childhood, what would you say were the most important steps that led to this project? I feel that it would be a kind of summary of your work.

AVV: I was always very curious, and indignant when people would not allow me to follow my curiosity, so I learned to pursue my interests, and although in this I was not always successful (mainly for economic reasons), I learned an enormous amount from the different activities I did, and exposed myself to many experiences, for which people then appraised me. But if we focus on the period of the Vitra Design Museum, I would say that it was from my period in Hamburg that I really learned a lot. We organized a theater and many social experiments that would be of great help in my first Vitra exhibitions. So I would say that this ongoing curiosity has been the red thread of my life, and that the experiences derived from it are the foundation of what we are doing today.

“Ongoing curiosity has been the red thread of my life, and is the foundation of what we are doing today”

MSC: It’s interesting that you mention the social experiments, and it seems to me that the way you lived and worked in the Hamburg factory became an important part of how we do things at Boisbuchet, which gradually became a community.

AVV: In my view, community was the small family in the beginning, and continued when I was in boarding school. Sixteen people in the same room doing everything together created a system I relate to even today. All the projects that came my way were done with friends, living together, working together, taking risks together…

MSC: At some point in your childhood you also began to take an interest in objects. At that time, these were not objects of ‘design,’ the word ‘design’ did not exist in your world, so how would you say this admiration for objects came about?

AVV: I was born in the last two months of the war and we were living in Düsseldorf, surrounded by houses in ruins. Like all children, we liked to go through the ruins to see if we could find something, like gold diggers. Once we found mosaic in what had been a church. I didn’t know about mosaic floors, but was fascinated by those small pieces. It was part of the curiosity that has stayed with me all my life.

MSC: Düsseldorf is an example of your work, in general, which is ultimately the telling of a story through an object, contextualizing it to create a bigger picture. Sometimes you invent part of the narrative to create a new reality for these things.

AVV: That’s true, but I haven’t finished: years later, it was in flea markets that I continued my search for objects. You could find just about anything, and most interesting were the stories people told about them. You might come across an identical object 50 meters further down the alley, and the dealer would tell you quite a different spiel. I continued doing this in the Netherlands and later in France… and always tried to learn something not just about the object, but also about the people, who they were and how they tried to go about their business. They often made up stories, but there was always some truth to them. I think that part of it rubbed off on me.

But the serious collecting started with the Thonet pieces, when we needed furniture for the theater. I remember finding a lot of pieces, some damaged, some broken… but we would use spare parts to complete and repair others. One day a guy came by and told me about the technology of the chairs, and I was fascinated. So much so that I traveled to Czechoslovakia to visit factory places and learn more. In those days it was strictly forbidden to go into the factories if you were a foreigner, as there was a lot of industrial espionage going on, but eventually I managed to get in, and found lots of catalogs and information. To cut a long story short, this led me to do several exhibitions, many of them in the United States. During one of my trips there I read that William Wyler had died, and I thought it was Billy Wilder. I knew that the film director Billy Wilder had a large collection of pieces of bent wood, so I contacted his family to see if I could buy some.

“I always tried to learn not just about the object, but also about the people behind it”

MSC: So you called the family.

AVV: Exactly. I called and the man who answered was very astonished. I expressed my condolences and proceeded to explain who I was and what I wanted, but he interrupted me saying he was Billy Wilder and that, no, he wasn’t dead. He asked if I had paper and a pencil to write with, and gave me an address. That’s how we met, and we became good friends. One of the first things he did was introduce me to Ray Eames, who was a big help in the beginnings of Boisbuchet because, among many other things, it was she who put me in touch with Rolf Fehlbaum, Vitra’s director, with whom I would work for many years.

MSC: I remember that at the time we met you were working in the creation of the Vitra Design Museum, and I – aspiring to help out in the project as an intern without knowing a thing about design – was fascinated by the passion with which you spoke not only about the future Vitra project, but also about Boisbuchet, which then was just a bunch of farming sheds. But at what point exactly did you, an expert in creating collections for museums and organizing exhibitions, decide to shift your focus to workshops?

AVV: It’s closely connected to my origins. I had always wanted to keep up the groupwork I had started in Hamburg, and I wanted to share the experience, an experience which gave form to my life, with others, so that many more people could live it too. So here, again, we link the past to the future.

Luis Fernández-Galiano meditates about 2020, the pandemic and C:Architecture and Everything Else in its latest issue: C18.

2020 will remain in our memory as the year of the virus. This is already the given title of a crop of chronicles and reviews of a health crisis that has also devastated the economic fabric and caused dramatic social damage. The emergency has put us to the test, placing institutions, businesses, and individuals before an unprecedented challenge, which has brought out the best in us while at the same time exposing our handicaps. Today we are more aware of the fragility of our communities and our lives, but also of the close ties that connect us in a tight web of communication, solidarity, and affection. Despite all this, these provisional accounts are still so close to the events unleashed by the ongoing pandemic that they inevitably lack perspective. The best testimony of the plague London suffered in 1665 – A Journal of the Plague Year – was published by Daniel Defoe in 1722, and it might be a while before the most timeless narrative of our year of the virus appears. In the meantime, covid-19 has left us the task of closing the gaps and healing the wounds of this tragic year, attentive more to the regeneration of social structures, collective projects, and personal expectations than to the intellectual and artistic record of a time of pain, abnegation, and uncertainty. The Ecclesiastes reminds us that for everything there is a season, and ours is not a time to tell but a time to cure.

In 2014 Cosentino embraced with Arquitectura Viva the challenge of drawing attention to the “innovations, designs, and projects that contribute to making the world more sustainable and beautiful”, and this joint effort, under the title C: architecture and everything else, has materialized in 15 issues of which both parties feel legitimately proud. As with many other cultural initiatives, the pandemic hit the pause button in our printed communication with readers, and as much Arquitectura Viva as C went through a period of remote editing and digital publishing. However, a commitment to continuity has made it possible for both magazines to offer the print version of their digital issues, and this is precisely the purpose of this volume, which gathers the already distributed C16 and C17 with the contents of the new C18, presenting under one cover the publications of this ‘year of the virus’, a period we will be unable to forget, and which we can hardly consider history when the pandemic still disrupts everyday life in territories and cities. But this is not a time to tell but a time to cure, and to heal the editorial wounds of a magazine engaged with the planet’s health, with technical innovation, and with aesthetic excellence: these are the strands that weave together this testimony of a year whose somber threat we have faced with tenacity and humility.

Architects Carme Pinós (1954) and Izaskun Chinchilla (1975) meet at the offices of the Madrid-based magazine Arquitectura Viva to talk about the role of women in history and in architecture.

Carme Pinós and Izaskun Chinchilla broach issues like architecture, the ecological crisis and the future exhibition on the work of Pinós at the Museo ICO, but in their conversation the gender issue comes up insistently, and that is the part we are recording here.

Izaskun Chinchilla: To start, and if you agree, let’s reflect together on how the gender factor affects architecture. I am asking first because not everyone feels comfortable discussing this issue.

Carme Pinós: Yes, I have things to say, and for several reasons, because the more you delve into history, the more you realize that it is told from a very male point of view.

IC: It’s true: history has been violence and strength, but many of the other things that have happened are not part of the official history, right?

CP: Yes of course. I think we have made great progress and, in this sense, I believe that when humans became sedentary, divinity – previously represented by the mother goddess – went on to become the god of war, and this gave birth to the concept of heritage, of patriarchy. The system was turned around: matriarchy gave way to a system based on the succession of heritage conquered through violence, and this was so despite the fact that, ultimately only the woman knew for certain who her son’s father was. As women were left out of war, of a world sustained by force, our gender was relegated, and the foreseeable result is that the history of humanity is written by men.

When I say that, in spite of this starting point, we have improved a lot, I refer to the fact that now war, violence, and the use of force that have traditionally sustained patriarchy do not occupy the absolute position they had before. Different aspects of women’s emancipation have contributed to this, such as sexual freedom, birth control or the rise of women to prominent social positions. This is a big step, but it is only the first. Other actions must be taken, like making men get more involved so that women can step fully into world management, or simply acknowledging that this world needs women. The world needs women because we are less arrogant, we have developed a greater capacity for listening and empathy, probably because we have spent thousands of years taking care of others, something that men have a hard time doing. In traditional societies, a woman listened without being able to act; she tried to understand; if a son became a murderer, the father disinherited him, rejected him as son, but a woman would still consider that son her flesh and blood.
The world consists of many things, many contaminated things, and that attitude imposed by patriarchy, and which women had to accept, has its positive side. In my architecture, for instance, I always try to make sure there is a dialogue between two or three elements, and not just one imposed discourse. I am sure that this attitude has to do, in part, with my being a woman. I work with men, and at the studio there are more men than women, but fortunately women are occupying stronger positions at my office, and are gaining more strength in the field. In any case, the most important thing is to favor dialogue and avoid impositions.

“In my architecture, I try to make sure there is a dialogue, and not just one imposed discourse“

IC: You have said several things. The first is the vision of official history as masculine. I would put it differently. I think that male history is the official one, the history you find in books, in museums… But throughout this whole ‘official’ time there were changes in food and gastronomy, in people’s way of dressing, sexual habits and hygiene changed, the idea of medicine also changed... and I think that in these aspects of private life women were extremely important. From writing letters to creating a comfortable home, women have played a leading role in the greatest events in the history of humanity, although the official history hasn’t paid attention to them. In my view, there is a reassessment of the roles of gender in architecture, an acknowledgement of those aspects in the heritage of humanity that seem minor details in the discourse of major academies or museums, but which are essential to social progress. Those who went to war were able to go because someone had taken care of them when they were little, had provided them health, an education… In all those tasks women have played a prominent role.

That is why I think that perhaps another perspective of art and of history could make us see that we do have a female heritage.

CP: The relationship between architecture and feminity offers interesting examples. A Victorian house can seem very feminine, in the sense that it is very legible, filled as it is with human traces, footprints: you can immediately figure out where the reading, smoking, and cooking took place. It was the product, all of it, of an ethic of detail that followed a discourse, which could be linked, at the same time, to the female universe. Later on the house became more abstract: with Le Corbusier the dwelling became a ‘machine à habiter,’ but after that it was not even ‘for living,’ but simply a pragmatic way of tackling a program erasing all discourse. I would say the world has gradually given in to abstraction because the market has set more abstract guidelines and less connected to women’s traditional universe, which is more specific and has to do more with caregiving.

IC: Yes, I think the market is perhaps accountable for that shift towards the abstract, but also towards the epic: that situation in which only the great possession, the great feat, the great emblem, the great achievement seem to count, and less attention is paid to the details, to the elements of everyday life. As you were saying, the Victorian house is an example, and leaves traces everywhere of its daily activities. And that is what modernity has eliminated completely. I’d say the market has managed to make the most of that trend, but this has happened in complicity with the academy, culture, and architects in the sense that we still think about Ornament is Crime: we still deny that those everyday aspects are relevant.

CP: Sometimes I ask myself why the architectures I dislike deny their ties with people and things: buildings that, not by coincidence, are photographed without people. That’s why I always say that I look for a contaminated architecture, I want to photograph architecture that is alive, which reflects how people move, how they feel inside it. What’s sad is that these architectures that exclude the human are incredibly successful, also among everyday people, which makes me think that perhaps people are in need of that epic you are talking about.

IC: I have the feeling that precisely that praise of the more epic aspects, that denial of the importance of details and of everyday life, is somehow the origin of that separation between civil society and architecture as a profession. There is a temporary factor – we’re in an economic crisis, a crisis of the production model, an ecological crisis – and maybe the way in which women have been educated, their culture and their way of acting is part of the solution. This is not a call for protection, but a call for an opportunity and a strategy. I always say there is a first and a second feminism that advocate equal rights for women and for men: the right to vote, the right to take on public posts or the right to have a political role in society. And, next, the right to be part of an executive committee or of company management: the possibility of being part of the decision-making groups in society, but trying to make sure that equal rights involve equal roles, that is, making the woman perform like a man. We are in a situation in which there should be a revision of feminism associated to the idea that the environment and nature put us, as human species, in our place: a more vulnerable place where we might not want to be men. Perhaps I have no interest in being president of a political party or of a company if that means I won’t be able to balance my private life and my public life, if that means I’ll have to give up maternity…

“The way in which women have been educated, their culture and their manner of acting, is part of the solution“

CP: But society too, and not just men, maintains the traditional gender roles. Today we know what type of feminism we need to defend, but I don’t want anything given to me, so to speak. I don’t want to be chosen for a post just because I’m a woman. I consider myself a better architect than many other architects. I have a vision of the world that is complemented by other visions of the world. History, culture, genetics, or biology have led us to perceive things in different ways. In this context, women must claim the essential and active role of the female condition. I don’t want to be given half of something: I forgo charity and don’t want to be labelled or pigeonholed. I see life as a whole, and in life there are aspects that respond to a male vision and others that come from a female vision. So when you say you wouldn’t want to be a company director because you would have to give up many things in life, I think no one who steps into that role should be expected to give up certain things. That’s why I say that, in the end, the market is the winner in all this: the only thing that counts is productivity, short-term benefits which demand huge sacrifices… This is what we should fight for: a fuller life with multiple and complementary visions.

IC: Joining messages, I think that the transition of women into the labor market is a collective advantage, not for women, but for society as a whole. It’s a matter of vindicating, reasserting the value, and placing at the service of society a series of tools – which have been acquired and naturalized – for work and for dialogue, as well as a cultural heritage which up to now haven’t been part of the conversations about public life. Do we give immigrants permission just to live in our country or do we let them change the rules? Because maybe the right thing is not only letting them live like we do, but letting them change some of our rules so that society can evolve towards greater cosmpolitanism.

CP: Every time there has been a rise in knowledge, diversity, cross-cultural contamination, it has brought moments of peace and also of prosperity. But cultural exchange has always needed mutual involvement, otherwise the result is isolation, and, when you close yourself to the world and to others, prosperity ends. That’s why I think exclusionary nationalisms only lead to conflict.

Interviewed by Vladimir Belogolovsky in Madrid, Gong Dong analyzes his architecture. Both reflect on the balance between the globalization processes and the recovery of local heritage.

The offices of the magazine Arquitectura Viva serve as meeting place for the critic Vladimir Belogolovsky (Odessa, Ukraine, 1970), founder of Curatorial Project in New York, and the architect Gong Dong (Beijing, China, 1972) director of Vector Architects and author of works like Alila Yangshuo Hotel in Guangxi, Seashore Chapel in Beidaihe, and Captain’s House in Fuzhou,

all built in China but with a significant international impact. Together they discuss architecture’s evolution since the Modern Movement and the different impact in the East and the West, stressing the importance of recovering the cultural history of cities without neglecting the technological development of contemporary construction.

Vladimir Belogolovsky: Spain was, at least until the financial crisis of 2008, one of the leading countries in the global architectural panorama, and a real playground and research field for architects, perhaps similar to what China has become, but in a very intense way. There were many talented architects here, and many interesting works were built during that period. I would say that this situation is a continuous thing, despite the economy and despite the fact that a number of younger Spanish architects left the country, because still quite a few are producing very good quality work. Do you plan to visit or meet with any of these architects during this trip?

Gong Dong: This is a very short visit, but I’m sure I’ll come back next year with more time. Personally, I’m not so familiar with the younger generation of architects, but for some reason I really agree with you. When you look at the European architectural legacy, or even at the world’s, Spain represents a very subtle and sophisticated tension between discipline and emotional expression. This sums up my overall view of the environment. To me these are two essential pillars of architecture, and Spain is moving right in the middle. It’s a very fine balance.

VB: Yes, I’d say there’s a counter-trend, a kind of opposition on the side of Chinese architects towards imported architecture, that in some way was developing a national identity that wasn’t their own. Your generation, on the contrary, proposed an alternative. Not exactly Western and not exactly Chinese, but rather a sort of fusion of both, and it has generated a lot of interest among Western professionals and critics. There is some sense of creating something different, something that’s related to culture, to the place, contemporary yet based on tradition. You can see it in the use of materials and techniques.

GD: But what does architecture consist of? To me, the most complicated and at the same time satisfactory aspect is when you truly engage with a place and discover something of your own in it, culturally speaking. You get to know the place. It is a sort of emotional commitment that lies in the heart of architecture as I know it. It is where inspiration comes from. Architecture must be able to engage with the local condition in multiple layers, but when you build in places where you don’t know the architecture, the building becomes a product and the architect becomes a brand.

VB: You started your practice in 2008. It was a very important year for China, because that was the year of the Olympics, and the year when a number of foreign architects just finished major iconic buildings in Beijing and overall in China, but particularly in Beijing. It was also the year when Wang Shu finished his Ningbo Museum; probably the first time in years that a local architect could compete with foreign ones. It is interesting because you, just like many important architects of your generation, started working in China, but had studied in the United States.

GD: I think the entire nation was trying to use that event to build a sort of pride and confidence in the identity of the new China, the contemporary China that is integrated into the world. That kind of mindset gave the whole nation strength, inviting first tier architects to design large-scale works – such as the CCTV headquarters by OMA and the Bird’s Nest stadium by Herzog & de Meuron – and really get them built. But after that there’s a very subtle change of mindset, because most of the foreign architects don’t have a very direct knowledge and engagement with China. They encounter many difficult situations along the way and it is hard for them to adapt to the country’s mechanisms, so they don’t all manage to settle successfully in China.

At the same time, architects of my generation, but trained in the West, start to appear on the horizon, with the clear advantage of being local. In sum, we have learned the techniques of contemporary architecture and at the same time share that deep love for our culture.

VB: I remember you telling me about the impressions of your first trip to Europe.

GD: That was around the year 2000, twenty years ago, and I keep fond memories. China was very different then, and to me it is interesting to see the contrast between the cultural shock I experienced then and how it is for the younger generations that travel and study abroad, in the United States or Europe. I don’t see that much cultural shock in their faces, even when it’s the first time they come out and look at the world. In China today – Shanghai, Beijing or in so many other places – they live with cars, computers, all the systems. When they come out and go, for example, to an airplane terminal or a train station, they realize that the built world is not so different, so they don’t feel a strong gap anymore. When I travelled to Europe twenty years ago I saw things I’d never seen before.

VB: However, there is one characteristic quality that unites all these works, something which is rarely talked about in academic circles, and that’s the subject of beauty. Seductive beauty I would say, very related to this idea of nostalgia and not just the newness of the work: the nostalgic beauty of history. I just visited some projects here in Spain where I see that connection with what you were saying Chinese architects feel.

GD: But you yourself are part of a different kind of fusion: you live in New York, teach in China, and travel around the world. You know how to identify those resemblances between Chinese and Spanish architecture, and talk about a nostalgic concept of beauty that I’d like to know more about. As I see it, both countries face different conditions and cultures, as well as a different period in contemporary history.

VB: Many of the leading independent architects in China are now building on small scale in the countryside. And you can find a number of interesting projects here in Spain, also built outside of big cities. I just went to see the work of RCR in Olot, a town outside of Girona. They work with the context, with abandoned or historic buildings, and blend the old and the new. I feel this is also happening in China. There is a kind of rediscovery of history and traditions, and a sort of refusal to start from zero and create something that jumps into the future. For instance, your Alila Yangshuo Hotel is based on the foundations and ruins of a building from the late 1960s, but it’s treated as ruins. It’s an interesting shift, and you can see this happening in Spain as well. There is a respect for what was there before, and I think that this attitude is different from that of architects years ago. Instead of trying to create this completely new, artificial object, now it’s a lot more about creating an environment, accommodation, comfort and working for the public.

GD: Modernism is almost like a revolution in terms of how the architecture engages with the system of production of this technology. Even the mindset, the culture, and religion change its philosophy. Also, the architecture system becomes more and more closed, more focussed on a final object in which all the components in architecture are integrated into a system. For instance, a cell phone, like this iPhone, is perfectly designed. Everything inside is such a smart system that it starts rejecting any relation with the exterior, because it is a closed object. This idea can be exported to many fields, but in architecture, since modernity, a more introspective model is produced. Only if we have in mind the place, people, heritage, or tradition will it be possible for the system to open up and let users interact with all these conditions, making the architecture more inviting, more comfortable.