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ANNA & EUGENI BACH | ...self

conversation · nuances · expression

editor: Félix Arranz | associated editor: Jaume Prat

architecture + architects

scalae ebook collection #004, english draft edition

April 2013

ISBN: when final ebook and print editions are published

bookID: scalae.net-aebach-self-draftENG-20130430-01

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scalae documents, broadcasts, and stimulates debate around, criticism of, and research into architects and other agents involved in the narration, creation, and construction of architectures that provide shelter for people’s lives and aspirations.

www.scalae.net

[collection credits]

Félix Arranz, editor and director

Jaume Prat, associated editor

editorial board

Eugeni Bach, Jordi Badía, Antonio Bedmar, Eva Blanco, Josep Cusidó, Olga Felip, Borja Ferrater, Ferran Figuerola, Beth Galí, Jordi Ludevid, Fernando Marzá, Josep Lluís Mateo, Ariadna Perich.

industries board

Cricursa · Lamp · Ciments Molins · Figueras International Seating ·  Roca Sanitario SA

guest entities:

Banc de Sabadell · Hydro Technal Alumafel · Andreu World · Fundación RBA · Interface

institutional network

guest entities:

Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (library) · Institut Ramon Llull · Arquitectes per l'Arquitectura · Associació Arquinfad del Foment de les Arts i el Disseny · Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona, UPC · LaSalle URL · ESARQ UIC · Catalunya Ràdio · ACC1Ó · Barcelona Global

[scalae international ebook collection]

The scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection is a European initiative that began in Barcelona. It became a reality through the support and teamwork of a group of experts, institutions, and companies that are committed to the internationalization of industries and their work, product intelligence for the construction industry, and the configuration of an architectonic project based on cultural exchange and debate.

The collection is based on scalae’s earlier publications and initiatives: print publications (scalae 0.0; 2003), podcasts (scalae 1.0; 2005), and the scalae.net rss documentaries (scalae 2.0; 2009), complementary undertakings which are all still available.

Each volume in the collection focuses on a single Catalan, Spanish, European, or international architect, studio, or architectural agent, and the volume is divided into three ebooks. The first book, ...self, begins with a transcription of a conversation –usually available online as a podcast– that covers the principles, processes, and results of the person or studio in question. It also includes a selection of significant graphics or drawings of theirs in order to reflect the connection between words and signs in their way of doing architecture. The second book, ...from, includes the subject’s opinions, experience, or critiques of topics and objects they hold dear. The third book, ...about, reflects others’ opinions, experiences, and critiques of the subject’s creations, techniques, and professional and personal output. The ...self, ...from, and ...about ebooks make up a complete volume. They are published as free, internationally distributed ebooks in English, Spanish, and Catalan in .mobi (Kindle®) and ePub (iBook, iPad, most eReaders like sony®, fnac®, etc.) formats.

In the final stage of this open production process -which includes both the ebooks and the online material- the issues in the collection become available for low-cost, on-demand printing for those wishing to have a paper version and for public reference libraries in Catalonia and the rest of Spain and in international centres for architecture and culture.

The collection is testimony to the efforts of many people –a fractal map of involvement on the part of the editorial board and multiple other agents– whose only motivation is the desire to open up ideas, documentation, and research so as to foster debate. Their work does not rely on sponsorship or conventional advertising but rather on collaboration: companies produce original articles about their work, which constitute an alternative –and direct– form of expression.

[issue credits]

· issue: Anna & Eugeni Bach ...self, draft, ENG

#004 scalae architecture + architects ebook collection, April 2013, scalae ed, Barcelona (Catalonia; Spain; Europe)

· editor: Félix Arranz

· associated editor: Jaume Prat

· social management: Montserrat Arnau

· English translation: Victoria Patience [nativawordcraft.com]

· photographs: Jordi Bernadó, Tiia Ettala, Eugeni Bach

· drawings & sketches:  Anna & Eugeni Bach

. technical & distribution support: Micky Bou [ysi.net]

. free distribution & subscriptions: archBIB.com

. printed paper version (April 2014)

. ebooks@scalae.net

. disponible la versió en català d'aquest ebook a archBIB.com

. disponible la versión en español de este ebook en archBIB.com

[conversation]

Anna and Eugeni Bach met by chance when they were still students, in their second year at university. The strange thing about that first meeting was where it took place: a party in Finland. From that first encounter they built an extraordinary personal bridge between the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea, between Barcelona and Helsinki. The connection was reinforced by various Erasmus scholarships that allowed them to get to know both the university systems and professional environments of their respective European “poles”. In this conversation, they describe their development as people and professionals. It ends up revealing the refinement of their educations, sensibilities, common sense, and respect. These values, combined with their skills and their contemporary take on the craft-based traditions that underlie the architectural profession, are the hallmarks of their studio. It, in turn, is an ambassador of the times and place they live in and the connections they have made. Above all, it represents a type of architecture that is in tune with its context and conscious of the possibilities of those who create it with their own two hands, using only resources that are dictated by good sense and the lives of those who will inhabit it.

comings and goings...

We spend 95 per cent of our time in the south of Europe. But part of us is always in the north. It’s a great thing to be able to leave here and look in from the outside, and also to be able to look at the north from here.

We’ve grown up together, ever since university. Architectural training and education is similar in Finland and Spain. They’re very hands-on schools, which place a lot of importance on planning. Leaving our countries, studying together, we’ve had very similar educations. These days we go to Finland two or three times a year, for family reasons. We know a lot of architects there, we see how they build, how the country works. We find it very calm there, and we get the chance to think. Moments like that are important. These comings and goings help, too, to demythologize northern Europe, which is necessary because when things get difficult here in Spain we tend to want to solve them by looking north…

Anna is Finnish. Her parents are rather unconventional farmers who have worked on cooperation projects in developing countries. As well as working in agriculture, her mother is a painter. So leaving the country is a family thing. Anna spent a few years living in Zambia when she was little. She speaks Catalan, Spanish, English, Swedish, Finnish, a bit of German…

Eugeni’s father is the architect Jaume Bach, who has a major studio in Barcelona. His career path began with public projects around the time of the return to democracy in Spain, and today he is an active part of Bach arquitectes, in partnership with Eugeni. Eugeni’s mother is a pyschology professor at the University of Barcelona. Teaching has always been a part of his home life. Eugeni spent his childhood travelling around Europe with his family, seeing a lot of architecture without really paying attention to it. Some places stand out in his memory, like the Hilversum town hall, in Holland, designed by Dudok, which really made an impression on him. Or the Rietveld Schröder house. He first became interested in architecture when he was finishing secondary school. It was natural for him to like it. Because of his experience with architecture, through his father, he started his degree thinking he knew what it was all about, but two or three years later he realized that the programme was going in a different direction.. And he liked it all the same, maybe even more.

a part of any given thing...

We share our lives with our children. We like our children knowing what their parents do, who we work with, what the studio is like... We believe that something our childhoods had in common was an understanding of work as not being something separate from daily life. If there’s no school one day, we take the children to the studio, so that they can draw there, or even so that they can get bored. So they can see what we do. But without any intention of them becoming architects.

Every since he was little, Eugeni’s cultural life has been connected to his father’s work. He remembers a lot of openings, parks, gardens, friends’ houses… and lots of museums, which he didn’t like at all back then. Now we make our children do the same things. At weekends we always go to exhibitions. They interest and influence us. But the opposite might have happened: we might have ended up hating the world of art and architecture, or simply not being interested by it, but it still piques our curiosity. Curiosity about everything. Everything is of interest to us. Or everything could be. From a photography or painting exhibition to nature itself. This is the most obvious thing we have in common.

Over time, we’ve adopted a way of filtering the world that relates to our way of doing architecture. There’s always some part of any given thing that interests us. We look at things openly, in all their variety. This way of looking helps us not to have too much respect for what we’re looking at. You don’t need to be particularly ambitious, just to look at things purposefully. To try different things out and not get stressed. To be mindful of what we see and experience, and to see if our suspicions can be confirmed, or refuted, without wasting energy on admiration.

It’s nice to be surprised, but we don’t want to lose that attitude towards the things we see: not too much admiration, lots of interest. The opposite, admiration for admiration’s sake, is not what we’re about, it exhausts us.

in our own way, we’re both craftspeople...

We met by chance during our second year at university, in Finland. We kept our relationship going, Anna did her degree project here, then some work came along, and we ended up putting down roots in Barcelona without even thinking about it. We don’t have any infrastructure in Finland, although we do take part in competitions there. If a project there did come along at any point, it would be really easy for us to put a studio together.

We’ve helped educate one another. We were so young when we met that we hadn’t grown up as people or professionals. We got off to a really slow start, which has allowed us to develop professionally without any pressure. While we were at university we did projects and competitions together. We’ve always been passionate about architecture. Since we were students we’ve sat in cafes drawing, making comments, constantly talking about architecture. We enjoy it to the full.

Eugeni is very good at expressing his thoughts on paper: his drawings work as plans, but don’t have artistic pretensions. They’re drawings that back up our conversation and help us think.

We love building models by hand. We’re real perfectionists If we do something, we want to do it well. If we have to something, we think about it for a long time, and if we take it on, we’re 100% involved. There’s nothing half-hearted about our models. It’s not that they’re perfect, technically speaking, but rather they’re instrumental: our aim is for them to see us through the project.

Both of us are, in our own way, craftspeople. Models –which, for us, are something we do by hand– allow us to build and see outcomes. They also function as a tool that connects us and the client because they’re concrete physical objects. Plans are always very abstract, even if they include drawings and computer simulations. Models are real things and they simplify that relationship.

It might seem that architecture today doesn’t leave much room for craftspeople, but it is possible to craft things through our work with manufacturers, on the actual scale of the building.

to dream of things that are actually possible...

We built a house for our kids, and building it was a pleasure. For a fortnight, we cut wood, hammered in nails… It’s not often that an architect gets to do something like that, because of lack of time and money. We didn’t draw up plans in advance. The preliminary plans were all of details.

We enjoyed it because putting up a building isn’t the same as making a model. Models are a representation, but you don’t really experience them.

Our buildings are more like stages than objects. When we discuss our buildings, we talk more about what will happen in them than what they will be like. For practical reasons, the house for our kids started with the building material. There are forests on Anna’s parents’ land. So we had wood for the house. Building with wood is easy. It’s similar to building models in terms of the directness of the construction process: you cut the pieces, nail or screw them together, then you gradually cover the structure…

The decision was clear. The landscape where we built the house helped that process. That’s why we were able to build like that.

Building a house for your kids in Finland isn’t particularly complicated. They have long tradition of building by hand there. No-one thinks it’s a big deal, it’s like saying you’ve painted a room. We talked to people who live nearby to ask them to help us dig out the foundations, and they were surprised because they couldn’t imagine a playhouse with foundations. It was more than that.

We prefer not to accept a commission if the initial conditions aren’t right. We dream up insane things, but we don’t actually build them. There’s something good about dreaming of things that are actually possible. Or of being able to make them possible.

Our kids’ playhouse is the abstraction of a house. That way they can let their imaginations fly. If a house looks like a house it can only be a house. This one can be a castle, a stand selling flowers, somewhere to live... The kids call it la casita [the little house]. When Anna and I are there it’s a café that they run. One of the advantages of it looking like a warehouse and not a normal playhouse is that an adult can stand up inside it and be part of whatever game they’re playing. Last summer we slept there for three nights, at the children’s invitation.

life adds to the system...

Buildings have to be open. They can’t have a single configuration. We think of them in terms of activities. They’re stages on which anything can happen, within certain limits. We don’t dictate the way the spaces we build are used. We want the user to be able to play around and decide what he or she wants. We don’t want closed systems or perfect designs.

Our interest revolves around two concepts: multiplicity and imperfection. David Hockney’s photomontages are a good approximation to this. Especially the early ones, in which all the Polaroids are perfectly laid out without even overlapping. You can see that whole mesh of Polaroids as a single image, but you can also look at each one individually and see that it makes sense. They’re not exactly collages. In a collage, there’s a meaning to the final mix, but not to each of its parts. In contrast, with these photos its fascinating. Each one has a different viewpoint. The same thing happens in some Sibelius symphonies. In certain fragments, you can hear each individual instrument, because of some internal logic... and then they all slip back into unison. Early Gehry buildings are another case in point. At his house you can see all the separate structures, the original house, the extensions, the fence, even the steps… All the same, it’s a very naive way of living and designing, but it brings a lot to whoever is living there. And it creates layers. Life adds to the system in a coherent fashion. Each element follows its own independent logic. The outcome is a building conceived layer by layer, so any layer of life that you add to it works. These buildings are not complete without the end user, who brings the construction process to a close. We are here to serve people. And if users need to make changes, then the architecture of our buildings is flexible enough to accommodate them. Nothing is sacred.

There are areas where people don’t know how easy it is to improve their quality of life. If clients come to see us it’s because they need help. Charles and Ray Eames had a great way of deciding if they accepted a job of not: it had to affect the client’s interests, their own interests, and society’s interests. If the project is not at a point where it affects everything, there’s no commission. If there’s no pleasure, no professional interest, it’s no good. If it doesn’t fit in with the society that you’re part of, it’s no good. And so on, through all the different possible combinations. The clients who trust us end up understanding architecture from talking about it so much with us. They understand that we can improve their lives. Then we see if we can actually achieve that. We’re paid to doubt. If they tell you that they want four rooms, they’re giving you the solution. We ask them to tell us the problem. And we channel that.

an economy of thought, of process

When we talk about creating a stage, we mean for people’s private lives. We call what we create environments… whether or not they’re spaces. By using this word, we try to break with the logic of differences between what is inside and what is outside. It’s really sad if a building is turned into a museum, as often happens with great architects’ houses, which you visit without being able to feel how they actually lived, what the house smelled like… If we think about the stage in theatrical terms, it’s not a bad idea to think that our lives are made up of a series of tableaux, rituals: Sunday morning breakfast, fresh flowers, orange juice… And rituals need a space to happen in. They don’t work in the middle of nowhere.

You need to set things up so that certain rituals can happen and others can’t. This can be achieve through economics. For us, that’s a conceptual term. If we can get something by reaching out an arm, why should we have to walk 20 meters to get it? If all the manufacturers we need for a project are in the town where we’re building, or in the next one along, we use them. We ask them to do what they know how to do, but without using building techniques that destroy the landscape or culture. You need to be inventive. Depending on how you lay a brick, you get the same old thing, the worst of conventional ways of doing things; or the opposite, the best of it, and so much more. It’s not just a question of money. It’s an economy of thought, of process… it’s thinking about what you can do with less. And then you add more if you need to. If after building our first house we’d been commissioned to do something big, it would have been a test. Now that we’ve had time to reflect, we’ve matured, we’re more confident, we can defend things in a reliable fashion… because economics has become part of us.

We might get excited about something very elaborate, or something simple. There are architectures in which representation, the symbolic aspect, is important. We’re talking about housing here, but there are other types of project where it’s perfectly legitimate for the architect to pay attention to representation, to make room for it, if it makes sense. That doesn’t run against the idea of an economy of means; you simply need to channel resources so as to be able to see if anything is superfluous.

Lots of things are acceptable. We have our way of doing things, but we like complexity. That’s why there are works by architects that are diametrically opposed to what we do but that we love. We are really passionate about lots of architects who are really different from us, and really different from each other, and even different from one stage of their work to the next. We love seeing intelligent ways of rationing out formal resources. It would be really sad if we were only interested in what we do!

[nuances]

In this second conversation, confident that in the first they started to define the lay of the land, Anna and Eugeni Bach delve deeper into their specific intentions, the way they work at the studio and on-site, their use of drawings as both instrument and origin of both their architecture and situations that make them buzz with excitement, and their constant activity that crosses the whole of Europe non-stop, seven days a week, and the spaces and times of the culture, job, and life they've been dealt.

fundamental principles: fruit salad and fruit smoothies...

Anna gives interior design classes at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s School of Design and Art (Escola de Disseny i Art, EINA). Eugeni teaches at the La Salle School of Architecture at Ramon Llull University, where he works with first-year projects. Teaching helps a lot, because you are continually exposed.

In addition to our work as university lecturers, we haven’t stopped being students ourselves. Anna is doing a master’s. Eugeni’s in the middle of a PhD. Making architecture, teaching, research, and cultural involvement are the four branches that hold up the profession as we understand it.

We never prepare for interviews. Or even for conferences. We don’t rehearse, we just let things happen spontaneously. It’s easy to get used to if the first few times you give a talk in public you do so about something you really understand.

The articles we’ve published come from talking about other activities. One of them talks about the idea of being a beetle, dragonfly, fox, or hedgehog. It’s based on a text of Isaiah Berlin’s about a work by Leo Tolstoy. In it, he divides creative people into foxes and hedgehogs. A hedgehog only knows how to do one thing, but it does it really well. The fox, in contrast, wanders around and does a lot of things. It tracks things. It makes mistakes. Put simply, for Berlin, Tolstoy is a fox but he wants to be a hedgehog. We want to be foxes.

Buildings can be foxes or hedgehogs, too. The idea of a closed, finished project is rather like a hedgehog. It’s harder to say what the fox idea is all about. There are many takes on it, all interwoven.

One comparison we often make to explain the idea of multiplicity, in terms of certain buildings, is fruit salad and fruit smoothies. To make a smoothie, you put all the different fruit in the liquidizer and you get a whole new flavour. It’s a manufactured taste that doesn’t exist in nature, and a whole new texture, too. It’s not any one fruit but rather a sum of fruits. It’s an integrating, hybrid, finished thing. In contrast, the fruit’s all there in a fruit salad, separate but together. You can choose what you put into your mouth, and how much of it. When you bite into whatever you’ve chosen, you get both things: the taste of the mix, and at the same time, each individual fruit. Fruit salad gives you the two things at once: totality and individuality. We want our architecture to be like a fruit salad: a mix of textures, of levels of information, and, at the same time, the possibility of deciding how to eat it, how to interact. The role of the end user is vital. If they don’t intervene, the project will never be complete.

processes: constructive reasoning...

We prioritize public space within the domestic sphere. We have built a lot of houses that had outside spaces because we built them here, in the Mediterranean. If you live in a rural area in a climate like ours, it’s almost a crime to build a house in which only the inside is used. We conceive of spaces as being very interconnected. This idea is compatible with that of a shelter. It goes beyond the idea of comfort. Opening up, embracing, protecting.

We’re currently working on a rather large house, with very high ceilings and lots of corners. Undefined spaces. Until now, you would have been just as comfortable in the outdoor spaces we’ve designed as the inside ones. Now we’ve gone one step further: we treat interiors as though they were exteriors. The dimensions of the houses we design now make them seem like warehouses. And inside, there are small-scale spaces where you feel protected. There are windows that open onto common areas. The houses we design now are like streets. We want them to be on an urban scale, like a small town, the users’ town. Our windows are not just holes in the wall, they’re a substantial feature. Holes aren’t just holes, they’re spaces. You end up living on the threshold. The thickness of the window eats into the corner. Often it blows the corner away altogether. We aspire to dissolve interior space. You need to be able to separate the parts that make up the house. If you want to be able to play with them and change their location according to what’s needed, you have to make them independent. There are a lot of reasons for each decision. Constructive reasoning is one. If you have a roof that is linear, it can’t be moved and has to follow its own rules. But the rest of the volume, everything below the roof, can be disconnected from it depending on how you lay it out. This logic might also apply to wall facings: we may or may not use them, and they might be in relief. You can also do simpler things like only partially rendering or plastering walls and creating patterns that lie over the volume. These patterns can reduce the amount of paint and plaster needed by half. The movement of paint on plaster helps to make the components independent. The way the house is located in the landscape around it needs to fit in with the activities going on there. Each material or situation ends up the way the nature of the landscape intends. That opens up a huge range of options.

results: industrial products made by hand...

Those living in our houses move between situations defined by textiles, and by other thicker, heavier materials like brick or stone, and lighter elements, like wood.

It might seem primitive, but for strategic, pragmatic reasons, we build in the countryside, so we see what local builders know how to do. So we work using their methods. That doesn’t limit us. We ask them to do what they’ve always done, the way they know how to do it, but following a plan, which is our design. That’s what we explained in the earlier conversation.

When projects are on a larger scale, the strategy is more complex. In some competitions, we’ve proposed to work in ways that are totally unlike the method we described before, but in those cases it’s because we found a way to do the project that worked, so we ran with it. The logic is similar, but the dynamics are different.

We often get asked about the stripes on the facades of some of our projects. It’s not a big deal, really. In some cases, it makes the building lighter. In others, it’s because if you paint stripes onto a rendered brick facade, which will inevitably end up having cracks in it, you won’t notice them when they appear because of the contrast. It’s a question of what will last. They break the building down. They’re playful.

The stripes on the house at Gaüses are reminiscent of a bar code, which suggests the house is cheap. They also evoke the vertical lines of a forest, they create a changing pattern with the shadows of the vegetation on the site... In another house we made the stripes of stone, because the municipality requires you to use that material, and the client didn’t want to. We asked what the minimum percentage of stone we had to use was and then we made that percentage of stone stripes. That was it.

When Anna draws there is something very craft-like about her work. In fact, she makes a lot of things by hand: she designs and produces objects, clothing, some lamps, she even crochets... so you get a very physical result. She likes making industrial products by hand, kind of the opposite of what usually happens. Hands aren’t machines. They shake. The movement of the arm tends to make straight lines into curves. The imperfections of the lines give her drawings an almost plant-like quality. Her drawings are black and white, and they don’t reveal everything. Images that have been worked on too much leave nothing to the imagination. Either you like them or you don’t. With black lines on a white background you’re forced to imagine things, and people usually go about that process in a very positive way. These drawings are the opposite of those by the Barcelona School, which use a few highly developed lines. Our drawings are totally different. They emerge little by little, over time. They’re therapeutic. Perhaps they’re related to the Lutheran-influenced idea of seeking the sublime through work.

everything else: because we don’t know how to keep still...

We like doing things. We don’t know how to say no and we like to get involved. So we never stop. We’re on the board of ArquinFAD and Arquitectes per l’Arquitectura, we’re part of the Aproximacions collective; we put on conferences, film cycles at film library, and we do the posters and graphic design ourselves... It’s the way we are.

We like to take hold of opportunities when they come along. Doing things like these is a way of belonging to Barcelona. The advantage of listening to people and being culturally active is that you form part of different groups. Most of this work is to support architecture and to share the positive things we see. There are lots of extraordinary architects here. That’s something we like to share.

But we don’t know how to kill time, or even how to waste it. When we have some time on our hands, we use it to invent things. Little things, fun things. Like the playhouse. Or installations, which we sometimes put online, although not all of them.

We’ll tell you about some of the unpublished ones… Once we had fun imagining a scientific photomontage about a field full of cows. They move according to laws of their own, relative to where their fodder is. That’s why in summer they graze the meadows randomly. But in winter, when the fields are under snow, the farmer lays the food out in lines, because that’s the logic of the tractor, and the cows arrange themselves along these lines. We imagined a board under the field and that we were moving the cows: "A6 to C8!", for example.

Another time we redesigned the road up to the farm, making a really lovely access road that we filled with candles one evening. So it looked like a road filled with light. We moved the candles and made another road: we changed it without modifying it.

Then there was the frozen trousers installation. In Finland, in winter, if you go outside with your hair wet, it freezes stiff. So if you soak a pair of trousers, they freeze too, leaving the shape of the legs formed by the frozen water. It’s like reinforced concrete. The result is a presence in the landscape that we recorded by photographing it.

They’re fun things we do because they keep us entertained, they give us something to think about, and... because we don’t know how to keep still.

It’s a need for us. It just something we have to do. They’re not very productive activities in the financial sense, but we need them to be able to let go of the airy ideas that there’s no room for in our professional lives. They group our observations together. But everything we do is related to architecture because it’s a reminder of what’s not there. An absence. If there’s no-one to see or experience it, it remains incomplete. Like architecture: it needs an intervention from the outside. Life, which we celebrate... by doing things.

[expression]

By basing their work on complementary expressive techniques, Anna and Eugeni Bach apply a peculiar common sense that allows the fantasies of the torrid north to co-exist with the prudence of a cautious south –or vice versa, in keeping with how these two places are conventionally imagined– because, as they themselves say, "The logic is similar, but the dynamics are different." So much so that when Anna's eye is busy catching a fish, it is of course cooked and served up on a plate. In other words: the surprise when the predictable is beautiful; reality, pure and simple, and irony, pure and delicious. Dalí would have loved to be at this feast, and so would Aalto.

Ornament or loop? ...Real Gone, the Bachs’ drawings and Moneo’s American glass

by Jaume Prat and Félix Arranz

When computers first started being used in the process of recording music, they brought with them a musical base that hadn’t been possible in pre-digital times: the loop.(*)

The highly unconventional musician Tom Waits was fascinated by the hypnotic, insistent, unpleasant nature of the loop; by how it could create environments, by the literally inhuman tension of a sound born to stretch out time. He looked into loops to see how they could become part of his music, and the result of this synthesis came in 2005, with the album Real Gone, in which he incorporates industrial noise bases.

In Real Gone, the Californian musician uses loops in practically every song. But he does so in his own way, which involves inventing a false loop. With the false loop, the musicians play live, but imitate the way a computer makes music, its obstinate rhythms, the crashing cadence of machines, all the while conscious of the fact that they are not machines. Conscious of the fact that they get tired, become impatient, make small mistakes, vary the rhythm and return to it, or that their instruments might fail or go out of tune.

Real Gone is a deliberately clumsy record, the execution of which is mechanically imperfect, and what it offers and explores is precisely this vibration, the way this false clumsiness brings things to life.

The drawings and the architectures that Anna and Eugeni Bach create follow exactly this sort of technology-based yet non-technological logic. In the age of computer-assisted drawing, they could easily create their sketches using the directed lines of CAD programs, and then print them. However, they choose to represent that complexity with hand-drawn lines, in ink, knowing that hands are clumsy, that they shake, and that ink can have a life of its own.

They push hand and ink, plan and material, to the limit to reach a sublime order that is born of shakiness, of an accumulation of controlled imperfections. The same accumulation of imperfections that Waits proposes in Real Gone.

When discussing the nuances of their work, Anna and Eugeni are conscious of the false loop of drawing that connects them to organic, plant-like growth, and the sublimation of the self: “When Anna draws there is something very craft-like about her work. (...) Hands aren’t machines. They shake. The movement of the arm tends to make straight lines into curves. The imperfections of the lines give her drawings an almost plant-like quality. (...) They’re therapeutic. Perhaps they’re related to the Lutheran-influenced idea of seeking the sublime through work.”

Ten years ago, in one of the first conversations published in a scalae document, we asked that stubborn hunter of the sublime, Rafael Moneo, about the possible meanings of “craft” today and about contemporary alternatives to ornament. In his answer, he could just as easily have been referring to Waits and the Bachs when he tried to describe the series of glassworks he had requested for one of his projects in the United States (the creator of the glass in question, Ferran Figuerola, recently gave a fuller account of this process ***). Today, Moneo would find it all much easier to explain: he could simply cite Anna and Eugeni Bach’s drawings and logic of closeness, perhaps while Spotify plays the persistent human-industrial echoes of Waits’s Clang Boom Steam on his telephone, and his hand runs with satisfaction over the perfect imperfection of Figuerola’s glass for his Princeton building.

Meanwhile, outside, it’s raining and spring has come.

JP and FA, April 2013

(*)A loop is made up of an ordered set of sounds, or a fragment of an existing song, that are repeated indefinitely to form a loop that functions as a base for the song. The loop is the basis for the type of music that is now known as industrial noise. It first appeared at the beginning of the 1980s, but didn’t become popular until about a decade later.

(**)“Ornamentation is connected to a way of doing architecture that included a workforce that implied a degree of variation in repetition that just doesn’t happen in today’s series. The available alternatives are not the same thing. When buildings have repetitive series – like those by Herzog & De Meuron sometimes do – I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this repetition, which is reminiscent of Warhol’s series, is ornament. In this regard, Rem Koolhaas is far subtler when he uses repetition. The formwork that functions as masonry in his Japanese houses, for instance, feels closer to the traditional stonework that is being alluded to.” (“Conversation with Félix Arranz” from the publication “Rafael Moneo, architectural author”, scalae document, scalae ed. 2003. Barcelona)

(***)”It was through this last project, the Neuroscience building at Princeton University, that we finally understood Rafael Moneo. Although for the opaque areas of the building he stuck with his idea of pearlized glass, for the translucent areas, he had totally handmade cast glass in mind. Our first attempts aimed to achieve something along those lines, but we were never able to get that really handmade look, because our main concern was that we would be able to laminate the glass, and that it would be strong enough to bear the wind loads the building had to stand up to. After we had worked for six months to come up with five alternatives for the product, it took Moneo five seconds to tell us that none of them was any good. None of them had the handmade look he was after. Luckily he spent more time with us, enough for us to be able to listen to him and understand what we needed to do to achieve what he was after. So we went back to work, and after spending another six months researching with a crafstman who specializes in cast glass, we were able to come up with a product that met the technical specifications but that looked exactly how Moneo had imagined. It was the length of time we needed to come up with the new furnaces and new moulds that the new form of production required.” (“Listening to Moneo”, original article by Ferran Figuerola, CRICURSA, published as part of the scalae.net fractal map, April 2013)

[referencies]

This section contains twelve links to online references about the works, projects, and discourse of Anna & Eugeni Bach. The first is their biographical profiles (in Spanish) on scalae.net (1). There follow five works published in the scalae.net works and project section: the house at Gaüses (2), the Anoro house (3), the playhouse for their children in Finland, known as LaCasita [the little house] (4), the MMMMMS house, and (5) the Oak showroom (6). The seventh reference is Anna and Eugeni’s own website (7). The eighth is an article by Tiia Ettala about the refurbishment of an apartment, published in Domus (8). The ninth is an article (in Spanish) by Anna Bach about foxes and hedgehogs, and people from Gio Ponti to Buckminster Fuller, which is referred to in the nuances chapter of in this book (9). The tenth reference is an interview (in Spanish) for the 10th Spanish Architecture and Urban Planning Biennale on the Gaüses houses (10). The eleventh is a video of Anna Bach drawing the house at Gaüses (11). The twelfth is a video that documents the complete construction of LaCasita (12).

1: Anna & Eugeni Bach profiles at scalae.net

2: House at Gaüses, Girona

3: Anoro House at Sant Esteve de Palautordera, Barcelona

4: LaCasita, PlayHouse, at Nummi-Pusula

5: MMMMMS House at Camallera, Girona

6: OAK Showroom, at Barcelona

7: Anna & Eugeni Bach website

8: article ...about A&E Bach Consell de Cent Apartament (Domus)

9: article ...from Anna Bach Hedgehogs and foxes (spanish)

10: video by studio banana tv for X BEAU , 2009

11: video of Anna drawing the house at Gaüses

12: Playhouse video

Anna Bach graduated as an architect from the Helsinki Polytechnic University in 2001, she was assistant professor at the Vertical Workshop at the International University of Catalonia’s School of Architecture (ESARQ UIC) in 1999, and since 2010 she has been a professor for the "Grado de Interiorismo" Workshops at the School of Design and Art (EINA) at the Autonomous University of Bellaterra, in Barcelona.

Eugeni Bach graduated as an architect from the School of Architecture of the University of Barcelona in 1999, where he is also doing his PhD, in the Projects Department. Since 2005, he has been a projects lecturer at the La Salle School of Architecture at Ramon Llull University, in Barcelona, and he taught at the Vertical Workshop at the ESARQ UIC in 1998 and 1999, and as part of the Mies van der Rohe chair at the School of Architecture of the Technical University of Catalonia in 2001.

Anna & Eugeni Bach were given a 2012 FAD Award for the Apartment at Consell de Cent and the FAD Opinion Award in 2008 for the House at Gaüses. For the same project they were chosen as finalists at the X Spanish Architecture and Urbanism Biennale in 2009, selected for the VII Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism Biennale, as finalists in the 2010 Arquia/Próxima Awards, and the AJAC Award for Young Architects in 2004, among other prizes.

As part of Bach arquitectes, they were chosen for the FAD Awards in 2004 and 2010 and won the ASCER Spanish Architecture Award in 2010. Their work has been exhibited in Spain and internationally; notably the “Resistid malditos” show in the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2000); “HiCat” at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; Eme3 Contemporary Cultural Centre in Barcelona, Bo01 Parasite – The City of Small Things in Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Oslo, and London (1999); “Architecture Catalane 2004–2009 Portrait d’époque” at the en la Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris (2009); or “Aproximacions” at COAC Barcelona in 2012; among others.

[net & fractal map]

The editors would like to thank the individuals and companies that were invited to sit on the editorial and industries boards of the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection for their support, hard work, and suggestions. We are also grateful to the public bodies and institutions that were asked to participate through our institutional network. Their inspiration and generosity enabled us to launch the collection, polish the ideas that underlie it, perfect the processes used to create it, and hone the goals we share. Their help has made it possible for this issue to reach the hands of those who are interested in architecture and the agents that take part in the creation of it.

We would also like to thank Anna and Eugeni Bach, and the staff at his studio, for the time and effort they have put into making this ebook a complete text that documents, in a comparative fashion, the approach and results of this architect from Barcelona during the first stage of his professional life. This publication will also contribute to understanding how different generations of architects and the different agents involved in the many facets of what we call architecture approach and resolve architectural projects and works.

We are grateful for Eugeni Bach’s suggestive snapshots, which put a coherent finish touch to the graphic and documentary material in this book, as do the five works mentioned in the references that are included on scalae.net: thank you to Jordi Bernadó and Pedro Pegenaute.

Anna and Eugeni Bach would like to thank...

…our parents, who taught us how to look at the world…

…our brothers and sister, who discovered it with us…

…the teachers who made such a strong impression on us at university: Juhani Pallasmaa, Manuel Gausa, and Eduard Bru…

…all those who have been involved in the studio: Joana Balló, Gracinda Ferreira, Kenneth von Freyhold, Sara Matías, Daniel Prado, Carina Silva, Francesc Vargas, and Marcos Vilaseca, and also to Albert Cabrer, Eva Florindo, Bianca Lins, and Xavier Uriach…

…our children, who share our interest in the world…

…our clients, who placed their trust in us…

…all our friends, who love us and whom we love…

…Félix Arranz, Jaume Prat, and Montse Arnau for their support and the passion they have poured into this editorial project…

…and especially to Jaume Bach… for everything.

We are grateful for the comments and contributions we have received from members of the fractal map, some of whom are listed below. These will undoubtedly nourish the upcoming “...about” and “...from” titles in this collection, the earliest versions of which are available at scalae.net:

...about Oriol Bohigas: Josep Ferrando (esp)

...about Rafael Moneo: Ferran Figuerola -"escuchar a Moneo"- (esp)

...self Rafael Moneo 03: Sobre la iconografía y el ornamento | On iconography and ornament...(esp/eng)

...self Rafael Moneo 04: Sobre la arquitectura y la vida | On architecture and life... (esp/eng)

...self Rafael Moneo 05: Sobre la propia manera de trabajar | On my way of working... (esp/eng)

...self Carlos Ferrater 01: the highest thing you could aspire to | la máxima aspiración... (esp/eng)

...self Carlos Ferrater 02: one teacher I didn’t have | un profesor que no he tenido... (esp/eng)

At the same time, Jaume Prat has written a regular series of articles that aim to reveal how context, reviews, analysis, and criticism can be complementary rather than conflicting terms, in keeping with our hopes for this collection...

…como si son 15 minutos, John (Cage) (esp)

...La cuarta chimenea del Titanic (esp)

...Ladrillos requemados, olor a tierra o las cosas que entran por la piel -sobre el workshop de RCR arquitectes en Olot- (esp)

Thank you to Apple and Amazon for including scalae ebooks as downloads in their respective shops.

Finally, we’d like to thank all the people who have supported the collection by reading and spreading the word: over 13,000 copies have now been downloaded through the iTunes and Kindle bookstores or through the free subscriptions system at archBIB.com. We are grateful to many of them for their efforts to help users who are not familiar with the technology in question to be able to read these ebooks. Below is a quick guide on how to read Scalae ebooks on different devices:

The scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection distributed by archBIB as mobi and ePub files can be read using a range of devices: Smartphones (Apple iPhone, Android, and Windows), tablets (Apple iPad, Android, and Windows), ebook readers (Kindle® and ePub readers), and computers (using Kindle® ePub reading apps).

+iPad: by opening the epub files you received by email using the preinstalled iBooks app

+iPhone: as above, after first installing the iBooks app.

+The Kindle app can also be downloaded for iPhone and iPad, in which case download the mobi file version of the ebook.

+Android and Windows: using the Kindle app, in which case you need to download the mobi file,

+Android and Windows: using ePub reading apps, in which case downlaod the ePub file.

Computer options, all of which use ePub files:

+Adobe Digital Editions is the official (free) application

+ Mozilla Firefox add-on which allows you to read ePub files directly from the browser

+ Sony ereader

There is also a Kindle app for computers, in which case download the mobi file format of the ebook.

Barcelona, April 2013

[notes]

[get involved]

Sharing this content through social networks is very simple: most ebook devices and apps allow you to highlight a paragraph or phrase and share it via your Facebook or Twitter account (once you have set up this feature on your device).

We welcome new articles, opinions, or comments on these conversations with Anna & Eugeni Bach, their personal work, or their professional work as architects. Proposals* should be sent to ebooks@scalae.net -if accepted by the editorial board, texts will be published on the scalae.net site and may be included in the appropriate ...about volume of the scalae ebook collection.

*Texts must not exceed 4000 characters including spaces in the language of the writer’s choice. The author(s) should establish a critical connection between their own professional background or personal interests and the world of architecture or that of agents that have been published or written about in a scalae “...self” ebook. For further information, see the articles in the documents section on www.scalae.net

[subscripció]

Why subscribe? You will automatically receive, free of charge, all the new issues and updates in the collection in the appropriate format for the device or app of your choice (iPod, iPhone, Android, Kindle®, ePub reader, iPad, tablets, notebook, or desktop). We have found the following apps and devices to be the most versatile: the Amazon Kindle®, the Kindle® apps for Windows, Apple OS X, Android, and Apple iOS, and the iBooks app for Apple iOS. Subscriptions website: www.archbib.com

[technical note]

This issue of the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection is a “draft” version of the ...self volume on the architects Anna & Eugeni Bach. Its Book ID is: scalae.net-aebach-self-draftENG-20130430-01. The issue became available online on 30 April 2013. In subsequent months, corrections and updates to the earlier content will be incorporated to produce the “ready” and “final” versions of the text. The “final” version will be available in print as a book for libraries and collectors. The ...about and ...from volumes on the same subject may also become available in coming months, and will be subject to the same revision process before the publication of the print version (please see the complete explanation of the collection for more information)

[collection catalogue]

published ebooks...

· scalae ebook "...self Oriol Bohigas" [iTunes] [archBIB]

· scalae ebook "...self Josep Camps & Olga Felip" [iTunes] [archBIB]

· scalae ebook "...self Josep Ferrando, architect" [iTunes] [archBIB]

· scalae ebook "...self Anna & Eugeni Bach, architects"

ebooks "in press"...

· scalae ebook "...self RCR architects"

· scalae ebook "...self Josep Lluis Mateo, architect"

· scalae ebook "...about Oriol Bohigas"

· scalae ebook "...about Rafael Moneo"

· scalae ebook "...about Carlos Ferrater"

· scalae ebook "...from Jaume Prat Ortells"

[copyright]

The fourth volume in the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection. Anna & Eugeni Bach illustrate and describe the circumstances surrounding their work step by step, project by project, sketch by sketch. Their undertakings reach beyond their own personal and professional lives to make way for –and create content and form for– an architecture that, in the specific context of Europe in 2013, is emblematic of the aspirations of a whole generation of vital, cultured architects who are committed to the time and place they live in, and of the way these architects understand the familiar and the foreign, the personal and the collective, the natural and the unusual, the here and now and the presence of those that have gone before them.

Digital copies of the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection are free, so sales of them are not permitted. If you wish to show us your gratitude for the reading, please consider making a contribution to the Arquitectes Sense Fronteres NGO and its cooperative programs.

(cc) 2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (by-nc-sa). You may not use this work or any work derived from it for commercial purposes. Any resulting work may only be distributed under a license identical to this one.

Table of Contents

SCALAE | ANNA & EUGENI BACH | ...self

[collection credits]

[scalae international ebook collection]

[issue credits]

[conversation]

comings and goings...

a part of any given thing...

in our own way, we’re both craftspeople...

to dream of things that are actually possible...

life adds to the system...

an economy of thought, of process

human scriptum, by Anna & Eugeni Bach

[nuances]

fundamental principles: fruit salad and fruit smoothies...

processes: constructive reasoning...

results: industrial products made by hand...

everything else: because we don’t know how to keep still...

human studio, by Anna & Eugeni Bach

north+south, by Anna & Eugeni Bach

[expression]

Ornament or loop? ...Real Gone, the Bachs’ drawings and Moneo’s American glass

House in Agullana, Girona

Scholar complex Aurinkokivi, Vantaa

Pavilion over Aura river, Turku

House at Gaüses, Girona

PlayHouse, Nummi-Pusula

Bo01 – Casa prefabricated wood-house

Anoro House, Sant Esteve de Palautordera

Collserola 16 Gates – Horta

Finland Pavilion Shanghai Expo 2010

Pez-cado

[referencies]

QRs

ref: Gaüses, Girona

ref: Sant Esteve de Palautordera, Barcelona

ref: Nummi-Pusula

ref: Camallera, Girona

ref: OAK, Barcelona

[net & fractal map]

human memories, by Anna & Eugeni Bach

[notes]

[collection catalogue]

[copyright]