Since he began his professional career 15 years ago, architect and aca- demic Cristián Izquierdo Lehmann has been interested in approaching construction processes as a set of decisions, from design to construction. As a partner of Izquierdo Lehmann, he founded, along with other professionals, Tecton Workshop, a parent company that brings together the architectural office, Tecton Construction, and Tecton Real Estate Development. With a Renaissance inspiration and a contemporary approach, this perspective, which links construction and social organizations, has allowed him to develop a path that makes his work unique. We talked to him about his vision and the way he does it. When Tecton Workshop was established, a new player entered the market, capable of dealing with the complexity of each project as a unit, without relinquishing control over the decisions. "Currently, control is in the hands of the construction companies, who take the risks, and therefore their interests are not focused on construction expression but rather toward its annulment, preferring products that ensure certain standards, guarantees, after-sales, insurance, rather than expression," says Cristián Izquierdo. The passage of time and the acquisition of experience urged him to par- ticipate in construction management differently. "I was interested in how we, being architects, could incorporate ourselves into industrial logic; how to make design decisions and not just specify products that are already made. We saw then that wood allowed us to customize the construction elements and therefore work on the design without increasing costs. I would say that our interest in prefabrication is not really an interest in prefabrication per se, but rather an interest in architectural expression”. His work with wood exposes the construction system, leaving the details and joints in full view, thus making a skill that is appreciated by specialists explicit. "When you design a building, what you are doing all the time is deciding what to hide and what to show. Building is a matter of emphasis. One always has a set of construction elements to take care of and it is really a matter of emphasizing one thing in order not to emphasize another. There is always a trade-off there," he says. He adds that he does not value one material over another and consid- ers them on equal terms, because the architecture he is interested in is about showing the relationships between the elements, rather than the elements themselves. "We are not interested in fetishizing the material, whether it is one or the other, whether it is cedar, lenga or pine, but rather how one thing meets the other. We are interested because behind that joint is the action of construction.” He notes that the thoughts of Gottfried Semper, the 19th-century German architect who was the first to understand architecture not from a relationship of proportions but as a set of activities, have been important to his work. In the different techniques and constructive rationality, he found the basis for the aesthetic expression of a project. Semper is the author of the book The Four Elements of Architecture where, in the first instance, he highlighted the base, the roof, the fireplace, and the enclosure as basic components. He then pointed out that his main interest is the actions necessary for these elements to happen. More than the roof, it is the carpentry with which the roof is made; the stacking of stones with which the plinth is made, and so on. “In that sense, we are interested in expressing the relationships be- tween the elements because in those relationships one can perceive the activity of how they were made," explains Cristián Izquierdo. "In each joint, you can say: here someone put this in a certain way. Of course, we don't show all the joints of a building; we emphasize the ones that show the order of sequences in common that the greatest number of parts of the building have in common”. He opted for wood prefabrication as a thoughtful choice. "In the first house I built, in 2012, I designed a very sophisticated metal structure, with a roof with details like out of a Swiss manual, but I did not know how to foresee the processes that were going to be used to build it. Of course, when I arrived at the construction site, I realized that they literally
installed everything 'on the spot' and the whole house was rained on. That affected me a lot. Maybe my interest in Semper has to do with this, with being able to know who is going to do things, how they are really going to do them and try to take advantage of that context to bring it to an expressive moment. Then, I realized that wood prefabrication allowed me to build at a reasonable cost, solve all the joints, and avoid surprises”. From Model to Production About eight years ago they started working in BIM and when they discov- ered Revit "we realized that it was very difficult to make a good plan, but easier to make a model". Thus, they began to model all the construction elements and pass them to the sawmills that, with reasonable prices, make all the elements with all the joints. The parts are then assembled on-site, and this does not require highly skilled labor. “During this process, we saw that the amount of work involved in modeling each of these constructive elements could not be paid for. Therefore, the initial projects we did were at a loss. The first one in which we modeled all the construction elements was the Alcantara Complex, our debut with BIM. There we took some crazy risks because the manager and builder was my brother Luis Izquierdo. That was an important project for us, in terms that it brought us more work, but for the office, the cost was really bad and it was not good for the construction company either”. It was not about specific mismanagement, but that the present time is paradoxical for architectural construction. "The market and the global political-economic organization are increasingly uncertain. On the other hand, the need for planning is increasing," he reflects. "There is a very big paradox there: the economic context asks you to change things in real-time, but construction planning asks you to have your project, with the screw in place, two years in advance. So how do you reconcile these two things? Clearly, the lump sum contract and the organization of production are not enough. The fact that we architects are making all the construction decisions, but the ones who capitalize on the eventual profits of those decisions are the construction companies, just doesn't make sense. It does not make sense that the construction companies have to take all the risks concerning decisions that were already made during the design phase. Thus, the construction company says: I have to do something that I did not decide on, and now you want me to build it for you and take all this risk alone? No, I will charge you double. So what happens? If you charge double, you can't build it”. He emphasizes that, in the end, everyone loses. The construction companies, the architects, and it is more expensive for the client. It is a production organization system that is not in line with reality. "Hence, faced with this paradox, we realized that we had to centralize all the processes so that responsibilities would be shared. We decided to create a parent company called Tecton Workshop, which owns our architecture office, a construction company, and a real estate developer. We partner with the construction company, manage the projects we do, and also take care of third-party projects”. In this way of management, clients can choose to contract only the architectural project or also the coordination of specialties, the budget estimation from the preliminary design, and the construction. Tecton Workshop can do all three or just one of them. However, it does not get built if the project is not their own. "We see that the design and construction tend to be the same thing, to the extent that construction decisions are made on computers. We want that whole decision-making sequence to be governed by a logic that is not only economistic but also architectural. When I say architectural, I mean that it should be an expressive construction of its variables. We believe that this way of working can guarantee our clients the profits they want, with the right timing and a better building. For this system to succeed, it requires a great deal of trust on the part of the clients. It is difficult because, says Cristián Izquierdo, "the prevailing system of economic relations is based on fear. Or on mistrust.
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