Centro Financiero Internacional IFC, Hong Kong, 2003.
EB: What was your impression when you saw the Costanera Center tower already built? - Fantastic. Not a total surprise, because I always received photos, but the photo does not show the true size or the material. You feel the weight that is nonexistent in the photo, the three-dimensionality. I saw the beautiful moment in which skin and skeleton are together, the construction and the finished state at the same time. And that is also fantastic. YB: You mentioned how delighted you were to be able to appreciate an entire building in the city, which is very difficult because usually towers are next to each other. - It is very difficult to see a skyscraper from top to bottom, impossible. In this regard there are two very different experiences: one when from afar you see a tower and the sky between the buildings and the other is when you are next to the building and there is nothing to see anymore. Not so with the Costanera Center, watching the whole tower is a fantastic gift, it can be seen as a sculpture.
- It was a great effort. Very early in our study, when postmodernism was very strongly established in the United States, Rice wanted traditional styled buildings, and the issue for me was how to make a modern building that would meet this requirement. It involved an analysis of how buildings were constructed and their expression, and I discovered that the brick walls of Rice were supported by metal beams, which I thought was very modern. It was an attraction to how to survive and be consistent with the enormous change that came with postmodernism. A very good architect friend of mine succumbed for refusing to do anything that seemed postmodernist, but I was not willing to let my studio disappear. Surely we must adapt. For example, in China, they no longer want buildings of glass, they want stone buildings. How do you design a contemporary building with stone? The Chinese are developing a taste for more traditional buildings; we see this coming... Mirene Perez: And how are you dealing with this? - Well, the complete World Financial Center we talked about earlier is of stone, due to a reaction of the time against the glass boxes. I love working with stone, it gives the opportunity to create textures that glass does not allow. And the Chinese are asking for more and more stone, and they don’t allow highly reflective glass, there are many limitations to the use of glass over there.
CAU: Your buildings for Rice University in Texas, show another type of architecture, more traditional, with the use of brick.
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