Our guest for the second event of the fresh-air-kitecture lecture series, held in association with Instituto Cervantes and the Architectural Association of Ireland, was Victoria Acebo, one of the principals of the Madrid-based practice aceboxalonso. Victoria gave the audience a quick summary of the ideologies of her firm, signified symbolically by the letter ‘x’ that fuses the surnames of the two partners in the name they have chosen to represent them in the architectural world. The ‘x’, for them, represents the unknown conditions around a project, the forbidden, the intersection of various layers of information and the properties of multiplication, as opposed to simple addition. Following a question from the floor, it seems that it may now also come to represent the danger posed by the architect herself!
Victoria went on to show us a number of the projects, both built and unbuilt, that her office has worked on in recent years. Perhaps the most fascinating to our audience was the arts centre-dance studio in A Coruña, north-western Spain. The brief called for two quite different buildings, one programmatically dictated and the other utterly free, to be constructed, although both would be under the same management after completion. The architects’ solution was to bring the two buildings together as one in an extremely controlled manner, setting out the pre-defined spaces of the dance studio first, and then allowing the arts centre to occupy the interstitial spaces. The internal roof cladding was composed of a large number of coloured panels which, in a move recalling that of the architects of the Arts and Crafts period, during construction, tradespeople were allowed to install in whatever pattern they desired. The result is a playful, dynamic ceilingscape that brings life to the starker spaces below.