A Spanish Inquisition

Speaking to an audience at UCLA, the ever-inquisitive Spanish architect Andrés JaquePhantom positioned the research-inflected work of his practice, the Office for Political Innovation, on the benevolent side of modernist binaries: the opacity of the labor needed to maintain Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion versus the transparency proffered by a display of its cleaning products (see 2012’s Phantom); the shininess of the titanium building facades of Hudson Yards skyscrapers versus the dustiness of the South African mine from which that titanium is extracted (2023’s Xholobeni Yards); the environmental exploitation of a formerly rural patch of southern Spain versus the ecological restoration of an adventurous dwelling (Rambla-Climate House). Audience members were slow to applaud. “Who really wins?” asked Sylvia Lavin, “in these competitions between one form of life and another?” Greg Lynn questioned “which side of the Whole Earth Catalog”—green capitalism or hippie modernism—Jaque was on. The architect deflected these queries and instead claimed “[the] messiness [that] is a fundamental element of architecture” as his primary inspiration.