Roberto Rijo + arquitectos asociados

Design is the central axis of our work. Our approach is based on the articulation of programs -either pre-existing or developed in our studio- with the material and social conditions that determine the former's development and further implementation. In our view, the idea of "building" the architectural object and the way whereby said building action relates to the aforementioned determining factors are but a starting point that determines levels of compromise that are specific to every project and idea. The main compromise consists in developing the idea of a possible future. The size and prominence of our projects does not determine the cognitive actions unleashed in the design process. Every idea is taken to one of its possible limits, which is determined by the decision-making process that places the architectural fact either at the end or at the beginning of the consequent questioning that stems from having decided for a particular idea. This process of collective and intuitive work on an idea, on a possibility among many, becomes the process of begetting further and unknown possibilities. Things past and their poetic vision = memory. The physical site and its geometry. The foremost economic and aesthetical contradiction, which is resolved as the available building technology, construction materials, manufacturing, local regulations and the complete array of underlying social and material elements take part, along with our ideal of a society, in the process of shaping inhabitable structures and the building as their image. Line, plain, volume and color are fundamental questions in our projecting process as we experiment with mettissage and try to reduce the particular values exclusive to each of the aforementioned elements while striving to turn their different associations and combinations into the foundation of shape. This process of de-construction of the unique value in favor of the sum of values and the contribution of color -i.e., the texture that manipulates said association thus de-constructing what has already been de-constructed- is part of a tangle of connecting threads in our creative process, where the image of architecture does not come from the whole, but it may rather be the result of accidents, snapshots or approximations to the ideal which, in the case of the image, is as transitory as a moment that memory will later bring back. The site. What is a place? How can it be defined? This is a permanent question in our professional practice that only social, political, environmental and landscape events can have an answer for. Project implementation as an urban event is our alibi to create -should we say provoke- new material and social relationships as well as a new standard of usage in their area of influence, and it is the relationship between what has been projected -including these variants- and the use that we make of it that determines its possibilities of coming to be a site or of becoming a provocation on its way to turning into such site. Roberto Rijo