Unit Staff Cristina Díaz Moreno, Efrén Gª Grinda, Benjamin Reynolds Cristina Díaz Moreno & Efrén Gª Grinda are both architects and founders of the Madrid-based office amid.cero9 (cero9.com). They are visiting professors at SOA Princeton, visiting professors in the GSD Harvard, Städelschule Frankfurt and they were in the IKA Vienna. They have taught at both ETSAM and ESA in Madrid during more than 10 years and they have been lecturers throughout Europe, Asia and the US. Their projects and writings from the past 15 years are documented in Third
Stop saying ‘I’ve seen it’, or ‘I know this’. Cultivate a deep knowledge of things. Honour construction of new materialities through amalgams or aggregations. Afterwards subject them to a process of distillation or synthesis. Embrace a playful attitude and celebrate forms of beauty unknown or unexpected, those without conventional frames of reference – the unclassifiable. Go technical. And then, play. And play again, like chess players or tennis players, but play with intense seriousness and never feel inclined to laugh. At least for the time being. This list is provisional and has only limited temporal validity.
Natures, a Micropedia (AA Publications, 2014) and more recently in a monographic El Croquis (no 184). They recently completed the Institución Libre de Enseñanza headquarters in Madrid. Benjamin Reynolds is a co-founder of Baselbased PA/LAC/E (palacepalace.com). He has been a fellow at the Van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), the Koneen Säätiö Foundation (Helsinki) and OMI (New York). PA/LAC/E recently won first prize in the 50th Central Glass Award (Tokyo). Their first major monograph, Paris Hermitage, was published in late 2016 with Cooperative Editions).
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Un-Rules The game is the only serious thing worth referring to. When you project, play. When you write, play. Suspend your critical judgment and embrace it with strength and radicalism later. Repeat this process as many times as you can. Leave behind all kinds of known logic and make DIY para-logics. Abandon all kinds of parallel narratives or fictional constructions. Develop forms of engagement with reality as it is, even though it is difficult to understand or seemingly incomprehensible. Get out there. Stop assuming what a building or project is. Project a violent, sudden and radical action. Cultivate a critical stance on digital tools, media and data, as a kind of technological inquirer. Be aware of how digital technologies and their businesses have transformed the way we produce, transmit and consume cultural artefacts. Avoid relying on this commonplace as your narrative.
Clockwise from top: Liam Denhamer (detail), Dalia Matsuura Frontini, Zsuzsa Peter, Brandon Whitwell-Mak (detail), work from 2016–17
Diploma 5