Andrés Jaque, architect: ‘The street of the future is a bustling street, full of life and shade’ 

For three years, Andrés Jaque, 53, has been dean of the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University, one of the most cutting-edge centers in architectural innovation. The Madrid-born architect is spending his time at the university rethinking how buildings and cities should face climate change. He believes that we must commit to an “interspecies alliance” and that buildings, beyond just being sustainable, should also contribute to repairing our ecology.

Jaque has proposed several projects with this concept in mind, such as the Reggio School in Madrid — designed to create life within its walls and attract insects and animals — or the Rambla Climate-House in Murcia, which is integrated into the local ecosystem. Some of his work is permanently exhibited at the MoMA in New York City, and at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jaque spoke with EL PAÍS at his studio in Madrid.

Question. How should architecture deal with climate change?

Answer. Architecture is the discipline that has most clearly assumed the responsibility of responding to the climate crisis. In the last 15 years, there’s been a radical transformation [in the field]: materials have gone from being sustainable to [repairing the ecology]. And [the architectural field] has revised its own mission, which is no longer to just build new buildings, but to manage the built environment. Additionally, it has brought about an intersectional vision: understanding that the material, the social, the ecological and the political are inseparable and that climate action has to coordinate these fronts of transformation. This has placed architecture at the center of environmental action.

Q. Do architects share this interpretation?

A. There’s a part [of the field] that’s anchored in a heroic vision of modernity and another that’s commercial… but there’s another that has a political commitment to the planet. And [those who adhere to this] understand that architecture must respond not only to the most immediate circumstances of a commission, but also to action for the planet.

Q. Has the climate emergency changed the way we build?

A. There are two systems: a material world of extractivism — which is a mix of carbonization, colonialism, anthropocentrism, heteropatriarchy and racialization — that’s currently collapsing. And, in the cracks of this system, another kind of architecture is emerging, which seeks alliances between species based on symmetry, which pursues a global regime of solidarity and which advances along a line of decarbonization that marks the esthetics, the materialities [and] the types of relationships that constitute contemporary culture. This is gaining undeniable strength. In the future, we’ll see a change that’s as important as the one that modernity once represented.

Q. How do you research this at Columbia?

A. The climate is affecting each part of the world in very different ways. The implications it has on the way it intersects with social structures — with infrastructures, with types of soil, with specific ecosystem compositions — is very diverse. We transfer it to architecture and urbanism.

Q. What do we do with urban planning, given so many extreme phenomena?

A. We’ve been pioneers in proposing a change of focus, from an emphasis on the city as a kind of stain on the territory, to a trans-scalar approach. This is a way of understanding [the physical structure that is] an urban block of apartments, the microbial relationships that occur in the bodies of those who live on that block, as well as the large networks of resource extraction that make life on that block possible.

The city has lost the capacity to contain all realities, [which is necessary] in order to think in a climatic and ecosystemic way. And we need a new model that allows us to understand that what happens on a molecular scale has implications on the scale of bodies, buildings, streets, neighborhoods, the planet and the climate. Designing [cities] in a trans-scalar way requires changes in the methodologies of architecture, which we’re exploring.

Q. How can cities become more green?

A. Cities are going through a period of great transformation. A transformation in which the city has to be understood as something physically porous, which allows for the circularity of water, which contributes to multiplying life… a transformation of materiality that promotes a flow of materials that also contributes to the health of bodies. [We require] a very different way of urbanizing the air – in such a way that it’s understood that there’s a direct relationship between our lungs and the climate – and a commitment to the generation of diverse and empowered living environments. The main difficulty is how to do this quickly, so as to mitigate the impact of the climate and environmental crises.

Q. You proposed a project to connect and greenify the neighborhoods of Madrid. Why did it not come to fruition?

A. Madrid hasn’t used urban planning or architecture for a long time. It’s urgent to create a regional plan that connects the city with the natural spaces that surround it. [We must] move away from an obsession with beautifying the downtown to a holistic vision of the city in its natural territory… one that generates extensive well-being that isn’t only focused on humans.

Q. What’s this new “interspecies diplomacy” that you advocate in favor of?

A. Humans are just one of many forms of life. And the idea that humans can decide to sacrifice the rest of the species to serve their own interests has been shown to be harmful. Understanding that we’re dependent on many other species — and that we’re actually inseparable from them — is more realistic. We depend on the quality of the soil, on the ecosystems. An interspecies alliance based on protecting the living conditions of diverse species is beneficial for all life on the planet.

Q. Can we continue to build public spaces without trees?

A. The street of the future is a street that’s full of life and shade: it’s open and socially active. Anything that deviates from that is misinformation or ill will.

Q. The Reggio School, in Madrid, is an eco-social project that you designed. What does it mean?

A. This school goes beyond the culture of sustainability to embrace the next step: a commitment to the ecological and social repair of the environment. It’s located next to the Valdebebas Park, [specifically] the playground in the park itself. Instead of seeking an [educational system] based on the segregation of children [from their surroundings], the school proposes that a fundamental part of education is learning to be part of the social and ecological. The building plays a fundamental role in this, because it collects rainwater and uses it to cultivate a series of gardens designed to encourage the presence of insects, plants, algae, mosses and lichens that are essential for the ecological repair and diversification of the old Valdebebas garbage dump.

The façade itself has layers of very porous cork that retains organic matter that’s suspended in the air. This encourages a multiplication of the façade’s microbiota, which contributes to regenerating the quality of the air, soil and circulating water. For this reason, [the school] has been considered the precursor of an architectural movement that’s taking architecture’s commitment to the environment and ecology even further, to become an element of ecological repair.

Q. You created the Escaravox — two 130-foot-wide mobile shading devices, which were equipped with sound amplifying systems, stage lighting and audiovisual projection equipment — as an agro-social infrastructure project for Matadero Madrid, a former slaughterhouse-turned-art center. However, the City of Madrid subsequently dismantled them.

A. The current city government has a very monetized vision of public space. The Escaravox proposed an alternative to that: [the idea of] public space as a space for collective expression. These two ideas weren’t compatible, because the dynamics of renting public space required vacating spaces. City officials have spent years dismantling architectural structures that were highly-celebrated in museums and biennials around the world, but which are now in the way [of other projects]. This impoverishes the city of Madrid.

Q. In your house in Corpus Christi, in Texas, you opted to use recyclable materials. What role should recycling play in architecture?

A. There used to be an unrealistic idea that materials came out of nowhere and were infinite. But materials are in permanent circularity. Contemporary architecture can only start from this certainty to produce the minimum environmental impact.

Q. In your Rambla Climate-House, you reuse water from showers and sinks for the ecosystem. What role should water play in homes and cities?

A. Water connects our bodies with other bodies, infrastructures, non-human bodies, technologies, soil, air, water... it’s the space in which our life takes place and a reminder that we’re collective, ecosystemic. We depend on others. When we say that we’re human, in reality, we’re more than human: we have to take care of the flows through which we exist. Polluting a river, or producing impermeable cities, are actions that go against more than human life, but also against human survival itself. Designers have to propose an architecture that favors the circularity of water.

Q. You say that “architecture is always political.” What kind of politics do you engage in with your buildings?

A. The politics that architecture [engages in] isn’t electoral politics. I’m talking about material regimes, performative regimes, technological regimes and ecosocial regimes that are promoted through design, management and development. True politics is done with pipes, with land transformation, with aquifer management… with how interhuman relations are regulated in the design of doors, stairs and elevators. I believe that these political regimes are currently the most impactful. Architecture, urbanism and planning all play a fundamental role in politics. And I believe that architects have the option of creating an entire culture and a new position through our work.

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