"Space should be shaped by people, not the other way around", argued Rafael Aranda of RCR Arquitectes

2017 November 7

• The studio that was awarded this year's Pritzker prize supports the idea of "bringing nature closer to people". 

Today, Rafael Aranda, member of RCR Arquitectes, gave the opening lecture of the I International Architecture Biennial MUGAK in its main venue, the Miramar Palace in San Sebastian. Aranda highlighted that «it is the people who shape space, space doesn't determine how people have to occupy it». «We like spaces that are landscapes. The person and their use of space should create the space, we aren't interested in a shaped space but in a space activated by the person».

The founder of the studio that was awarded this year's Pritzker prize referred to RCR Arquitectes' creative process using a sentence by José Antonio Marina: "shared creativity allows a group of not necessarily extraordinary people to attain extraordinary results".

Among the different examples he showed to an overflowing auditorium with over 200 people, Aranda insisted that their projects always follow "the same thought: bringing nature closer to people". In this sense, he showed examples of coexistence with nature, of breaking the limits between indoors and outdoors and supported projects that "become less architectural in time because of vegetation growth, thus becoming more natural". "Architecture is a whole; form, structure, environment, everything must compose a whole".

Aranda stressed the value of "the basics we learnt in our environment, which help us read other environments". He was referring to their presence in Olot, where, as he explained, "we learnt from simplicity, from the essential. Some walls, some planks. We learnt our construction logic. With minimum materials, much can be achieved".

For the same reason, he explained why the location of their study, the old Barberí foundry, a place that "moved us", is so important for their creative process. It is the need of "being in a place that allowed us to go beyond the mere building construction and make people think and move them".

Rafael Aranda founded the creative architecture studio RCR Arquitectes in Olot in 1988, along with Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta. Awarded this year's Pritzker prize, RCR Arquitectes also founded the private foundation RCR Bunka Fundación Privada, aimed at promoting social awareness of architecture, landscape and, implicitly, arts and culture in general. Authors of public buildings and housing, nurseries and a winery, RCR Arquitectes is an unusual studio, closer to that time in which architecture protected humankind from nature, whilst simultaneously keeping alive the link between them.

Tomorrow's MUGAK programme:

The MUGAK programme continues tomorrow in the third day of its opening week, with lectures by Solano Benítez and Gloria Cabral (12.30h, Miramar), outstanding professionals in the international panorama of contemporary architecture. They share Wednesday morning with José Manuel López-Peláez, Professor Emeritus at the Technical University of Madrid and National Architecture Prize in 1971.  In the afternoon, architects Ignacio Quemada, Juan Mera, Atxu Amann and Iñigo Beguiristain will be giving 30-minutes lectures each.

In the evening (18h), journalist Soledad Gallego Díaz will be moderating a round table on the topic The Threatened City: Depersonalization, Mass Tourism and Gentrification, with the participation of Barcelona’s Local Councillor for Housing and architecture critic Josep María Montaner, the writer Manuel Vicent and the academic at the Oxford University Igor Calzada.

Besides, four exhibitions will be opened to the public in the Koldo Mitxelena space: envejezANDO, about architecture and population ageing, Gipuzkoa Brut, showing the brutalist movement in Gipuzkoa and organised by the Basque University UPV/EHU architecture students, COAVN Awards 2016 and The Patrimony Factory, created in France to reflect on how to give an impulse to contemporary architecture in a protected environment for built patrimony.