APRDELESP is an architecture office: a practice-as-research¹ on space and its appropriation.

Our research focuses on our own workspace and developing a methodology for making architectural projects.²

On one hand, we use our workspace as a laboratory for spatial research and experimentation. The private part of our office is composed of temporary offices set up specifically for each active project³ and a series of organization, communication, and online archiving software.⁴ The public part, which functions as an extension of the office, is composed of a mansion-studio⁵—a project in continuous development that works as archive, collection, garden, kiosk, library, lobby, printing press, salon, et cetera—and a network of subspaces⁶—a pavilion, a lobby-bar, an art gallery, an experimental park, an online radio station, an empalme stall, a café-furniture store, two convenience stores, and multiple cafés⁷—as well as our website. This website contains our archive and is synchronized with our photo and video channels, as well as our organization, communication, and archiving programs, allowing us to compile and publish our information in real time and without editing it, thus exposing every decision for public scrutiny.

On the other hand, we use a methodology⁸ for making architectural projects, developed, tested, and constantly updated by us, through which we conceive architectural drawings (plan, section, elevation, or axonometric views) as the workspace where the dialogue between all the people involved in a design process takes place. This allows the project to be the result of a conversation⁹ around social dynamics and material conditions, both existing and proposed.¹⁰ The method consists in (1) expanding as much as possible the universe of objects we draw, instead of only drawing the objects that are conventionally considered ‘architectural,’ such as walls, ceilings, or floors,¹¹ (2) using a color code to distinguish the different types of objects that we draw (existing, proposed, and suggested, as well as the inhabitants and their belongings),¹² and (3) treating each of our drawings as the latest iteration of a continuously updated document,¹³ instead of producing material specifically for marketing or exhibition purposes. This process allows us to better facilitate communication between everyone involved in the design process, to document each stage of the design process, to compare between case studies in our practice,¹⁴ and to set our work free for future re-appropriations.¹⁵

1. “Making the decision that something is practice as research imposes on the practitioner-researcher a set of protocols that fall into: 1) the point that the practitioner-researcher must necessarily have a set of separable, demonstrable, research findings that are abstractable, not simply locked into the experience of performing it; and 2) it has to be such an abstract, which would set out the originality of the piece, set it in an appropriate context, and make it useful to the wider research community.” Angela Piccini, “An Historiographic Perspective on Practice as Research,” in Parip/Practice as Research in Performance (Bristol: University of Bristol, 2002); available at: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/parip/t_ap.htm. [Back]
2. See aprdelesp.com. [Back]
3. Instead of expanding the private office space, if we need more space for a case study, we set up a temporary office at the project site where we are working. [Back]
4. We organize ourselves and communicate through cloud-based software that is synchronized with our website. We are interested in ensuring that the information we generate is useful, that it changes through the design processes, and that it becomes active material for reflection. [Back]
5. See elcastillodechapultepec.com. [Back]
6. A subspace, an architectural typology in continuous development conceived by APRDELESP, is a temporary, autonomous, ambiguous, non-hierarchical, 1:1 scale model. Subspaces work as public-facing infrastructure and as an extension of someone’s private workspace, encouraging experimentation and provoking unexpected encounters and relationships. See subespacios.com. [Back]
7. “Instead of trying to design institutions which, through supposedly impartial procedures, would reconcile all interests and values, the aim of all who are interested in defending and radicalizing democracy should be to contribute to the creation of vibrant, agonistic public spaces where different hegemonic political projects could be confronted”: Chantal Mouffe, “Agonistic Public Spaces: Democratic Politics and the Dynamics of Passions,” in Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art (Berlin & Moscow: Sternberg Press / Interros Publishing Program, 2008), 95–96. [Back]
8. “It is clear that in this way I am defining a method. But it is also evident that that method is one of analysis and not of knowledge. For methods imply metaphysics; unconsciously they disclose conclusions that they often claim not to know yet. Similarly, the last pages of a book are already contained in the first pages. Such a link is inevitable. The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances can be enumerated, and the climate make itself felt”: Albert Camus, A. The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage International, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018). [Back]
9. In another context and from a different perspective, Butler emphasizes this idea: the possibility, and even more so, the advisability, that in communicative exchange, a modification of the people involved, of their points of view, of their conceptual and vital certainties, may occur. She calls this transformative conversation a task of ‘cultural translation.’ In cultural translation, transformation occurs through an encounter with the other, with the unknown, in which both parties are modified. This is how Butler understands the fruitful power of dialogue. See Judith Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” in Undoing Gender (New York-London: Routledge, 2004), 204-231. See also Elvira Burgos Díaz, “Cuerpos que hablan”, Contrastes. Revista Interdisciplinar de Filosofía 11 (2006): 93-109. Author’s translation [Back]
10. “What the work of art looks like isn’t too important. It has to look like something if it has physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an Idea, it is the process of conception and realization with which the artist Is concerned.” Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”, Artforum 5/10 (June 1967): 79-83. Quoted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 29. [Back]
11. “But if we start out from the principle that each element has its own specific value, not more nor less value than any of the other elements, i.e. that they are all equal, then our designs will have a fundamentally different organization: it will be a matter of creating the right balance between all the elements so that each can function optimally in its own right as well as in its relation to others.” Herman Hertzberger, Lessons for Students in Architecture, compiled by Laila Ghait and Marieke van Vlijmen, translated by Ina Rike (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2005), 246.
    “The narratorial fixation with the small-scale, the trivial, and unspectacular details speaks of the need to interiorize experience, to invest material things with private meaning: […] The proliferation of small objects and everyday substances in the war poems speaks urgently of a need to imprint the world with private desire and longing, to alter its surface. Material signs reveal the struggle of the soldier-self to affirm individuality under conditions of extreme pressure. Objects may be already present (owned and cherished); objects may be created (the postcard is written, the slogan is framed and hung, graffiti is produced on a blank wall); objects may be transformed or recycled (recovered aluminum is turned into rings and whistles). Materials are shaped, carried, contemplated, consumed, preserved by the soldier who, in turn, seeks in the ‘friendly’ object a reflection of his own passage through the world; the empathy between human subject and the material world is poignantly articulated in Apollinaire’s war poetry. Through things, poetry reveals the presence and the performance of self in the world and upon the world. The circulation of physical things in the textual economy reflects thus a therapeutic commodification of war, where the transformation of materials is an analogue to writerly activity and speaks of the same desire to compensate for the unknowability of war. By salvaging familiar fragments, the soldier-self can begin to assuage feelings of powerlessness. Recreation is then properly re-creative, leading not only to new objects but also to a reaffirmed sense of individuality.” Susan Harrow, “Material Fragments, Autobiographical Fantasy: Reading Apollinaire’s Calligrammes,” in The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Réda (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 62-112, quote on p. 92; available at: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442681705. [Back]
12. See the documentary Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges, dir. Harun Farocki (75 min., Federal Republic of Germany, 1989). [Back]
13. In this spirit, we avoid 3D renderings or other images created exclusively for marketing or exhibition purposes because these are time-consuming and difficult to revise. [Back]
14. “Only the incommensurable is worth comparing; comparing the measurable is a task for accountants, not for anthropologists”: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “La antropología perspectivista y el método de la equivocación controlada,” Avá. Revista de Antropología 39 (December 2021): 121-139, quote on p. 128. [Back]
15. We are not the first architects to raise questions about our own expertise and whether we can know more about the lives of the people who will inhabit a certain space than themselves. We can think of the Dutch structuralists from the sixties and seventies (Hertzberger, Van Eyck, Habraken, etc.), the members of Team X (Giancarlo De Carlo, Alison and Peter Smithson, etc.), Yona Friedman and more recently, the design justice movement. That is, at least since the sixties, a lot of people have been arguing along the lines of “but the people! but experts! a little bit of what the people want but not too much! a little bit of authority for experts but not too much!” And the way in which we position ourselves in these discussions is by offering a methodology (out of the infinitely many possible methodologies) to work with these questions.
    “A complex, diverse architecture that shows its contradictions and regrets will stimulate random creativity both during its conception and throughout its use. It will be an architecture-weaving, without rigid limits between this and its context, between today, yesterday and tomorrow, between its authors and its users. Only then will it be pedagogical. Besides, his disappearance, his relinquishment of authority is in no way contrary to a personal art!” “The Ecological Architecture of Lucien Kroll”, Barcelona Architecture Walks 28 (March 2018), available at: https://barcelonarchitecturewalks.com/the-ecological-architecture-of-lucien-kroll/, accessed August 15, 2024. Own translation. [Back]