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Ramiro Diaz-Granados: I think the versatility, or let’s say the issue of flexibility in the project, was an intentional thing. The fact that pavilions are generic because of their temporary nature means that almost anything can happen there. Mine is still a space that encloses. Marcelo’s is more vertical, let’s say more wall-like. Mine’s still horizontal. Marcelo Spina: Ours is definitely vertical. I would tend to agree that we are closer with Ramiro in terms of the position. For me, being at the corner meant that, somehow, we had to be vertical in a way. Eric Owen Moss: But I think, just to be clear, when you look at what Marcelo’s doing, it’s volumetric. Even the little pavilions on the side look like back stage Green Room spaces or something. In other words, you could stage something out of it, and it’s a lid. Marcelo Spina: I don’t know if this is related [to the discussion] but I was trying to explain to the students what it is like to do a project for a client. And what is it to actually submit a project for a competition where you know that you are not the only one. You not only produce your own idea, but also learn to second-guess certain strategic conditions, which means that you want to make sure that your ideas, your stylistic predilections, your material predilections, all your intuitions, go in the right direction. Eric Owen Moss: There is a discussion of competitions that has to be acknowledged, whether you succumb to it or not, which has to do with second-guessing the jury. Marcelo Spina: For me, it’s not second-guessing the jury so much. And this is maybe not the right competition, but let’s say in a competition where you know that you’re competing against hundreds. It’s second-guessing what are the two or three moves that everyone is going to try to make. I tried to stay away, as much as possible, from those. You don’t want to put yourself in a corner, in that the project is completely unviable, just to make something different. Tom Wiscombe: I think one of the most concrete examples of that in my experience is whether or not to break the rules of the competition. Eric Owen Moss: It’s tough to make that guess. And there’s always the question about whether somebody, and it’s usually not everybody, will look at things, either in a different way or in a way that might be coincident with you and will say, “Wait a minute. I don’t give a damn whether they broke the rule or not. But having broken it, what they’ve done is an act of invention and imagination, ingenious. Let’s keep it in.” The question is whether that had anything to do with anything anybody did. Marcelo Spina: If you go through the projects,Tom did a sort of enclosed building, something that would be like a classroom, and that’s an interesting take or different take. It wasn’t in the brief. Ramiro did something that actually has trouble being recognized as an object, let’s say. And Elena did something which is incredibly graphic, you know, and it has this sort of quality of being super flat. We did something vertical that will cast a shadow and that has no footprint. I mean these are four very different ideas.
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Eric Owen Moss: I think, from our point of view, the reason that Marcelo’s project was given the commission had to do with its positioning—where it was; and had to do with the fact that it allowed, given this climate, all sorts of things to happen in the shadow of the piece without obligating you to chase around it. It was infinitely large, rather than finite, so it looked like it could work at a smaller scale and not devour everyone, and it looked like it could work at a larger scale. I think part of the appeal was how it was made and how it was made as an object. And I think there was some sense that the form language of the project, given what we see a lot of in the architecture discussion now, was a genuine effort to find something that we didn’t quite recognize and we couldn’t quite name and we didn’t quite know. That it seems to be a hybrid of a number of possibilities, notwithstanding it had a substantial amount of power as a piece of investigation. It looked to me to like something that wasn’t finished, in that he didn’t quite know how to finish it, and that it would be interesting to see in the process of building it where it would wind up, and it might wind up a little bit differently. I think learning about Marcelo’s, by taking it through a couple of studios and engineering it and constructing it, is going to be a terrific lesson for us and for the school and for the architect.