2nd extract | segundo extracto 

Carlos Ferrater and Félix Arranz in conversation. 2003, september. In the heart of Barcelona’s Ensanche, on Calle Balmes where it almost intersects with Diagonal, the street hums with the humid Mediterranean heat of June and the noise of the speeding traffic that rounds off a Friday afternoon. For all that, noise and heat have remained outdoors. Good insulation. The conversation takes place at the far end of the studio, at a small round table beside a patio with white reflections and bamboo. A competition probably came to an end the day before and that’s why the studio seems strange without all the hullabaloo and frenzy suggested by the notice boards. At midday and the weekend they’ll all be there. As usual. 

Conversación: Carlos Ferrater, con Félix Arranz. 2003, septiembre. En el corazón del ensanche barcelonés, casi Balmes con Diagonal, la calle ruge por el húmedo calor mediterráneo de Junio y por el ruido del tráfico apresurado que apura un viernes por la tarde. Sin embargo, ruido y calor urbanos han quedado fuera. Buen aislamiento. La conversación tiene lugar en el fondo del estudio, en una pequeña mesa redonda, junto a un patio de reflejos blancos y de bambú. Probablemente, el día anterior se terminó un concurso y por eso el estudio parece extraño sin la algarabía y el frenesí que sugieren los tableros. A mediodía, y el fin de semana, estarán todos. Como siempre.

[English]

I’d like to talk about one teacher I didn’t have: J.A. Coderch de Sentmenat. He gave classes in project design for a few months at the start of the “new plan.” I was doing the “old plan” and wasn’t entitled to go to his classes. Nobody asked me if I’d enrolled on his course, and I attended his workshop. We were meant to design a single-family house in the Maresme, where he was designing someone’s home. The first day I had correction I excitedly, and somewhat vainly, showed him some drawings in plan with a few turns; Coderch said to me, “No! It’s awful.”

What must I do? And he went on, “Look, what you must do is…” and I ended designing a Coderchian bungalow. 

Coderch was at the School for a very short time. A rejection of sorts and the bad behavior of a few students, along with his weariness at the lack of interest of the projects he was being offered, led to his departure.  

Then I was lucky to be given the Senillosa House in Cadaqués. I discovered what a house meant, what a space for an occupant was, what a building that was well positioned in urban space was, what an architecture was in which the role of the architect was almost that of a medium, in which the materials were simple, fulfilling all the requisites of a marvelous holiday home. A tiny house with an incredible section. At the School we were designing in plan alone, and in this house the design grew out of the section, because Cadaqués takes its shape from the slope. The house has a dual entrance, in the bottom part from the beach and in the top part from a little street in the town center; the systematic floor plan is repeated, the stairs become a circuit, the light rains down.  

I filmed Coderch’s houses with an 8 mm camera by jumping over walls, asking for permission or befriending the owners. Via the zoom lens I got to know his intermediary spaces. It was a kinetic and cinematic knowledge of space; louvers and sliding elements that varied the geometry and the light of the spaces. Some designs surprised me, like the Catasús House and the Rozes House, where part of the land is turned into outside public space, solving the means of access at a stroke, and giving the house a transcendent quality. 

This heterodox learning process allowed me to understand that the relationship of the architecture to the landscape has to have its roots in the tradition and culture of the locality, that over and above its physical, urban, climatic and topographical aspects, an intellectual rapport is established between architecture and landscape, something I’ve tried, years later, to establish in many of my projects.  

My first sketches try to transmit something of this. They’re lightning sketches, the hand moves at the speed of thought; they’re rough drafts that capture the organizational and constructional aspects. You try to discover something, since the architecture appears as learnt intuition.

I finished the course at the end of 1970 and together with Fernando Bendito proposed Instant City, an ephemeral settlement, in the summer of 1971 in Ibiza, to coincide with the International Design Congress. We sought the help of José Miguel de Prada Poole, who’d investigated pneumatic structures. We got the backing of Aiscondel and created our first built experiment. Hundreds of young people arrived from all over the world. With a sophisticated but homemade technology we stapled thousands of meters of plastic together and using electric fans and ingenious diaphragms a self-built city was erected on the spot. Its playful, assembly-style regime turned into a retort to the official congress.