Interview with Enric Ruiz-Geli

It is telling that Enric Ruiz-Geli opened his presentation at TU Delft on Monday with an image from Star Wars. The projects of his practice Cloud 9 don’t fit easily into the lineage of architectural history and precedents, but offer a bold stab at what a future might look like and how it might be constructed. Engaging all manner of emerging technologies – from parametric design, scripting, CAD/CAM machining, rapid prototyping, environmental sensors and electronics – it is an architecture exploring the outer reaches of what is possible, and offers an interesting model for how a small practice can sustain this level of design research.

Villa Nurbs, Empuriabrava. Detailed to the point of almost being Baroque, this house is a composite collage of design ideas, facade systems and manufacturing processes. A built catalogue of architectural possibilities.

Edwin Gardner and I spoke to Enric in a nice leafy courtyard in historic Delft – a world away from the radical images shown in the lecture moments earlier. I started by asking him whether there is any distinction between what he can dream up and what he can build, or, are you effectively building student projects?

Enric Ruiz-Geli: Yeah for sure. I think we are coming from an educational period of the industrial age where things have to be categorised in order to be understood. We come from a Darwinian perspective. Now, it’s about particles, there is no body and outside the body, there is only particles. The body is made of particles, the weather is made of particles, the earth is made of particles, and these particles are running us. It’s one system. A continuous liquid system. Therefore what kind of role, what kind of added value can we offer to this system? What kind of positive attitude can we bring to this new realisation of particles? In this age of knowledge, it’s all linked, and we have to pay attention to this. There is no global warming, economic crisis and financial meltdown. It’s all one. And an economist will tell you that. Petrol is linked to energy and therefore to war, to the stock market, to our lives, to our culture, to everything.

Rory Hyde: The references you are drawing on are from science and technology – not architecture. Do you see yourself as an inventor-architect? Are people like Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto or Nikola Tesla more likely to offer inspiration than Corb or Mies?

ERG: That’s a tricky question, but I like it. What I like from Buckminster Fuller was his sentence ‘we are all astronauts in this spaceship called Earth’. I think it is possible that we are all active in this role. We are all players in this one picture. I also think that post-Modern architecture was trying to separate layers in order to understand complexity, but today we need to integrate complexity. Science has always worked in an integrated way. Another thing, is that we have the sense that our parents have sent us away, to see the world, to learn English, to see other cultures. So we don’t come from a culture that was closed, but was opening and willing to collapse, to embrace culture by accident, by crossing, by crashing, by getting to Australia and seeing what’s happening there too. Culture happens in this crash way, and as we were saying, beauty happens in this landscape of events. So, please be open to crash.

SED Pavilion, Expo Zaragoza, 2008. Exploring the biological capacity of sweating, the pavilion is covered in sprinklers that activate when the structure reaches a certain temperature, covering it in a fine mist of salt water, thereby cooling the pavilion evaporatively.

RH: That was another theme of the lecture I think, this idea of ‘just do it’ – an insistence to not think about it too much (perhaps), not to overwork, overthink, but to have the idea and just take it into the shop and build it. What role does this spontaneity play in your architecture?

ERG: I do and then I think.

RH: Shoot first ask questions later.

ERG: Yeah, shoot first ask questions later. I think of course software is taking over, and there is all this programming, parametric design, all these things are happening – and it’s not very human. The more data, the more information that lays on the table in architecture, the more I’m interested in intuition, indetermination, fantasy, fiction – but not just like that. I really think there is a possibility to work in ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ – not ‘science-fiction’, but ‘science’ and ‘fiction’. There is a gap between what is parametric design and what is random, what is chaos, or undetermined. I like to say that going from John Mather to John Cage is a pretty good open field of research.

Hotel Prestige Forest. Covered in a network of cells comprised of micro solar panels, light sensors and coloured LEDs – the facade of this hotel records its solar exposure throughout the day and replays it as light throughout the night – producing a reflective diagram of the potential for solar power generation within cities.

RH: While we’re on technology. Your work engages parametric design, sensors, LEDs, CAD/CAM – all this new machinery that’s often overlooked in architecture, and normally more closely associated with fields of electronics or automotive manufacturing. Do you see any limits to what architecture is or can engage with?

ERG: I was reading a lot of Antonin Artaud, this idea of ‘Opera Totale’ – and I think the more I’m doing buildings, and gaining more expertise, the more I think architecture has to be a platform of integration, of hosting contemporary art, of engineering. So the more we open these limits of architecture, the more it can operate on the city level, the more it becomes democratic. Are video games architecture? Sure they are! If architecture starts to open these limits, by looking at video games for instance – there is space, landscape, acting, research, cosmetics, costume design, light design, and architecture has to be there. It has to go all the way to these open limits. This is a way it will be stronger, and then it will allow us to lead. So it’s not about architecture or engineering, it’s about hosting engineering, hosting smart grids, hosting green IT, hosting software, hosting Media Lab thinking, hosting programming. All this – if we have a big stomach – can be hosted in an open-mind architect’s field.

Media TIC, Barcelona, in construction. View of the upper structural truss being lifted into place. Each of the floors are then suspended from this roof, placing the structure for the floor plates underneath in tension and thereby saving 30% steel tonnage for the project and enabling a column-free ground floor.

Edwin Gardner: Since you’re working so closely with a big variety of high technology and software, probably you’ve also developed some ideas about how software could improve or better fit your needs. What do you think would be interesting developments for software to use in designing?

ERG: Ok, I think this is great. So we have a huge problem with global warming, let’s talk about global warming. Number one case of CO² emissions are buildings. Not cars, but buildings. Number two cause of emissions is agriculture, interesting no? Meat production, cows, gardening, cultivating food, etc. Cultivating agriculture is number 2. Number 3 is cars, we look at cars like the big problem, they are not. Ok, could you imagine a big computer that could tell me what is happening with global warming now. What is CO² emissions, clouds, flow, traffic? Tell me this. Visualise the enormous intensity of this problem. Show us the visuals. Show me what is invisible. Show me what architects are doing wrong. And in this way we will create a conscience. And people will be aware. Now we have the computers to run them, to calculate, to compute this data. These are great tools, these are great rewards for architects offices. So, it’s like, ‘how is this building going to perform for the next 7 years, day by day, minute by minute? Ready? Go.’ We can manage this complexity with computing. So why don’t we do it? Why don’t we build the links between a smart traffic light and smart cars?

EG: So you need more data to work with?

ERG: Of course we do, because we have the smart cars and we have the smart lighting, but they don’t talk to each other. The city does not know where the cars are, the cars do not know the map of the city. I mean, what’s happening? It’s just a link. It’s just to know the format to work together. And I think this is really the key point for software development. That we are able to know what a fire is doing in a forest, and this is linked to the firetruck, and Google is telling us there is a tsunami coming, and the people on the beach are receiving alerts. The world we are living is is not linked. And this is a big problem.

Rendering of completed Media TIC with inflated ETFE facade panels.

RH: All of your projects sound so incredibly research-driven, with a lot of work going into them, lots of people involved, all very expensive undertakings both to build and to develop as a practice I’m sure. Is there a whole series of Cloud 9 bank fit outs or rectangular office buildings not in your lecture that pay the bills?

ERG: No, no, no, no. To tell you the truth, this office is 9 years old now, and for the first 7 years it was about doing projects, and spending the money left over on doing prototyping, paying for patents, doing research. Today we have a pool of firms that is supporting the research of the office, we have over 12 firms, supporting with over €25,000 to know what’s next, what’s happening, ‘where are we going?’, ‘show me some future path.’ What this means is that our office has a floating economy of research, very much based on the Media-Lab strategy, they support us. And what they know is that in 2 years time, these little games, these little jokes, these little reports, will probably become a building, a masterplan, a new skin. And that is why they want to get this information in advance, they want to lead the market, and I would recommend any firm, any technological firm, to invest in talent, human talent. Don’t invest in banking, invest in talent, and in 2 years time your research will become a building and you will be sending off invoices for €2 million.

RH: Enric Ruiz-Geli, thanks very much for your time.

ERG: Thanks very much for hosting this conversation, and see you in Australia.

Big thanks also to Indesem for organising and hosting the lecture.

The audio of this interview is scheduled for broadcast on The Architects in a few weeks time.