El manejo con fines paisajísticos de las aguas lluvia y de las inundaciones es recurrente en los proyectos de Katz. The landscaped management of rainwater and flooding is a recurring feature in projects by Katz.
RL: Going back to the issue of heritage recovery, how does your office participate in that discussion? Take for example the atelier complex in which you opted for creating front yards in a context of continuous façades, or the Cube House (Maison de Ville), a transparent work that seems to disrupt the height and volume of the area. Why these counterpoints? I truly believe I put special attention to the context, but I’m a contemporary architect working today, with today’s materials and technologies for the users of today and tomorrow, not of yesterday. The literal inclusion of projects in the old fabric is not part of my standards, because I have concerns regarding heat sources, sustainability and issues that are different from those of Haussmann architecture or Versailles. But I define relationships with the site: respect for heights, structure, volume, sunlight conditions, and the system of life for residents. In the project for the ateliers for example, some houses were set apart from the street line. The reference was right there. The site was made up of five lots and I did not want to make one single building, I wanted to maintain the scale of the street. So I made five buildings preserving the existing scale. The act of breaking them up to mark the scale of each plot allows sunshine into the gardens. It is a project that is extremely attentive to the context, but without mimicry, it works with repetition and slight variations. In the Cube House I worked in a very small site, with 110 m ² available to build the house and a separate studio. There is a pair of relatively tall buildings on the street, as well as two-story homes; facing the site there is a small hill with houses, a virtually inaccessible garden and a stone retention wall 3.5 m high. The geometry of the house is defined by its street-corner condition. It takes elements such as the wall and the garden, and defines a glazed facade that takes advantage of the green area in front; on the other side it restrains the views of neighboring buildings with a perforated wall, while maintaining the relationships. What I did was restore the intermediate scale between the existing houses and buildings in this angled situation between two streets.
- YB: The limited selection of participants is an interesting idea because actually no jury can assess, with the detention and analysis required, more than six or seven proposals. This doesn’t happen in Chile and juries evaluate many more proposals. Furthermore participation costs are not covered, leaving out many good architects beforehand. Every work deserves reimbursement, even more so one the size of an architectural competition, which involves teams to pay and material costs besides creative energy. And regarding the number of projects to assess, if they are too many the truth is the jury ends up choosing images, leaving out poorly presented projects that could be significant. - RL: French architecture seems to arise from a process of reflection, in which the state commits to providing work for architects when appropriate and in turn they are required to develop good architecture. How do you participate in this process? One of the things that have marked me is the legal definition of architecture that oversees professional practice in France. The law defines architecture and the architect’s role as a work in defense of the common interest. That is, the architect is a professional who works for the general interest. This is a major element, because it has allowed architects to comment with legitimacy on urban issues and architecture, participate in discussions on the future of the city, and propose and resolve with authority. However, much of this is in decline, and many architects are quite fearful of the direction the economy is taking in a European Union that instead of leveling up is leveling down and undermining many of the French quality specifications. If social housing was originally built by competition, today we are moving towards tender contracts.
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