Surprises and Decisions

The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices award spotlights North American individuals and firms with distinct design voices that have the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. This year, the League posed a series of questions to the eight practices that received a 2024 award, prompting each firm or individual to reflect on their working theories and methods, the opportunities and challenges of contemporary practice, and what’s next.

CANO VERA arquitectura’s portfolio includes large-scale institutional, cultural, and infrastructural projects both in and beyond the firm’s base in Mexico City. Below, partner Juan Carlos Cano explores how CANO VERA embraces uncertainty and contradiction in the design and construction processes, especially when working on public projects.

*

What does it mean to be an “emerging” practice or practitioner?

It is quite satisfying (or embarrassing perhaps) to be considered an emerging voice when objectively we are already midlife professionals with midlife crises and old-fashioned musical tastes. However, we know that architecture is a slow profession, and we like it to be slow because slowness is necessary to better understand the problems one faces. I guess the definition I would most identify with is emergent slowness.

What does it mean for you to share your “voice” in the design field, in your community, in your practice?

Perhaps more than sharing our voice, we like the idea of joining a chorus of voices that complement, oppose, and contradict each other, never ceasing to discuss issues that are relevant to a community and try to solve them together.

Where do you locate your practice environmentally, socially, and within the design field?

I really don’t know. I would like to think that we are doing a good job in line with the most pressing needs of our time, but I don’t know. What always comes to my mind when I start a project is that we must act with good judgment[1]  and common sense, with no greater pretension than to do a good job. We are lucky to work in an era where the media noise of superstar architects as masters of the mainstream has waned, or so I would like to believe. But we like to stay far away from that kind of trade, from overdone design, form for form’s sake, the bling-bling world, or grandiloquent speeches.

What do you see as the main challenges for your firm’s practice in today’s economic, environmental, and political climate?

On one hand, it is stimulating to agree with many current concerns about climate change, social justice, or political coherence, and to see that they are gradually being taken more seriously. I think that in the contemporary context it is impossible to ignore these issues and our profession has much to contribute in this regard. However, one of the greatest challenges we have is to know how to face many other conditions that still abound in our time, such as the haste with which answers are demanded, the labor injustice that exists in the construction business, the disinterest and foolishness of bureaucracies, or the excessive political correctness that surrounds us. Specifically, working on public projects in Mexico, we must be very stubborn, have a lot of patience, and be willing to get into absurd fights to defend ideas that confront economic usury or the lack of interest that certain institutions have in long-term solutions because they do not see an immediate political utility.

When you are deciding whether to take on a project or collaboration, what questions do you ask yourself? What questions do you ask the client or collaborator?

In recent years, as we have mostly dedicated ourselves to solving public space projects, we are very concerned about the social relevance of the project. Once[2]  we are immersed in the design process, we try to simplify solutions so that they are more viable[3]  and easier to build. The design discussions within the office always take into account basic things: a sensitive analysis of materials, natural ventilation, no excesses or superfluous designs, human scale, relationship with open areas, green areas, etc. Then comes a very stimulating phase, that of reviewing the design with the users or communities, a phase where sometimes we must rethink many aspects of the project. And finally, there is the most complex stage, that of construction, working with contractors, supervisors, and government authorities. This is the stage in which we suffer the most because anything can happen, from the process running smoothly to everything turning into a disaster. One learns that, in Mexico and similar countries, public works construction processes are full of surprises and improvised decisions, so you must be alert to unforeseen situations all the time. Let’s say it is part of the masochistic charm of uncertainty.

How would you define research in your practice?

Research is a constant activity in our routine, whether we are involved in a new project or not. The funniest thing is when random research we are conducting suddenly coincides with a project without any apparent link and that research is the key to solve something that was stuck in the design process. Or sometimes it happens that problems that arise in a project, resolved[4]  or not, become the subject of a future research project. I guess they are like parallel universes that love to be promiscuously mixed.

Do you teach? What is the interplay between your teaching and practice? 

Yes, in fact, it is a very important part of our work. We have had a design workshop at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City for almost twenty years. We are very interested in teaching as a form of shared learning. Yes, the cliché: we learn more from our students than we can teach them. We understand teaching in the manner of medieval workshops: transmitting a craft. We are very rigorous, very neurotic as well, but always respectful of our students and eager to hear their ideas, to try to understand their way of seeing the world. This is perhaps the most important aspect of teaching, the dialogue between generations, between different ideas, making pertinent observations based on our experience but being open to anything, not being old fools stuck in their old ways.

Do you prefer to work in a certain scale or typology, or do your projects range in scope? Is there a project type that you would like to design for but have not yet?

On the one hand, the large public scale is a challenge that fascinates us, in the sense of its social impact and the relationships that are generated by the city, by its infrastructure. We love, but we are also intimidated by, the transcendence that a project of this scale has over time. But also, we know that at this scale it is almost impossible to resolve the details as we would like, that some of our architectural whims will be (luckily) ignored, and that the project we had in mind will usually be in many ways far from the final result.

On the other hand, small projects are very pleasant: trying to solve subtle details; discussing for hours the pros and cons of certain materials and being able to test them; having the time to see the development of the constructed project and if necessary being able to change certain initial ideas, which is impossible in a public work. So, in a contradictory way, we love working on opposite scales.

When do you consider a project complete?

Never, I guess. A work is not finished until it is occupied, and even to see its real functioning, you must wait months, years. Its inhabitants will appropriate the space in their own way: they will make the necessary modifications; they will enjoy it, or perhaps they will hate it. And time will also do its work: the architecture will age, as we humans age, as everything ages.

Can you name a person, book, film, or other source of inspiration?

Thomas Bernhard, always Bernhard. All his work, but perhaps a favorite book: Correction. Charles Olson. Susan Howe. In film, the urban desolation of Tsai Ming-liang or the claustrophobic domestic space of Chantal Akerman. Oh, I also have an absurd obsession with anything related to Japanese culture.

Are there references, of any sort, that you find yourself drawing on again and again?

I always find myself revisiting John Hejduk and his invented societies inhabiting impossible mechanisms. I love his childlike sense of humor. Then I think that in the real world, the individuals in those societies would end up behaving like in Dogville [directed by Lars von Trier], all against all. Human nature. But that doesn’t stop me from imagining and drawing similar villages and characters and realizing that they always lack Hejduk’s spark and end up in inconclusive failures. Then, from there I can extract the occasional individual sketch that has been useful sometimes as part of an ongoing project.

On the other hand, it is frustrating to realize that with the new tools and the daily rush, I find myself drawing less and less. I spend more time in Excel. In my ideal world, I’d like to just be drawing and making physical models. Good luck with that.

What did you last draw?

A very colorful vegetation plan for the Cencalli Kitchens project, a community dining room located in part of the former presidential residence of Mexico. Every week of the year, cooks from different regions of Mexico will come to cook in this dining room which is open to the public. The drawing is a plan with the proposed landscape, the location of each of the trees, the medicinal plants, the pollinating plants, etc. In fact, it is an imitation of those beautiful plans drawn by Piet Oudolf. Of course, the result achieved has been notably inferior.

What do you need to do your best work?

Rules and limitations.

What’s next?

I have no fucking idea.