Interview with Tina Gregoric and Aljosa Dekleva
Dekleva Gregoric Arhiteki explain how a generic system becomes very specific through collaboration and prefab design.
Tina Gregoric and Aljosa Dekleva have been operating out of Lubljana Slovenia as an eponymous architecture firm since 2003, making wide use of interactive systems, virtual and physical. They’ve also seen rapid change to both: Slovenia joined the EU, for one, and the Flash technology they employed on their recently redesigned website became obsolete, for another (Aljosa: you couldn’t see it on any i-devices!). In studying up on Slovenia in preparation for the interview, there was much I had to imagine. Interviewing them, however, I realized precisely what makes their practice so fascinating is the very uniqueness and adaptability of their context. We talked about some of their projects and how open source architecture can make architects relevant to global society again.
Paperhouses: I wanted to start by talking about the 21 for 21 prize you were awarded for achievements in the 21st century. How do you perceive that distinction? Is there something more forward-looking or future-oriented about your work, in your opinion, or since we are currently in the 21st century, was that more about being aware of what’s going on at this moment?
Tina: Architecture is educated in the past but we’re always working for the future and the process takes a long time. 21 for 21 selected very different practices so I don’t know why we were chosen, but I can guess it’s that we don’t develop any specific style, considering instead each program, or problem, or task separately. That was good about this award because it compared not just different approaches by different firms, but also different projects from within one practice.
Aljosa: I think it’s also due to the fact that in the news and world developments, any discussion on any level, professional or whatever, is moving from the individual and individuality toward community and communalism. Be it in the Internet, with social tools enhancing social relations, bringing them to the foreground of discussions--whether it’s the girl who commits suicide after being bullied on Facebook, or say the problems of Syria. In our work we are concerned with this collectivism and the user, as Tina said, is a central part of architecture. This might be why we were selected for the 21st century.
Ph: That ties in really neatly with Paperhouses, this idea of crowd-sharing and collaborative creation. As a partnership, how do you start that process of design? And then using your practice to design larger projects like the Cultural Center of EU Space Technologies, where you collaborated with three other firms, how do you manage that actual collaboration process?
(KSVET photo by Tomaz Gregoric)
Aljosa: We always think of the architectural process--which is inventing, researching--as a discussion first. So when the two of us start working on a project we approach without individual preconceptions. It’s actually a very good tool for a proliferation of ideas. You start by doing a wide thing, and use discussion to narrow down ideas. We don’t do it just as a couple, either. There is always a collaborator who is in charge of the office, so often, we are a three-part group in our office.
Tina: I also think this collaborative aspect of architecture production was always there. Just that historically in let’s say the last two decades it started to melt from the obsession with one architect, or one star architect or ego, which started in the 18th and 19th century and the 20th. But architecture was never done by one person. Never. It’s just that for some reason it is now finally OK to say it was collaborative, and it’s more democratic to allow ourselves to express jointly. We were actually happy to explore that collaborative moment also 10 years ago in RAMTV. That was an intensive project and part of our life when we were five architects, conceptually very powerfully unified, trying to do one master’s thesis together. This very emotional and strong memory of RAMTV "Negotiate my Boundary!" was a really intensive year. We also figured out we could share an office, so we started this firm. From there, it became easy to work together on the Space Center that you mentioned.
Aljosa: The center was a very interesting moment because the motor of the project, of everything--the funds, the location, everything--was actually an artist, and being an artist, he is maybe more sensitive to the changes of society from individual to collective. In this way he challenged us. Each of the four participating firms has two partners so in a way it was actually eight people working together. We started to work on the ideas, the proposal, the way we do individually in the office: with workshops. Then when the project evolved to more technical work we just divided the work. The fact that four architecture firms did one building influenced public relations when the building was launched to society. It was so positively accepted someone actually said this should be a model for politicians. This showed collaboration can really work and can bring out unexpected results.
Ph: I actually think the most interesting unexpected result is that in the process of doing collaborative work you actually teach yourself new tools of productivity and efficiency.
Aljosa: Exactly.
Ph: The building became a PR vehicle as you say but to what extent is the impact or the design of that building or your work in general influenced by Slovenian identity?
Aljosa: In terms of that project, identity was a central issue. (As an aside) there was this Slovenian who lived 100 years ago, who wrote the book entitled The Problems of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor. So imagine this book is still central in the discussion of space travel even today. There is a long story but it culminates in this popular end which you may be familiar with; Arthur C. Clarke was writing the screenplay for Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey, and the inhabitable space station, the wheel you see through the movie, is actually a Potocnik design! They took his design to be part of the screenplay of the movie. He was doing hundreds of sketches of this prototype thinking about how people could live in space. That’s why (the Space Center) is round.
Tina: As you mentioned (in email), Slovenia is not just topographically diverse and rich but also culturally and climatically. We have three different climates in this extremely small small piece of land. We have the more alpine climate and topography, we have the more Mediterranean climate, and the Eastern part has a more central flat part. We as architects, in such a specific country, are able to identify these specific difference. We are aware that if you go to a mountain region of Slovenia you have to design differently than if you went 50 km in another direction. Also, for the materials, what can users and the character of users handle. This diversity helps us understand projects in other regions and parts of the world. Say we had this project in Portugal and we could understand it because we related it to the more Mediterranean understanding in Slovenia. The more extreme case was the house in Maui so we went there to experience it, because we couldn’t cope with this super weird environment without relating to it beforehand.
Aljosa: Super nice environment. (Laughter)
(Cliffside house in Maui, photo by Cristobal Palma)
Ph: That is a gorgeous home. I was particularly fascinated with comparing the Maui house against XXS House. Can you tell me about those projects?
Aljosa: They’re actually very different in terms of who they were designed for.
Ph: I can imagine!
Aljosa: The Maui house was designed for a family who needed a home to socialize in with friends, because in Maui if you want to go out, it’s not like you can just go to the opera, for instance. Or if you did there’d be no one there… (Laughter) As opposed to here in Lubljana (XXS), the house was designed for my parents, who actually live in the countryside on the Italian border. My father likes jazz and my mom likes to go to coffee in the square in the urban context, so this is actually their urban holiday home.
(XXS House photos by Matevz Paternoster)
Tina: This is crucial, actually. We did a lecture where we compared these two houses, because they’re so radically different. It’s easy to present the same approach to the question but the questions posed were so different and the contexts were so different. So first, the small house is the holiday home, urban. The second one is very specific home for a family, a crucial starting difference.
Ph: How ironic, the Slovenian family living and socializing full-time in Maui, versus your parents using an urban setting for holiday.
Tina: That is interesting what you say, because what we claim is to have two different sets of conditions and very different reactions; if one is holiday and the other, primary. This is a major difference. This is also something we tried to address in our Paperhouse. If you design a home, you should design for a specific family or allow that family to make their house with their own hands, or with someone else but nonetheless, it becomes their own home. However, people are usually not so eager to experiment with homes, so it’s much easier to work on holiday homes, because all their frustrations, feelings, et cetera... they can contain them in a primary home, and then experiment radically on their holiday homes.
Aljosa: In the end you can also find similarities. One is the local reaction to the materials that they were built of. In the XXS, you have the flooring and the kitchen countertop out of Terrazo brushed on site. This is something you find in Lubjliana quite often because you have this architect Joze Plecnik…
Tina: The most famous Slovenian architect.
Aljosa: Yeah, and he designed quite a lot of urban settings and Terrazo is very …. you find a lot of pieces out of Terrazo. In Maui we used Ipe wood and it gives completely different flavor. In both projects we were trying to be very honest in the materials. We try to show the original nature in everything so we don’t paint anything. Everything is primal.
(Photo of XXS interior, by Matevz Paternoster)
Tina: This question of the context which we try to understand not only as a typology but on the technological level and material and climate level, by relating to all these contexts, these projects became so different. The Ipe wood on the roof became very gray and really chromatically bland with cliffs all around. But inside, the wood didn’t gray. Starting from the same material, over time the house became different. We like that kind of patina. We also did the mortar on the walls specifically out of a recipe including local sand. It was done just for that house and connects indoor with outdoor.
(Cliffside house in Maui, photo by Cristobal Palma)
Aljosa: It’s kind of yellowish, and we would never paint anything yellow, no? (Laughter) Taking the sand from the beach, you have this chromatic scheme you’re used to seeing in Maui around your home.
Tina: Also, the materials we used for the façade of XXS was a reference to the house we demolished. It was the same material used in the service house we replaced, so we wanted the new house to remain a reference to that service house it used to be, within the larger setting, because it’s a heritage protected environment. We wanted to connect to the history of the service house.
Ph: I want to go back to something Tina just said that I thought was interesting, how people are more willing to experiment with their holiday homes because they get to be a little freer with their ideas. Do you think that’s going to be the case with your Paperhouse? Because you’re leaving it up to them to experiment?
Tina: Actually what we were thinking, since this is open source after all, that we would like to see architecture as such provide a home. Not just extraordinary objects in nice surroundings, which is usually all a holiday home is. We want to provide for both possibilities. We thought of defining a system that could allow someone to do a very radical holiday home in a very specific landscape, or to be able to somehow within that system, allow normal forms of living in another setting. Understanding and taking the units a very different way, and you can set up a home for a family of four, which in our minds is still the basic unit. We tried to explore both sides of this thing. In relation to our obsession with the ability to design a very small house, a very small home, we were thinking first of our Paperhouse being small, and if you need a bigger one you can assess it out of more units.
Aljosa: The thing with Paperhouses is that of course we don’t know for whom it’s going to be built. Since our process normally begins with the user, this is going to be quite a challenge. We figured out we need to make a system that can adapt to the specific things that will differ with each user. In a way you start with the prefab idea, the prefab house. But actually we are doing prefab design. Prefab means that it’s limited so you have to provide a variety of designs to address specific needs for user we don’t know. This is going to work with a tool of scenarios, allowing for the thinking of possibilities of what our Paperhouse could be.
Tina: We’ll show how a generic system becomes very specific through open source. How it reacts on different geographic points and different context geographically and with people. How these houses differ radically among themselves, wherever each person interested would do it.
Aljosa: So in a way, start off with a simple proto-house. But with all the decisions and different possibilities of what you can do with basic volume, you achieve different specific results for different specific users.
Tina: Context matters so much to us, we’d really like to address how in this agenda. How to go from generic to specific in this open source architecture. Because making specific houses is not a problem if we do our own projects and get invitation to do a house. But in this completely other setup, it is an issue. We would like to show to different potential users how they can do their own house very specifically and not generic.
Aljosa: Prefab design.
Ph: It’s a great distinction, prefab design. Lastly, you were talking about the process of working with clients, but what do you think of open source as a means of sharing information, and how it evolves through sharing, as opposed to moving back and forth without change.
Tina: I think that’s one of the best things about the internet. It allows so many great ideas to evolve, firstly, and then to send it where it is needed. Back to this idea of doing Paperhouses, we don’t see a problem of authorship because we have much bigger problems to deal with as architects. We just saw this wonderful video of Shigeru Ban for his incoming architecture students, called “Architecture is useless for society.” (laughter) He explains that if you just do museums and things for privileged people, people who already have the means and the grounds to build something, you just empower their own ambition. It’s nice for an architect to have something else to offer; to offer a really smart design for people who would never address the architect directly. Here’s the potential for something in open source architecture that can really affect a lot of territory. Because at present, you have a little bit of exclusively good architecture but 99.5% of really damaging building. I see this as a kind of positive move, to prove there is still a need for architects in this world. Just nice housing is not enough.
Aljosa: I also see open source as a tool of widening the discussion. This becomes a tool for widening the discussion to and throughout the world.
*Apologies for the lack of appropriate Slovenian accents in proper names!
Read more about Tina and Aljosa at their site, and follow all of us on Facebook or Twitter!
Previously, Paperhouses talked to Panorama arquitectos