Juan Herreros: "Wear is what gives value to architecture"

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San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 1958. Architect, author of the recent Munch Museum in Oslo.

This month he will receive the award from Madblue, a conference on innovation, science and culture for sustainable development.

Do you know how the architectures you've worked on are doing?

If they are cared for, who uses them and how... Quite a lot.

It's an anecdote but think that today, when we photograph buildings to publish them, we do it with people.

Until recently, we photographed them empty, as if the occupation were the beginning of deterioration.

Today we know that life and wear and tear are what give value to a building.

What really matters is if an architecture fulfills the objective of changing people's lives. And the conclusion is? There is everything.

Sometimes the architectures age serenely and sometimes they are altered but they work.

An architect must anticipate that his work will not remain untouched.

We must not aspire to absolute permanence, we must build to be shaken... I am reasonably happy.

And an architecture that has assumed a change makes me happier than another that remains the same.Do you often speak in public for non-architects?As much as I can.

And I try to listen.

For years, we went around trying to convince people of our stuff.

We are learning to listen to make design decisions. And what do you try to convey? That architecture has something for everyone.

It is not an egocentric game of some guys obsessed with their work but it is a service.

It positively affects people and needs people to take what is theirs in that game. Is the word beauty important?

I use it little, but I assume that our obligation is to return the best image and represent the dignity of people.

I would prefer any synonym of beauty that had a shade of means, rather than end.

Beauty sounds like an end in itself.

It doesn't just happen in Spain, but yes, we have overflowed the urban territory without considering that the cities were big enough to live together.

And we have forgotten that there was a more necessary project, which was the requalification of the existing city.

Today, with environmental concerns, we know that growing like an oil stain neither works nor adapts to changes like the consolidated city. It occurs to me to think that, instead, the success of democracy is that Barcelona was ugly and now it is beautiful, as happens in many historic cities.

But we see that now with irony.

The people of Barcelona are bored that Barcelona is beautiful and expensive and they feel expelled.

The city is the accumulation of all the shared dreams and all the greed.

There must be some equation in which those two tendencies work.

But there are predatory instincts that do harm. I read an interview with a colleague of yours, a Spaniard, who slammed the door of an Ivy League university and who said that the invasion of the social sciences was going to destroy architecture. Columbia.

I know this world.

The first thing: enriching architecture in friction with other disciplines is crucial: it helps us understand the world.

Second: we are architects and our duty is to convert that knowledge into architecture. The problem arises when the academy splits from practice.

That happened in the US, not in Europe, where we are still striving for a connection.

In the US small and young offices disappeared because the system was concentrated in a few large firms.

And that was a problem for the academy.

The interesting thing is that now they are beginning to recover this type of small studies, they have understood their value. What do you say to your friends when they tell you that your son wants to do architecture?

It happens to me often.

Parents come worried and I encourage them.

Look: I started the race very excited;

I later discovered that it had nothing to do with what I expected but I liked it even more.

If there is a real desire, you have to support it.

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