Speziale Linares arquitectos

We founded our Office of architecture in 2004, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, after having finished our studies at the University of Buenos Aires. This is a metropolis of 2.9 million inhabitants, with a Europeanizing look and famous for diversity and cultural wealth, in addition to having an unstable and conflicting political and socio-economic history. In that context, we decided to establish our office 14 years ago, always made up of young collaborators, architects or students, Argentines and from different Latin American countries, with whom we work passionately looking for new and better ideas for each project to be developed. We believe in construction and collective contribution over the individual. A group of young architects that we have trained looking at the region but also at international architecture and that has laid the foundations of our search. We are behind a contextualized and contemporary architecture. In these years, we have had the possibility of developing very diverse projects in program, scale and execution but we always knew that each one is a new opportunity to contribute more and better architecture to reality. Part of our challenge as architects is to think about their report, autonomy, continuity and prosperous becoming.

When we talk about architecture, we talk about living and its meaning. An architectural work exists to the extent that it is inhabited. The meaning of it is not only the one that the architect imagines and proposes but also the one that it acquires through the users. It is they who give it identity, appropriating it and finding its place. The architect imagines, proposes a sense and a space full of freedoms. Reality returns another or the same but always revisited. Part of the wealth of our discipline lies in this unpredictable obligation.

Every day we are more convinced that the image of a work should be the direct result of its constructive logic. Work as an indivisible whole concept, form and content. The aesthetic and formal result will be a reflection of the structural, technical and constructive solutions. What is outside or inside is part of the same thing, lacking ornaments, which have uneconomic difficulties to cover what should not be seen.

The great technological advance of recent years has transformed the profession and, above all, the project process. Its base will be the same, since we talk about a what (concept / idea) and a how (execution) but its development and consequently, the final result can be very different. We can understand architectural creation as the result of systematic work on an abstraction basis that has a concept and a series of elements that will find their rhythm and harmony. In the process towards the construction of any architectural work, we speak in abstract terms. It is in this way that digital work breaks into the development of the profession to provide infinite possibilities and break all the boundaries of the imagination. It triggers permanent stimuli and exponentially increases our capacity for creation. With a pencil in hand, we feel and look for the deepest expressions. In the digital world, we find tools that allow us to develop highly complex designs, in an otherwise unthinkable way. Each work should be read as a whole. Nothing is casual, or random, both order and disorder will have their compositional rigor that will give them integrity. If there is no logic that produces unity, there is no sense in the object.

In these post - postmodern times, architecture, along with other cultural expressions, has collapsed in the face of the great temptations of consumption and advertising. It has lost its deepest meaning. The one who thought and built cities and spaces to develop, to its fullest potential, all human activities. It accompanied the development of civilization, while showing a different and, in some cases, new way of understanding reality. If we want to give back its wealth, its sense of transcendence and allow it to make a qualitative contribution to society, we must rethink humanity and understand what kind of life we ​​want to live. It is a great responsibility entrusted to us as architects.