Maio / Langarita-Navarro

Overview

DOMa was delighted to welcome Langarita–Navarro from Madrid and MAIO from Barcelona to the second conference of the DOMa Lectures series, which aims to connect architectural practices with similar characteristics in their work.

Georgios Panetsos, from DOMa, took to the stage of the Benaki Museum amphitheater to welcome us and to share some preliminary words and thoughts about the presentations that would follow.

Taking the floor, María Langarita and Víctor Navarro guided us through seven key projects and captured their approach as a continuous and laborious reflection on the limits of architecture and materials. Thus, they summarized their philosophy in the aphoristic “Bust and Pelt”, an almost slogan-like formulation with which they invited us to see through their eyes how architecture is essentially accomplished through materialities. As a balance between what is hard, inorganic and inert (“bust”) and what is soft, organic and lively (“pelt”), Langarita and Navarro defined their proposal as a dialectic of tension and feedback between these two poles. If this approach has found its most successful concentration in any project, it is the “Red Bull Music Academy” in Madrid, which served as an ideal case study for their entire practice. Langarita–Navarro noted in their presentation that the beginnings of their professional career are placed shortly after the financial crisis of 2008, a state of exception that defined, as they said, their architectural practice, beyond the blow it caused to the construction market and the subsequent collapse of architectural activity.

It was of great interest then that in the second part of the event, MAIO, through Anna Puigjaner and Guillermo López, directly linked its practice as a response to this “year zero” for contemporary (architectural) reality, thus naturalizing the two invited practices as “products of the crisis” and at the same time offering a valuable conceptual thread for understanding their individual paths. In the case of MAIO, their reaction to this new era was the questioning of the sign of domestic life and its reinterpretation based on the new needs and family formations that were created in the wake of the last fifteen years. Thus, the main object of their work is the typology of the dwelling, while their architectural stance is formulated as a response to the complexity of the modern lifestyle and a counter-proposal of “spatial systems that allow for variety and development over time”. If we had to retain a phrase that condensed the creative concern of MAIO and their settled opposition to the rigid dictates of modernism, as they said, it would be the following aversion at some point in their speech: “It’s not about invention, but intention.” In this tone, the event entered its final stretch, where the representatives of the two offices shared their thoughts on the common components between their practices, namely their anxiety for an architecture that recovers (resilient) and incorporates its future costs, for how we should manage our resources and reserves, and for how we produce the qualities of contemporary life in its full spectrum.