Cities & Rivers (ENG ED.)

aldayjover architecture and landscape
Iñaki Alday, Margarita Jover, Jesús Arcos, Francisco Mesonero

The architectural culture of Spain in the last 20 years of boom and bust has been an important incubator for a paradigmatic shift of vision in the profession, a process in which the architecture of Iñaki Alday and Margarita Jover, with their firm aldayjover architecture and landscape, has played a pioneering role.
Taken as a whole, aldayjover’s work demonstrates the importance of understanding architecture in all its facets, from building design to landscape and territorial planning, as a unified cultural and a technical discipline that is capable of addressing complex problems in holistic terms. During the years of the icon builders, the cultural dimension of architecture was seen chiefly as a question of individual creative expression, of a personal poetics or sensibility, which was invested in the built object as if it were a work of art. aldayjover’s role, in contrast, is comparable in certain respects to those contemporary artists who seek to disengage the creative process from its focus on the objecthood of art, and seek, in its place, to engage more directly with the vital substance of life and experience. aldayjover see architecture’s cultural dimension as a question that arises from the problem itself, and whose solution is found there as well. They discover the hitherto unconscious narrative histories of the site or the landscape, the hidden currents of its cultural formation, and bring them to the surface in new configurations. In their work, the continuity of architecture’s cultural dimension does not exclusively pass through the architect as an individual creator. Rather, they are highly-informed, thoroughly prepared and perceptive facilitators, like a wizards or a sage, if you will, who transform knowledge into action. And this, I think, is how architecture can once again prove its worth as a discipline capable of introducing positive changes in everyday life.
David Cohn
North American critic of architecture specializing in Spain.