By Wilfried Wang
DOWNLOAD THE FULL INTERVIEW IN PDF
INTRODUCTION
TEd’A arquitectes’ definition of their understanding of architecture is a concise position statement. One might indeed read it as a manifesto. Seen against their first works, however, one would conclude that it is a more recent realization than a long-standing insight with which they began their careers. The statement itself is a product of an evolution. It marks a transitional point in their architectural thinking, a process that is a biographical part of the notion of transformation. It is the intention of this review of TEd’A arquitectes’ work to set out the different aspects of this particular instance of a multi-faceted transformation.
Both founders of TEd’A arquitectes, Irene Pérez Piferrer and Jaume Mayol Amengual, were born in 1976.2 They studied together at the Escuela Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura del Vallès (2001 and 2000, with Jaume Mayol taking a PhD in 2010). They also share a Catalan heritage: Barcelona and Montuïri, Majorca are their respective home towns. Within the Spanish political context and in view of Franco’s centralist policies, the establishment of Catalan and Mallorquí as official languages alongside Spanish in 1983 in Catalonia and on the island of Majorca respectively can be considered a formative event in Irene Pérez and Jaume Mayol’s political and cultural consciousness. The ascendancy of the concept of regional identities, of regionalisms, in the European case more recently known as ‘Europe of the Regions’ (Maastricht Treaty 1992), is directly tied to more specialist discourses in architectural circles. Long before Alex Tzonis and Liliane Lefaivre or Kenneth Frampton wrote about critical regionalism, architects such as Dimitri Pikionis were practicing sensitive amalgams of historical fragments and contemporary techniques as a common part of a natural and cultural topography, a return to the wealth of a specific regional heritage and a questioning of their then current relevance, a resumption of specific crafts and materials, all of which can best be seen in Dimitri Pikionis’ paths for the Acropolis and the Philopappos Hill (1954-1957), a project was imprinted on the early work of the Greek architects Dimitris and Suzana Antonakakis.