Şevin Yıldız: How is the relation with the other offices and how do you manage to work with other teams in different projects? Depending on the program you have four different offices to collaborate. How does that choice happen?

Paulo Mendes da Rocha: I didn’t do a plan to work like this. Step by step things happened in order to develop the work on this way. And also, more than working with ex-students, etc, in this case I must contract them as a company. And whenever I have a commission I propose to them to enter the project and collaborate together. But in fact I don’t choose the offices per program, it’s a matter of availability. It’s a strategic question for the work, I don’t separate through the program or so. They all do the same work, including me. The structure of my office is just a secretary who is there for 30 years. It is an interesting way of working, because the proposal of partnerships is different than employees, actually they are all my ex-students having their own office.

Şevin Yıldız: It’s a very good thing for young architects to have such experience, not many architects in the world are doing this now...

PMR: But actually in my opinion it’s not true, because architects are always associated with other architects. Today I am saying that, but at that time I didn’t realize this: I first experienced this when I did the project for the pavilion at the Expo 70 in Japan. In Brazil it was made the competition where the architect would embark to Japan alone, just carrying the project (rolinho de papel debaixo do braço). They would hire a company that would make all details and build it. I have worked with 30 Japanese architects that I have never seen in my life before, and I couldn’t even speak their language.
It means that we always associate ourselves to many other architects and not only that, but also engineers, structure, electrical, mechanic of soil and acoustics specialists, we work with many teams. We don’t do anything by ourselves. I must assume the responsibility of the project. It is not a project of a group. I put he proposition and they develop it.

Flavio Coddou: And in the case of your latest project in Madrid and Vigo, how was the process of finding the local collaborators?

PMR: I always start everything in Sao Paulo. Then because of adequate technology, it is better to have an office at the place and then we connect to them. But actually I was invited to work in those projects. Because a project is an unchaining of actions. It’s normal in human life the finding of other people with the same interests. Architecture is not a mystery, it’s very easy.

ŞY: You have a very strong engineering side of you as a designer, in the structures. Actually you don’t use the engineering to show off the structure, but what is its motive behind the engineering capabilities when designing?

PMR: Historically, I suppose, it’s like a mosque, it’s all construction, but that says something. Architecture is a discourse. Of knowledge, desires, opportunities. The architect never does something for himself.

Ömer Kanıpak: Architecture has a consuming luxury side in many countries. It still hasn’t reached the social level. How the architect can work for this social awareness of this responsibility?

PMR: In a journalistic way the answer is that actually the architect belongs to the elite. We must educate the elite.

ÖK: Can we do it?

PMR: It’s a way to say. Architecture is more important than a particular for of knowledge and should influence all the knowledge and politics. Because of that the prestige of the architect is not worthless. I imagine that architecture becomes more and more important in the universe, universe as a school, a centre of knowledge. Because in this way, architecture can influence on other fields of knowledge: Linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, because we live in the formation of a consciousness about nature. Nature as something not stable, a passage, and we belong to the nature, the intelligent part of the nature. We were not born human, we are animals. Becoming human is a task for humankind. Some people say this has nothing to do with architecture, but it’s not true, this all needs to be talked by architects. The techniques is a human way to see the nature, through it you discover the secrets and truth of nature. A stone that falls you cut it in geometrical shape and with it you make a cathedral; so in this sense, this is the human, nature, in transformation, so the object of the architecture is this transformation. All this is not natural, but it’s all nature. If you put two stones, one next to the other, and then again and again, you introduce the beauty of geometry in the stone. And you can read this as a design. And you see how from magma we have stones, and from there, for instance, in the mosques, you make all those patterns, it’s a human design.

ÖK: Rem Koolhaas calls it a petrified knowledge...

PMR: No, I don’t agree. It’s a live knowledge. Knowledge belongs to us, and not to the stone.

ÖK: Can the capital owners able to read this knowledge?

PMR: I believe in this moment that it’s useful to speak in terms of capitalist and not capitalist.

ÖK: Are they able to understand what they are building or are they looking for superficial images?

PMR: I don’t know, I am not an anthropologist. This condition of nature becomes an universal consciousness, like popular culture in the middle ages, it’s a moment of transformation, as Berkley says, it’s a common sense. We are just stupid humans. The disaster in this case is good, when disaster happens, it becomes urgent to act. In this consciousness, we can disappear like many groups of animals. And we are organizing world summits and meetings for discussing that. The planet is little. We are essaying the essence of human life in the universe. We have laboratories on the space. We have a certain humour to call the satellite that is collecting fragments of comets as Stardust, it’s song recorded by Tommy Dorsey. So in this moment it’s impossible to think about this expansion around the universe if the planet is rotten. We must transform the matrix of human life. In this sense, in this limiar of condition of the planet, we cant say “these people with money, without money, etc”. It’s just a matter of human condition, we have slowly this consciousness. To have an architectural image of all this: the supreme monument in this moment is the house. It’s impossible to imagine a rich house or a poor house. The housing in the city needs potable water, light... it’s impossible to think of a kilowatt for rich and a kilowatt for poor... a teacher, the muezzin, they say to all. Education is the fundamental question in this moment in the world. Because the man is used to use the knowledge as an instrument of operation, as the father with the son. Knowledge is an instrument of liberty.

ŞY: So the architect has to serve to the democratic open space, for everybody?

PMR: People say that, not architects. It’s like in medicine, if you are a doctor, you may open a clinic for idiotic people, or you may study nutrition, of wider fields. There is no space for this type of people or so on. You are a woman, you can’t be a Turkish woman, maybe you pretend, you intend, but you are a human. I am an architect, doesn’t matter that I am Brazilian. Culture became an instrument of operation, when you say “my culture...”. Culture is something you cultivate, not finished. We have no destination, we decide what we want to do. The thing is that the most important thing is to do what you have to do, but don’t talk about it. Don’t start saying things about your work... my problem is that I can’t resist friends. And all this what I am talking is not mine, or new, it’s something related to what has been saidby contemporary philosophy, how ideas are able to seduce your life.

ŞY: Do you write?

PMR: No, only the indispensable things of memorials, etc.

ŞY: But I have seen your sketches together with sentences.

PMR: I don’t write. It’s very difficult to write. Writing is like architecture, you must be able to construct ideas.

FC: What is the reflection on your work about what other people write about you? Do you read what people like Sophia Telles writes about you, and also the books, how is this absorbed by you?

PMR: It’s like any human production. You do something and other talk about it. This is a dangerous question, I don’t exactly know what they are talking. It’s a problem for the others, and not me. If there is an influence, it’s not good, it would be a bad one. But I don’t think about theory when I do architecture. I only use this kind of theory “how will I do this or that?”.

ŞY: I was thinking that when he was thinking about architecture and nature, and in his case, certain invisibility on his work... as we can read on his projects, the open space, you don’t want to create a conflict between built space and non-built space...

PMR: I want to build in a way without contradictions and conflicts. Because this is necessary to build a house or a school. Everything that is new in this planet must not be contradictory with nature.

ÖK: What do you think then about Oscar Niemeyer’s work then?

PMR: I think he is a very great constructor. All those constructions are beautiful. The Brazilian Cathedral, for instance. Think about the domes, specially that one in Firenze. There is the fundamental question in the domes. You can’t deform a circle used in an uniform way, if you are able to make it with arches made of stone, or whatever material. At the dome in Firenze, the lower circle works in shear, and the superior in compression. When Brasilia was done, we had the liquid stone, the concrete, and the logic is inverted, where the inferior circle is the one with compression and the upper one with shear. In the first moment you can imagine it’s a fantasy, but it’s not. Imagine a roman arch, the development till Agrippa, where you have the secondary half-dome to resist the secondary forces, and the extension of the dome. If you are inside the interior of the little chapel, and rectify all the chapels side by side, what you have is like a wing with many pillars. And with the pre-stressed concrete you do only one of those wings, two pillars and two domes, you do something like Niemeyer has done n the Memorial da América Latina in São Paulo. And with the pillar on the outside and the internal space, we do something that we wanted to do centuries ago. It’s a development of a human reflection.

Talking about his project for the Copan building, for instance. Some prototypes are acceptable in housing. It’s good to have some buildings in the city, where the ground floor is open, and there is a good position concerning the sun, etc. We all know how a building works and how it should be done. There are no structural problems in these days, it’s easy with the concrete. But concerning the thickness of the building, then appears one big structural problem, the wind. If you curve the building, as Niemeyer has done in São Paulo in Copan building, you solve this problem, in the centre of the city, where there is subway, shops, cafes, and every storey is a piece of this wind bracing system. People are jealous of Niemeyer, nobody says that this is an intelligent idea. This discourse brings to another larger discussion.

We have short ressources, Lord Palumbo mentioned in his speech the other day: we have 7 notes, and with that we make a symphony, 25 letters and we have Shakespeare, Anatole France, Dante... it’s a construction of the work.

ÖK: Like a chair, with its four legs...

PMR: It’s always the same chair.... So it’s a beautiful reflection of history, because we have history as an experience, and not talking. I think like that. Why are you able to construct the minarets so tall? Because in this point, it’s so thin that there is no wind forces.

ÖK: Some nonsense talks....

PMR: For Istanbul the problem is public transportation and housing for all.

ŞY:Do you think a urban planner has to be a good architect?

PMR: Every architect is an urbanist.