APRDELESP

Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman and Guillermo Gonzalez Ceballos founded APRDELESP in 2012 in Mexico City. They consider their work in terms of case studies and describe their architectural office as a practice-as-research on space and its appropriation. According to Cesarman and Ceballos, the most important among their case studies are the Mexican pavilion for the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2023 Venice Biennale, which presented the campesino basketball court as a utopian infrastructure; Lodos, an art gallery renovation in 2021; contemporary art fair Feria Material; Art Fair Estacion Material; a pavilion and event Parque Experimental El Eco in 2016; the self-initiated furniture store Muebles Sullivan; and Café Zena, a long, narrow space for events or all kinds defined by a long communal table. They have exhibited their work as well as taught and given lectures across the globe, including Mexico and the US, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Australia, and Japan. They were among the winners of the 2021 Architectural League Prize, and prior to their impressive Mexico pavilion in Venice, participated in the Chicago and Shenzen biennials. You can find their writing in Log, Tank, Plat, Harvard Design Magazine, Scapegoat, and elsewhere. The way Cesarman and Ceballos operate APREDELESP and set its goals is unique in the field of architecture, from the vocabulary they use to describe it to the way they think about use.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture.

Transcript

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački 00:19
Hello and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljački, Professor of Architecture at MIT and director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled, I Would Prefer Not To. This season of the podcast is supported in part by the Graham Foundation. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects toolboxes, refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of the refusal is hidden from public scrutiny, and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails, and are not easy to examine or learn from, and yet the lessons contained in architects deliberations about, and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions not to engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics, inevitably forfeit potential profit, placing other values above it, at least momentarily. Today, I’m talking to principals of APRDELESP, Rodrigo Escandon Cesarman and Guillermo Gonzalez Ceballos or Billy. Thank you for joining me. 

 Rodrigo Escandon Cesarman 01:42
Thank you. Thanks, Ana. Thanks, Julian.  

Miljački 01:45
Rodrigo, and Billy started their office APRDELESP in 2012 in Mexico City. They describe their architectural office as a practice-as-research on space and its appropriation and think of their work in terms of case studies. According to them, the most important among their case studies are the Mexican pavilion of the 18th International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2023, which presented the campesino basketball court as a utopian infrastructure, Lodos, an art gallery renovation in 2021, contemporary art fair Feria Mmaterial, Art Fair Estacion Material, a pavilion an event Parque Experimental El Eco in 2016, and self initiated furniture store Muebles Sullivan, and Cafe Xena. They have exhibited their work as well as taught and given lectures across the world map, in Mexico and the US, UK, Sweden, Norway, Australia and Japan. They are recipients of the Architectural League prize in 2021 have participated in the Venice, Chicago and Shenzen biennales even before their amazing Mexico pavilion in 2023. You can find their writing in Log, Tank, Plat Harvard Design Magazine, Scapegoat and elsewhere. Both Rodrigo and Billy are graduates of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Rodrigo got his SM.archs at MIT and Billy his MA in critical theory at Instituto de Estudios Criticos. Their way of operating their office and setting their goals for it are fairly unique in the field, starting with the vocabulary they use to describe it and ending with the way they think about use. They have been talking about these topics a lot via different broadcasting infrastructures, and I hope that today we can at least tease out some aspects of their practice as research, as well as what it might mean to have projects on the boards in the context of APRDELESP. But as you know, we want to first begin by talking about projects that you’re not doing, and how you make decisions about projects that make and don’t make sense for the practice. So we usually start these conversations with the most memorable decision to not engage or to drop the commission. And if that hasn’t happened, yet, I ask my interlocutors to imagine on what grounds it might happen. And so we can start with that one before we decide that we need to change that question perhaps. 

Cesarman 04:25
Yeah, so I think, one way of of replying to that question is to say that we, I don’t think we have ever said no to any kind of project. And when we started the office, we were really trying to figure out a way to have a service that was where we can say yes to everything, even more than, like, as a kind of profit maximizing strategy was, like, a political idea to, or like a political choice to be able to accept every project. I think that some of the first projects that we made were that cafe and the furniture shop. And, you know, all these are these projects that we called subspaces. And so I think that we, we had a lot of ideas about operation being open to the public, kind of sort of, that kind of accessibility. And we were, we have always been trying to sort of incorporate that into into architecture practice. So we weren’t, we had the fantasy of, you know, maybe someone walks into the coffee shop, and they ask us to do their, to renovate their house. And that actually kind of happened. In a way, all of the projects that we have now, most of them, if not all of them come from people who we met through these spaces. I don’t think we had any, or maybe you had a couple that were like a neighbor who randomly walked in, many were people who, maybe we would have met otherwise. But we, but yeah, initially, we were really trying to, and the methodology is kind of an attempt to make like, a methodology that can help us make any kind of project and accept all projects. 

Miljački 05:59
I think we have to zoom out a little bit. So assume we don’t know about Xena cafe. And so you just mentioned subspaces. And I would like to get us to really kind of come to some of the definitions that you have, the key concepts and terms that you use, but maybe tell us how you started the office? Because yeah, I think this kind of scenario you’re describing already assumes that something is in operation, right? 

Cesarman 06:26
Yeah. Yeah, so we started the office. We had done a bunch of projects together, Billy and I and a bunch of other people. Yeah, maybe it was like a team of like five or six people who were kind of around. We were doing many different projects together. And then we got a commission to make… I guess the first project where we all worked together was a commission to make a restaurant in Polanco, which is like a fancy neighborhood in Mexico City. And I think there were, we were very frustrated by the process, I think, I would say there were two things that we were frustrated with. One was the kind of, that dynamic of like, of trying to come up with a finished project, that’s a finished finished product, and then defending it with a client. I think that’s something that we learned in school. And we were, we realized that we kind of urgently needed to unlearn it. And so that in a way that resulted in the methodology, and maybe we can get into that later. And I think the other thing we discovered was that we also didn’t want to be kind of locked in our office, only going to architecture events, only seeing other architects, only getting projects through, you know, through these kind of professional social spaces. And we were, we were trying to figure out a way to be more open to unexpected encounters, to the city, to chaos, to all these kinds of things. So I think if we made the methodology in response to the other frustration, in a way, these things, some of these things that we call subspaces, we made in response to the other frustration, and so these, these were, the first one that we made was called Cafe Xena. It was kind of like a coffee shop, we called it, its full name was Cafe Internet Cafe Xena. So it was like a cafe that was also an internet cafe. And its name was, also included the word cafe so so it had like a kind of funny name where the word cafe got repeated three times, but it was a very small space, only one really long table where 30 people could sit. Since then we were, we’ve always been interested in kind of these everyday infrastructure, so it had a lot of power outlets, you could connect audio and video to the table and then project it into a screen and like broadcast into the speakers of the space. It had a grill on the table, the sink for the bathroom was on the table. So that was the first one and we ended up opening a bunch more. We had the Muebles Sullivan which was a furniture shop that also worked as a cafe. And we had karaoke on the weekends. We had two little convenience stores. We had a stall in the Tianguis which are the weekly kind of traditional open air markets. And then we also, some of the projects that we made as like the Parque Experimental El Eco, which was kind of a summer pavilion competition for a museum, we also thought of that as as a subspace. So it also had coffee. It also had free water and free coffee. And even the the building for the Venice Biennale, we also think of it as one of these spaces. And so yeah, we call them, so we picked this word subspace, which is like space with the sub prefix. I think we were interested in, Yeah, and like making these spaces that were kind of outside or beneath other forms of commercial space. And so we also like the reference to like, I don’t know, like, maybe surrealism or like, subculture and so that’s why we call them subspaces and we have like a little kind of somewhat ambiguous, very succinct definition in the website. But yeah, we were trying to think of them as like very experimental spaces, you know, very focused on operation as like a way of intervening in design. They’re also like self-run and they were like self-operated. And the programming was like, stuff that kind of we received from neighbors and friends and people who were around. Yeah. So that’s, that’s more or less what they were about. Yeah.

Ceballos 10:24
Yeah, I mean, what Ro is saying is one of the lines of our research, like, our own workspace, and the other one is our methodology. 

Cesarman 10:33
Yeah, exactly. There’s subspaces where if the methodology is like, one set of questions of like, how to provide a service, then, yeah, the subspaces were also, it came from this idea of like, as architects, if we are spatial practitioners, the free space where we should be experimenting is our own workspace. And so, you know, even at some point, we even thought that maybe we could, we could survive without having a private office, we were like, maybe we can just have these subspaces and work from there. And we were like moving around the city having meetings everywhere. And then, you know, eventually we decided, we discovered that we do need a private space where we can be focused and calm and quiet. 

Miljački 11:15
Well, let me get to, I do want to ask you for a few definitions, that are part of the way in which you describe your processes and methodology on your on your website. So one of them is practice as research, I feel like we should stop on that for a moment, as well as maybe difference between case studies and commissions. And I don’t know if one becomes the other for you, or vice versa. But that seems like also important, at least in the kind of longer line of the conversations that we’ve had in this context. And then also, this is a big one, but how you conceptualize participation and labor? 

Cesarman 11:57
Yeah, so to start with the first one. The name of the office itself kind of comes from these questions. And when we started, and this was, maybe Billy can speak more to this. But initially, the idea was that project itself was one big research project on the way that people appropriate spaces. So that phrase is Spanish is aprobacion del espacio, and APRDELESP is an abbreviation of that. It’s like, a little bit kind of tongue in cheek abbreviation, because it’s also like, very difficult to memorize and pronounce. But yeah, so we thought of the whole thing as one big research project. And so we were trying to use this idea of practice as research to think of like, how this one giant research project happens through practice, and through making these things. We, so the projects we started calling case studies instead of projects, because they’re kind of, we kind of see each case study as one test implementation of this methodology that keeps evolving. I also know that case studies has this connotation of like, evil, UN, interventionist, I don’t know, but I think, but we, that was not what we were trying to, we were thinking more of each one is like a test implementation of this methodology that we keep also updating project after project. And then yeah, I don’t know, participation and labor. I think maybe we can start about, we can talk about how we think about labor. And I think, to go back to the subspaces, I think that our way of thinking was really influenced by working as managers and servers and cleaners of our own subspaces. I think that that way of using space as kind of a service worker, and we were working for ourselves, we weren’t, you know, it was like our own project, but still, working as a service worker really changed our way of thinking how spaces work. And it also like, I don’t know, it made us think about work from the beginning. And we were trying to, to go back to projects that we’ve said yes or no to, I think we were trying in the same way that if someone comes to a coffee shop and asked for a coffee, you give them a coffee, we’re like trying to see that as a way that we could do architecture in a similar way. And so the methodology is, in a way, it’s a response to that. Well, it’s like, we try to have like a very, very, very standardized way of making architecture. And we try to make it as easy as possible as like, the least fussy drawings that we can make as a way to liberate room for the other stuff, you know, for conversations, chaos, discussions, disagreement, and also as a way to do like, move away from the kind of default model of like, exploitation and self exploitation in architecture. 

Miljački 15:02
For me, I saw the the idea about appropriation, and so participation in some way through appropriation. And so that seems to, in some way, inflect how we might think about labor in one direction or the other as a continuation of the project, or as simply always appropriation of some kind. But this leads me to the question that’s really about maybe helping us imagine how big is your firm? And does it size, depending on how you think about labor, fluctuate, depending on the projects? Or in what way does it do that?  

Cesarman 15:43
So when we started, we had the, if you included the people who, many of the subspaces, most of those subspaces, closed during the pandemic, in part because, originally, we had the idea that, maybe we had the fantasy that the subspaces could subsidize the architecture, the design work, and the opposite ended up happening. And during the pandemic, it was impossible to do it. But when we were, like, our biggest we were working with, like, 50 people across these spaces, including, like, servers, and cooks and cleaners, and, we had like a driver for like, a driver for a minute, because we were making deliveries! And anyway, right now, there’s Billy and I, and maybe five more people in the office. And we have an office manager, we’ve really tried to keep the rotation at a minimum, like, we, I think it’s very common, at least in Mexico to hire people per project, so you get hired, and your boss will be like, oh, this project is going to last from one or two years. And then after that, you need to find a new job. And we’re, we’re really against that for many reasons. And the selfish reason is that we are interested in developing the office with people. Yeah, we have an office manager. And we mostly have architects, but we also have one civil engineer, because we build our, every project that we make, we also build and so we have a civil engineer, who’s more in the construction side. 

Miljački 17:15
To go back to the kind of question of case study versus commission, and I saw that you do list clients on your website. So how do you find yourself in conversations that enable work? When I heard, you began saying something about, these happen in certain kinds of spaces, and we hope the spaces enable some of them, but where do you find the people who want to do the work with you? 

Cesarman 17:42
There’s obviously a standard model of like, architects’ first house that’s commissioned from your parents. And we didn’t have that much access to that kind of thing. And so we made a few projects in the beginning that were like that. And after that, yeah, we we were trying to use the subspaces as a way to get access to more of these things. And so one of the big projects that we’ve made, the art fair, we made the design for this art fair for many years. And like that all started through conversations that we were having, because these people were coming to the subspaces to hang out. And yeah, the projects that we have now, I think most kind of came through these unexpected encounters of people who we meet kind of by chance through these subspaces. Less so now because they’re mostly closed. You know, and we’ve also, we’ve also had, Mexico has, doesn’t have a lot of public competitions. But the Venice pavilion was one, so that one was a public competition. It was like a rare case of a somewhat transparent, there was no, it was not by invitation, there was no like portfolio shortlist, it was completely open, completely open call with a jury, the submissions were anonymous. And so we did get that one project that was kind of through that. But yeah. 

Miljački 19:09
One more thing that will sound perhaps as a request for definition, but how are buildings, infrastructure, subspaces and objects relevant for the practice? And I’m wondering if you can arrange them for us into a set of relationships that are important to you in general, but also maybe use specific projects and how these terms or concepts operate in them as actual buildings, infrastructure, substances, objects. 

Cesarman 19:40
So I think case studies are every time we intervene, let’s call it a building. Like every time we make an intervention in a building that, from when we start conversations, making the survey, whatever, until we finish the construction or wherever the project ends, some of them aren’t built. We call that a case study and then of case studies, there are some that are also subspaces. And so, I mean, maybe one very succinct way of defining them is, they’re the ones that we also operate. They have other qualities in common. For example, we always try to have free water and coffee in them. We’ve given a few examples. But the the Venice Biennale, the pavilion, we saw as a subspace. Because we, yeah, the Venice Biennale pavilion we thought of as a subspace because we were working on the operation, in contrast to, for example, the Fair where we, we do the design, and then we hand it over to the client, and they are in charge of the operations. Also, many of these subspaces are kind of self initiated projects, not all of them, but many of them are. Yeah, and so what else? Do we need to define objects? 

Miljački 20:50
The relationship between buildings and objects? 

Cesarman 20:53
So I think objects are, we have this methodology that we started working on, since we opened the office in 2012. And it’s a methodology that we’re, it’s mainly a methodology for communicating with clients and anyone who’s involved in the process. And so I, there’s a few things that we do differently from kind of more traditional methodology. One is that we, instead of only, when we’re making a survey, and then when we’re working on a project, instead of only drawing the objects that are traditionally considered, quote unquote, architectural, so floors, ceilings, doors, windows, etc, we try to expand that universe of objects to include other things. And you know, what things is very much kind of up for discussion, but at least we include things like people’s belongings, tables, chairs, rugs, paintings, and so we draw these things. And then we have them at hand during the design process. And then we use a color code to differentiate between these classes of objects. And we can talk more about these classes of objects. But the other thing that we do differently is that we have, when we start working on a case study, every single drawing is simply the latest iteration of the drawing that we have. So we start, we make a survey. And so we draw in blue, all the objects that are traditionally considered architectural, and then we make an inventory in red of all the other things. And then we come to the first meeting with that, and we never come, we never come to the first meeting with a project or with a design proposal, we just come with the survey. And then we have periodical meetings where we update the survey. So you know, we make notes by hand, we come back to the office, we discuss these notes. And then we have a week or two weeks or a month, depending on how frequent the meetings are to make a clean version of that in the computer. And so we have another conversation. And so yeah, I think the goal of this in part is to try to flatten this hierarchy of objects. 

Miljački 23:04
Does it change the conversation, in your opinion, or has it already changed? 

Cesarman 23:08
Yeah, no, absolutely, I think it’s kind of a silly thing to say. But of course, a table is as important as it is, like, a table is as important in this space as a wall is. 

Ceballos 23:20
Yeah. And it’s also a way to, we don’t need to decide everything. So it’s also a way to open the conversation for each one of these decisions to the dynamic with the people involved. It’s not like, but the only way we find to, like, achieve that is to let the conversation take the decisions instead of, the architects arealso the clients. I don’t know. It’s like, Yeah, I mean, the word conversation for me, it’s like, for now, the best way we can define the way we, like our design process. I don’t know. 

Cesarman 24:06
Yeah the thing is that, another thing about the conversation way of thinking of the design process is that, I think that in the, in this more traditional way of thinking of architecture, which is this again, and I know that this is something that is is shifting, luckily, but I think in this like heroic model, there’s this ideal perfect building. And the genius architect has it somewhere in their brain, and it’s just like an appearance and it becomes materialized. And I think the conversation way of thinking about it is that it’s just one of many paths, like every conversation there are forking paths, every conversation, you make decisions that lead you to a different place. And there are other forking paths. And there’s, you know, there’s a universe of infinite combinations of things that could result in infinite different buildings and the one that we ended up agreeing upon is just the path that we took. And it’s contingent on every previous decision. It’s not like, it’s not one ideal thing that’s apart from these, every decision that we made forecloses some options or opens up others. And yeah, and we think of the design, of the design object or of the result of the design process as that, as more of that than the other way of thinking about it.  

Miljački 25:58
Let’s go a little bit to the subspace that was the Mexico pavilion this last Venice cycle. Can you tell us a little bit about the various things that happened there? It felt like a super sort-of multi dimensional project activated on many levels, and maybe just a little bit of a description of it would be useful also. 

Cesarman 26:26
Okay. So I’ll start by describing it. And then we can get into the history of the making of the pavilion, but we, every two years, the Mexican state comes up with a different way of assigning the project. And this is maybe the second time that they’ve had a public competition, at least since we became professional, like, since we graduated undergrad. The other time, we also applied and didn’t win, but this is maybe the second time, there’s many times when there’s like, a committee picks five people, and then someone picks one, it’s very, it’s usually done that way. And so we saw the call, we decided to apply. Yeah, and so I can talk about the project. But we started working with this, with our Co-curator, Mariana Botey who has done, she’s an art historian, she’s done more research on indigenous art history in Mexico, and with her, we had done a few projects with her as well, mostly just helping her with with kind of operations like, helping her like manage her projects. We weren’t, we weren’t super involved in the creative aspect of the other projects, but we had a few meetings with her. And we had this intuition that these rural basketball courts were an interesting site where many, many forces combined. And so we started doing a very short research into these basketball courts. 

Miljački 27:59
So what was in the pavilion? 

Cesarman 28:01
So we started doing this historical research project about these campesino basketball courts. And then for the pavilion itself, we built a fragment of a basketball court, and that fragment is not, like, it’s not a campesino court. It’s a pavilion in Venice, but it was somewhat inspired by the operations in these courts. So it had the court, it had bleachers on both sides with power outlets. It had a propaganda kiosk, as we called it, that was designed by Fabian Capello, a designer, French designer based in Mexico. And then through the basketball court and the propaganda kiosk we sort of broadcasted all these different forms of media. So there was a decolonial jukebox, we called it, which was a jukebox where people could play audio from a collection that we also made in collaboration with a bunch of people that included political speeches, field recordings, indigenous music, protest songs, popular protest, music, etc. It had a series of paintings made by three Mexican artists, it had the net, had the signs that were made by a collective of indigenous embroiders. And it had a poem by a indigenous anthropologist and poet. It had three reels of photographs of these courts made by three different photographers. It had a short film they made by another artist and photographer that kind of shows a festival that happens in one of these courts. And I think that’s it in terms of like, the list of the material, but Yeah, they were all materials that kind of described and showed and sort of complicated these ideas that have to do with the with the basketball courts, and mean, we, one thing we did do is that we, we very purposefully avoided architectural representation in the in the pavilion, so there were no no models or or plans. And that’s more or less what the description of the space. Yeah. And then the other thing is that we had, along with the pavilion in Venice, there were sort of two other spaces that were part of the project. One was the pavilion website, where we had a bunch of, of texts, and we commissioned a bunch of texts. And so we had, we have like other research projects or other research materials that are in the website, but not in the pavilion, we had on the website, we also had a lot of the materials that are actually on the pavilion where you can see the photographs. And, the other thing is that we had, we worked with a community radio station based in Mexico City. And so we had kind of another venue of the pavilion in Mexico City that operated throughout the six months. And so we had the, it was, and they’re called Radio Nopal, so we had in their space, we had a booth where they were, where we had a radio programming so you could stream the radio programs on the website. And we also had a film club that only, where we showed these movies only in the Mexican venue in Radio Nopal. And so it was a selection of I think it was something like 30 movies, we showed a different one each week. And they were a selection that was made by the, by our co-curator with film programmers that kind of show, it was kind of a history of Mexican film, it was Mexican films from, you know, from the beginnings of cinema until now. But it was kind of telling the history of Mexican cinema through these ideas of utopian revolution. And so there were these three spaces that were part of the Biennale, the Venice pavilion, the radio station in Mexico, and the website. And so yeah, this is all to say, this is every single thing that was in the pavilion, but this is also all to say that it was like, it ended up being a huge project, there were more than then 30 collaborators, many of which were collectives, so if we count individuals, there was, I don’t know, maybe more than 50 people, which made it extremely, extremely complicated.  

Miljački 29:53
And vibrant.  

Cesarman 30:19
Yeah, haha. 

Miljački 31:32
Maybe to connect to that a little bit, you talk about on your website about two active subspaces, the radio station, or Radio Amigos, and Riso printshop Macolen. And it sounds like both of those are part of the office, just the way that you describe these other parts to the pavilion. And then of course, there’s also the website, and maybe it’s useful to talk about these different modalities of work, or what you now call spaces, right or locations, including the internet one, and the way in which they participate in the production of the office that you’re interested in. 

Cesarman 33:12
Yeah, Radio Amigos, which is our online radio station, we started it because we already had all these spaces. And you know, it became a kind of an operational problem to choose what music to play. And so what we decided to do was to open a radio station, an online radio station, which would one, allow us to like, curate, and like broadcast sound in these physical spaces, and maybe more importantly, solve the operational problem of choosing what to play. But we were also interested in thinking of the radio station from the beginning as a subspace. And so right now it’s running with a selection of music and recordings. And it has music, but it also has things like, sometimes like a chapter of an audio book will appear and you listen to that for an hour. And we were interested in that being part of how the sound in this, in these subspaces was. So instead of like a Spotify playlist or something, it was more, it was like a stranger selection of audio. And then we also broadcast live we when we had events in the subspaces, we would often broadcast those live, and then the other thing that we did is that we added the, we have like a little, it’s called Radio Amigos, which means radio friends and so we have a little friend in every one of our websites that you can click on and it opens their radio station and you can listen to it. So that was one of the subspaces and the other one that’s still operating is the Riso shop which we had, we had a physical shop for a while, and now we only have the equipment and so we’ve kind of left it open as an open subspace. But it’s something that we’re also figuring out what to do now that we are finally trying to open the Mansion Studio to the public. 

Miljački 35:09
Let’s talk about Mansion Studio. So you say somewhere that El Castillo de Chapultepec is a cultural institution in development, managed by the architecture office APRDELESP, and you also say that it will provide infrastructure for sharing, producing, exhibiting, selling, and archiving the work of local artistic community. So that’s a lot. Is it also a building? 

Cesarman 35:34
Yeah it’s also building. So yeah, this is, it’s the kind of operational conceptual part. We have been working, we have been doing stuff with people in the city for a really long time, because of the subspaces. That’s been more artists, writers, designers, more than architects. And so we’ve been doing a lot of stuff with these people. And we are all very frustrated by kind of, the lack of, well, functioning institutions, cultural institutions in Mexico. And so this is an attempt to between all of us create cultural institution that is useful to us, and that we can create projects through. 

Miljački 36:30
Do you also live in it? 

Cesarman 36:32
The physical space is built, it’s a three and a half more or less floor building, where we have, we currently moved out because we’re finally renovating that part of the building. But we lived here for a long time together. And it also has, it has a space that we used as a bar for a while. And that’s going to be the the lobby bar of the cultural institution, when it opens. It has an event space, it has a space that that’s kind of an archive, library, exhibition space, we use it, we’re working from there now. And it also has these spaces that we’re going to use for some kind of residencies or for doing, it has a space where people can stay over. 

Miljački 37:22
Maybe, sorry to stop you in describing this. But maybe my question is about the role of architecture and the architect in this and other works, but also the role of sort of togetherness for architecture. So a little bit in different direction, the fact that you worked and lived in the same space. And together, how did that, how would you sort of describe that affecting the work? 

Cesarman 37:50
On the more personal end, right now, it’s just Billy and I, but we’ve been, we founded it with four, we had more partners in the beginning, some have left, some have come back. And I mean, in the end, Billy and I were the only two who, the only two who were able to withstand all the problems all these years. But you know, Billy and I, we lived together, when we started working together, we were living together, we were sharing an apartment in 2010, 2011. So we were 22, 23. And Billy was 20, I don’t know, 26, 27. We lived together for a long time. And then, we each kind of lived in their own place. And then when Billy inherited this building, he moved in here, and then I moved in here. And then some of the other partners have also lived here, on and off. Yeah, and we’ve been spending a lot of time together, we’ve been trying to like, make a viable life together, personally and professionally. Not only us, too, but also all these partners who have come and gone. And it’s all these, this big community of artists, that’s kind of the next circle of like, collective endeavors. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think I have, I don’t know exactly what to say about that. But I think that there’s a there’s a lack of institutional support in Mexico. And also, I mean, at the other context that I know, more or less well as the US right, also know, there’s a huge lack of institutional support. But I think that has led us to try to come up with our own networks of support. And we are interested in having these networks of support to be institutional. I think there’s a lot of resistance to that. There’s a lot of, especially in the art communities here. There’s a lot of, you know, we really are all anarchists. Like, there’s a lot of this… I mean, including ourselves, but I think there’s like a resistance to, you know, the stiffness and the rules and the risks of being co-opted by institutions. But we really are interested in the institutional project. 

Miljački 40:17
So you said that you say yes to everything. So then I’m wondering, are there things you do that you would prefer not to do? But that you do in order to do other things that you want to do? 

Cesarman 40:31
Listen, we do have a list of things that we should have said no to.   

Miljački 40:35
Oh, well, let’s talk about it! 

Cesarman 40:37
No, I think it’s like, it’s become like, it’s almost like a running joke between Billy and I. Because every time we end up in a nightmare project, we are like, Okay, this was really, this was a nightmare project, what did we learn? What’s the rule? 

Ceballos 40:55
I think that we are trying to do is to explain more clearly how we work and how we, and our political positions, our ethic, it’s implicit in the way we work. So at the end, when we don’t, the decisions to not take part of a commission is not our decision, it’s to give all the elements so that if someone is trying to hire us, he, they can really understand how we work so that if that works for them, then the process, it’s more like less risk during the whole the rest of the process. I don’t know.  

Miljački 41:42
What makes a commission nightmare now that, you know, maybe you stay in it, but what makes it bad? 

Cesarman 41:50
I mean, I think that working with the state, for example, has been very difficult. And we’ve maybe had a couple, but the latest one was the Venice Biennale pavilion. And I think it’s worth talking about that a little bit. It’s, yeah, because the way that we won the competition, we were selected, they picked our project, we started working on it. And one of the first things that we realized is that, the competition was in December, we submitted in December, it was published in December, we submitted it maybe early January, we knew that we won sometime in January, and then the biennial was in May. So it’s like, it’s a really, unnecessarily short schedule. They know there’s going to be a biennale every two years, there’s no need to make it, to make that time switch. And even, they want to wait for the announcement of their director and the theme, there’s more than, maybe there’s a year, you know, so I think, that was the the first difficulty. But then, as soon as you start, as we started working with the state, we started understanding that there are all these things that you don’t know until you have already accepted the commission. And you know, you can see the people and again, this is like, it resulted in a lot of learnings from how institutions work, because you can see people within the institution who are like, there’s basically two types, there’s the type who doesn’t want to have any problems. And so they just tell you Don’t worry, and just let time pass and something will happen kind of logic. And there are the ones that, who maybe do want to change it, but it’s like, the institution has a mind of its own. And it’s very, very difficult to change.  

Ceballos 43:31
Yeah, but even if we don’t want to work anymore with the government, instead of regretting the commission, if we have like a possibility of a commission, it’s more like, then if we ask the government for, for example, like labor conditions, and how will they pay, they can give us the that as well. So that makes it impossible to start to be involved in a commission for us because we don’t have the information. So that makes that, I don’t know, it’s like a consequence of accepting a commission, but it’s not like… 

Cesarman 44:15
Instead of individually rejecting a commission based on some like, criteria, I think we have a set of work conditions that we that we explain, and if they can’t be met, we don’t make the commission. 

Miljački 44:27
Well tell us, wait wait tell us more! I know that, I know that the pavilion is a particular kind of commission, right? But I am wondering how you pay the bills and maintain payroll for the office size that you are, and then what you just mentioned is that you have criteria by which you decide whether to take something on or not, which is a little bit different than the initial yes to everything. So that’s what we want to hear about a little bit more. 

Cesarman 44:57
Right. Yeah, I mean, so the initial yes to everything was when we started. And now what we’re trying to do now is to have a set of conditions that, and again, this is difficult because when you make, when you apply to competitions, you can negotiate these conditions in advance. So you have to, either you have to take the risk of knowing that maybe they won’t be met. But we have things like, you know, we charge this much. And if someone doesn’t want to meet it, we just rather would rather not make the project. Do you want to talk about specific conditions? 

Ceballos 45:31
The whole dynamic is part of, it’s also a condition. And it’s not that we only, like ask for what we want, it’s more like a negotiation in the beginning. And if there is not like a place to have this conversation before the commission, we don’t say no, but at the end, it doesn’t happen. Because I, because there is no disposition or the, to talk about these topics that are, for us are really important, so that the other part of the process can work, because if not, it really blocks the other part of the intellectual process, so it doesn’t have anything… when we were in the middle of the process for the pavilion, really it was, it was really clear for us that it didn’t make sense, the whole things we were thinking about the project if these really basic conditions are not solved. 

Miljački 46:33
It seems to me like you’re describing something like deciding to engage in the conversation or not, or from your ability to have a conversation deciding whether there are next steps. So the kind of circumstances in which something becomes a project or a case study have to be right. But that sounds also like something that maybe you have articulated, it sounds like to yourselves.  

Cesarman 47:05
Yeah, I think. Yeah, yeah. To add to what Billy is saying, Yeah, we usually instead of having to say No, it doesn’t, it’s clear that it’s not going to work. And we end up not doing the project. One of the things to give one example of the kind of things that we’re trying to do, so that we can have these conversations is that we are now, we used to charge per project. And I think that’s like a whole conversation. But there’s, in Mexico, the way that it, basically there’s El Colegio Arquitectos, which is like the professional association. And they have like a document that stipulates how projects, how much people should charge for the project, that no one, not a single, we don’t know a single person who has ever used it. And so at one point, we were trying to use that, and we were saying like, okay, we’re all, if the whole professional community is getting together to stipulate these prices, let’s test them. What we are doing now, because that also kind of didn’t work for our way of working, what we’re doing now is that we’re charging by time. And so we charge a fee, a monthly fee for the project. And so we think that that is the proper way of enabling these conversations, because we, and you know, we have, we’re very worried about having all the materials on time. So the discussions can be had and the decisions can be made. But I think it’s been a way to let us have, you know, if a client doesn’t, is not in a hurry, and they want to have a year long conversation about their house, we can do it without feeling pressured. 

Miljački 48:55
You said that you’re, you have five or six people in addition to the two of you. And I’m wondering, do you have procedures in place in your office by which you expose the office to the realities of running it? And do you invite this team to think collectively with you about the case studies that you will and will not undertake? Or where do they enter these conversations as you do? 

Cesarman 49:22
Yeah. So the way that the office is organized right now is that we have these conversations with whoever’s involved in the project: clients, collaborators, and then we have, so those have been kind of outside the office dynamics and then every week on Mondays, we have one day long meeting where we discuss every project that’s active, and in that, and everyone is in that meeting. So we have the, even if it’s a very early stage, we have an engineer who’s going to supervise construction in the meeting.  

Ceballos 50:00
We don’t have any, It’s the only meeting that we have. 

Cesarman 50:04
Exactly, it’s the only meeting that we have with the people who work at the office. There’s no like, emergency, what do you think of these two options? They have to prepare everything that they want to talk about for that meeting.  

Ceballos 50:14
Because we don’t make, like, presentations, and we don’t, we’re not trying to sell anything. It kind of works. Because it’s like, there is nothing that is urgent. I don’t know. And also, we started this dynamic, like more than five years ago, I don’t know… 

Cesarman 50:32
Almost, maybe 10. 

Ceballos 50:33
Almost 10 years. Since, you know?  

Cesarman 50:37
Yeah, like 2014 maybe?  

Ceballos 50:38
It was, kind of, it’s so strange that since then, 10 years, we have only weekly meetings. 

Cesarman 50:46
Yeah we’ve tried, we’ve tried things like for a while, when we started maybe for two or three years, we had the meeting in one of the subspaces. And it was open to the public. And so we would have these meetings where it did happen that like a student got really into the office, that they would come every week.  

 Miljački 51:06
To listen to you? 

Cesarman 51:07
Yeah, listen, and also participate. We were really trying to be like, if someone’s willing to spend half a day with us or a few hours with us, they should also, we should also listen to them. So they had, they could also like participate in that meeting. We’ve tried to do things like have one every month that’s open to the public or have one every six months where an external guests comes. And right now we’re not doing any of that we’re just doing amongst ourselves.  

Miljački 51:36
Maybe this is going to be a little bit related. So in your manifesto, you describe that appropriation is not the future of projects. The project is part of the processes of appropriation. And then you add that architects should start inhabiting the drawing. And more is more is, sort of, how I think it ends.  

Cesarman 52:03
Yeah.  

Miljački 52:04
And you speak somewhere else about needing to organize information, so drawings, photos, videos into something like a public archive, which sounds a little bit like opening up meetings to the public and also imagining the archive of those meetings. So I’m wondering if you could tell us why? What does this enable, organizing of information into an archive? 

Cesarman 52:27
Yeah, you bring up this question of inhabiting drawings and appropriation. And to go back to an earlier question where you were asking about participation, Well, I think we are very skeptical of the idea of participation in design, or like, quote, unquote, participation in design. I think participation has become a way of like, describing a dumbed down version of involving someone in design. Yeah, like I’m talking about, like, participation, that kind of disciplinary meaning of participatory design. 

Miljački 52:59
Yeah, Yeah, participatory design, Yeah, I understood. 

Cesarman 53:02
We think that actually the tools of, the technical tools of architecture are very accessible. And especially now, you know, people are playing video games, people are using like amateur design software, people are seeing a million images per day. And so we think that thinking that you need to dumb down a floor plan is strange. There’s something else going on in there. And so yeah, and so that, I mean, I wanted to make a note on this idea of participatory design. And I think we obviously, maybe think more of like, people who are involved in the project as people who are in conversation with us, that’s one of the things that we try to do when we say, like, inhabit the drawings. That’s kind of what we mean. And, yeah, we’ve thought a lot of like, how to bring people into design, sort of as equals instead of dumbing it down. And then I think appropriation also has to do with the way that spaces are used and transformed without a professional architect. And so we are interested in like, how can we have that be part of the process, like for the Eco pavilion, which was this pavilion that we made, it’s kind of a competition that’s modeled, more or less modeled after the young architects program of the ps1, but you make a summer pavilion and when we won, what we proposed was on the courtyard, we, we put real natural grass on the floor. And then we bought a bunch of commercial objects to enable things to happen and we made a website where people could coordinate and make things in the space. We have these, objects that we had were like, the white plastic chairs, umbrellas, grills, speakers lights, free water and coffee every day that we were serving ourselves. And yeah, little like kiddie pool. And I think there was, we were not prepared for how controversial it would be. I think people misinterpreted it, our project as us trying to have as many people as we can in the space or something like, have it be used as much as possible. But I think that what we were actually trying to do is have it be as open to future appropriations as possible. And so I think that’s one way of framing how we think of appropriation and how we think of design, like, how can you design the thing that’s open for future appropriations? 

Miljački 55:35
Do you want to say something with the white chairs? Because they appear everywhere. 

Cesarman 55:40
Actually, we’re designing, we’re working on a design project with the white plastic chair. We went to the biggest white plastic chair factory in Mexico last week, but I think it’s kind of become a mascot of the office, the white plastic chair. That project was the first time that we used them, this pavilion at El Eco I don’t know, it’s become in a similar way that the basketball, the campesino court we see as like a site that’s very loaded with many different meanings and different forces of appropriation. And we see the white plastic chair as a similar thing. It’s like, I think it condenses a lot of ideas about design and class and production. So anyway, we used it for the first time in that project. And we were also accused of, I don’t know, I don’t know exactly how the ,what the critique was, but the critique was more or less that we were like… 

Ceballos 56:35
Why didn’t we choose more beautiful chairs? 

Cesarman 56:38
Yeah, exactly. Like, why did we choose that chair? And, you know, one of the reasons was that the budget for the pavilion was $5,000. So, we also couldn’t afford it. Like, in part it was because it was the chair that we could afford. But I don’t know, I think it’s like, I think if there was any aesthetic statement, I think it was more that we were kind of commenting on how these chairs are every, like, if we had designed the pavilion that was like a tin, I don’t know, like a cloth ceiling or something. During the opening, they would have had to use chairs. And they would have used the ones that they have in the museum, and they would have been that chair. But yeah, anyway, that was the first time we used it. And then a few years later, we made this text and this short film called Notes on the White Plastic Chair, the movie. It’s a kind of documentary. We’ve since made a series of these projects where we make, we collectively write, it’s us with a bunch of other people, we collectively write these documents that we call notes, and each document is a series of vignettes that all talk about a thing. And it’s really not an essay, there’s really no overarching argument. It’s more like a series of vignettes that can even be contradictory between themselves. And I guess, in a way there’s an argument that emerges from the series of notes. And then we also make a movie based on the notes. And so the movies, which actually this is a term that I stole from Xavi, from Xavi Laida Aguirre, but they call them, they didn’t call them notes, they called a project that they, an exercise that they did with their students, a desktop documentary, which I think is the perfect description for the notes. Because we make these movies using only stuff that we can find online or that we have in our own archive, or that we have. We very purposefully don’t go out and record anything for these notes. But anyway, we made one about the white plastic chair. And we used it in other projects, in part because they’re cheap and easy to, like indestructible and easy to use. 

 Miljački 58:47
And they have all kinds of meanings attached to them. Right?  

Cesarman 58:50
Yeah.   

Miljački 58:51
I have a simple question and a final question, maybe I can give them to you together. One, you might have already started answering, but did you have a chance to regret taking or not taking a commission? And then how would you describe the conditions in which APRDELESP does its best work? Are all case studies equally exciting? Or are their ideal ones? 

Cesarman 59:20
I mean, I don’t think we have had any regrets. I think we’ve had bad experiences. But that’s kind of just part of the work. I think the ideal conditions are, and we kind of already talked about it, but I think the ideal conditions are when the counterpart is open for discussions… 

Miljački 59:45
Or what makes a case study exciting? 

Cesarman 59:48
I think they’re all exciting. Yeah, I think they really are all exciting, you know, and to go back to the original attempt to take any project, we think that, we really do think that every project is interesting. Like we, and again, this is like, I think something that we have that kind of appears in many forms in our practice is this kind of flattening of hierarchy. But we do think that like, designing a, I don’t know, I baby’s, a newborns room is as interesting… 

Ceballos 1:00:19
There are a lot of case studies that we only did like, the preexisting space survey, and we didn’t, we were not hired to do more things. And we were really like, motivated to do only like the preexisting space surveys. It’s, no one wants to do that here. I mean, there is, we don’t know another architecture office that makes preexisting space surveys. So that, I don’t know, that’s strange. Yeah. And t’s also on our web page, public, like all the photos of our preexisting space surveys are like in the same way as the photos of another case study, like the after we ended the construction phase. I don’t know. 

Cesarman 1:01:10
I don’t think we have I don’t think we have particularly strong ambitions about like, scale. We have never made a ground up construction and we think it’s fine. We live in a world where there’s plenty of buildings. We don’t have the fantasy of like the big public commission. We think that a room is complex enough for us, for it to be kind of inexhaustible or something in our in our discussions. 

Miljački 1:01:47
Is there anything else you would like to put on the record?  

Cesarman 1:01:53
I don’t think so.  

 Miljački 1:01:56
Alright, so, Rodrigo and Billy, thank you very much for talking to me today. And listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To.  

Ceballos 1:02:08
Thank you. 

Cesarman 1:02:08
Thank you, Ana. Thanks, Julian.