Conversation between Christian Kerez and Smiljan Radić
Text published in El Croquis 224 Christian Kerez 2015 2024.
Smiljan Radić: Generally, one admires another architect's work when it lies beyond our own capabilities, and outside of our own range of action or thought. That admiration turns into envy when we think we can do what another architect does. Fortunately, I can comment on your work thanks to an honourable admiration for something I am happily unable to do myself.
Christian Kerez: The perspective that others do what you cannot could also mean that other people are fulfilling your dreams. I think the purest exercise for an architect is to build without a commission and, later on, to leave their own house for public access as a museum, like Barragán did. So far, I've never built anything for myself, and I haven't found a proper reason to do so. But I'm fascinated by all the amazing houses that you build for yourself; you've fulfilled my dreams with those projects. And I'm also fascinated by your autonomous projects… I wonder why I've never succeeded in working so independently.
Smiljan Radić: I first saw your work at the XII International Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2010. On the day of the opening, Kazuyo Sejima had prepared a conversation between five architects and one landscape architect, including Nishizawa and you. There were 10 people at most in the audience &mdashincluding my wife and my best friend. I remember Ryue Nishizawa getting up from his seat on stage and sitting in one of the empty chairs among the scant audience and choosing to do his talk from the empty chairs, almost as if he wanted to extend a bizarre &mdashand not very fluid&mdash conversation to the absent audience. We greeted each other at the end and that was it. Later in one of the small rooms of the Biennale, I came across the huge structural model of the Leutschenbach School, made of cheap, black steel. In fact, the room had only shrunk because of the size of the model that seemed filled with air. It was the first time that I ever saw your work: the air in the Leutschenbach School, its presence.
To my surprise, some months later you called me from Brazil. You wanted to come visit me. When you arrived at my studio, I found out that your only purpose in coming to Chile was to see what you could of my work. There are few architects who travel to look at architecture with that kind of freedom. Many of them will travel to verify something &mdashto see if it's real. Since then, you and I have travelled together and we have fantastic friends in common, like Erwin Viray, for example, who seems to live for seeing, visiting, and as you've said of Erwin before, relishing in architecture. I don't know many architects like him... Enrique Walker is one, for sure. Perhaps because of this, building something seems important: leaving evidence behind seems to be the only thing that justifies architectural travel.
Christian Kerez: On our way to Pite House, on the Chilean coast, you showed me another house in the countryside. You didn't know who the architect was, or the owner. A simple courtyard building, it was located on a steep hill so that half of it was sunken in the ground; the only entrance was from the courtyard, which could only be accessed from the roof. Later we saw your house on the coast. There, the platform where you park your car &mdashnext to a series of archaic basalt stones, installed by Marcela Correa&mdash seemed so enormous that you might wonder whether it was worth entering the house at all. The bedrooms are underneath the platform and can only be accessed from an open, outdoor corridor facing the sea. Both houses had a layout different from what I had experienced up to that point, derived from their struggle with the nature of the landscape. This new experience of architecture helped me to imagine and understand the landscape to the north of Santiago, which I found to be the most striking element of our trip.
Smiljan Radić: When we travelled through Spain, with Catherine and Marcela, to visit the Alhambra in Granada and the Mosque of Cordoba, I remember you speaking assiduously with your assistants back in your new office in Berlin, and from a distance, you made corrections to the competition proposal for the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. There was special enthusiasm for that competition because it was going to be building of more than 200,000 square metres. I think that the size of the project forced you, maybe for the first time, to make explicit references to past architectural projects to back up your building. For example, the Monument to the Third International, by Vladimir Tatlin, was one of buildings, among many others, that appeared collapsed into a collage. 'Tatlin's Tower' is a building that has always been understood through its huge wooden model, which was later fetishized. A construction that looks like something you could take for a stroll across the city, as if it was part of the set for some street theatre festival or a Virgin in a religious procession. But the reality of that building lies in its heroic size, installed like a longing, or a yearning for the future, in the middle of Petrograd, a still primitive city in the early 20th century. The image has been rebuilt many times, the tower in the middle of the city, its heavy and airy spiral structure, and the creaking movements of the pure capsules inside. But the unreality of its size has been buried forever in the eyes of the spectators from that era, who never managed to see it. In the face of that impossible memory, the photomontages are but a pantomime.
Christian Kerez: Sustainability is, as we all know, a problem that impacts our entire planet. However, its scale is constantly downsized to the scale of details, one that doesn't create any conflicts with the global economy. The competition for the China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou, was an attempt to react to this issue of sustainability on an urban scale, at least by minimizing the building's footprint &mdasheven the sports fields were put on the rooftop to prevent wasting any of the precious land used for agriculture.