OPINION 8. O´DONNELL & TUOMEY “Patios, bricks and boxes”
Whenever there is a conference by an architect at school I make the students see the interest they may have in their searches, highlighting above all that they are alert for the invited architect to explain his work from his project process, so that they evaluate whether What he says and what he does are related. This is the challenge when we invite someone to give a conference, and rarely the challenge is assumed, almost always the guest describes the work and does not delve into the stages and decisions he made during his project process, and even less into the errors and successes. that he found on that road.
It may seem that we architects are trained to consider the final result as the definitive experience of a built or simply projected work, and not so much the pause to ask ourselves how we work, what steps we take and the mistakes we make to improve them.
In an architecture school and for a student, unraveling where concepts arise from and how they are transformed into ideas is essential for their learning. And with this reflection, which always accompanies me at the beginning of all conferences, we went to listen Sheila O'Donnell. This conference “Patios, bricks and boxes” from May 2013 at our school, uses their searches, obsessions and interests, offering us small fragments of the life that accompanies the production of projects, in a way that humanizes the project process over time. The searches that he approaches through the montages for the Venice Biennale articulate a discourse enriched by the places in which he finds himself at the moment of thinking, collecting data, elaborating it, and testing alternatives.
We have to thank Sheila for this delicate exhibition, for bringing us something of the landscapes in which she moves with John Tuomey, and for showing us that regardless of the result, architecture is an experience that belongs to a place, to a time and its users.