Tatiana Bilbao
Published April 6, 2020, in No. 10
Twelve days before Tatiana Bilbao, founder of the Mexico City-based Estudio Bilbao, was scheduled to speak at Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus, GSAPP announced a suspension of its spring 2020 public programming and postponed her talk indefinitely due to the novel coronavirus outbreak. On March 24, NYRA correspondent Alissa Lopez Serfozo connected with Bilbao virtually to discuss what she had intended to present. Speaking from her home in Mexico City, Bilbao touched on her theory of housing, current designs for a monastery in Germany, rethinking the welfare state, and her interest in cooperative systems.
What were you planning on saying at your now-canceled lecture?
I wanted to speak about my design practice, but from the perspective of my current interests, and to critique my work to understand what we’ve done and what we’ve been searching for in terms of equality.
I was involved in the Women’s March in Mexico about two weeks ago. After the lecture I gave in Oaxaca [as part of the Acto de Protesta Lecture series organized by Mexican architect Gabriela Carrillo from March 6 to 8, 2020], I became interested in what I have and haven’t done to counter discrimination against women. I declared myself guilty of unconsciously perpetuating the patriarchal system, and then I committed myself to changing it. While discrimination is not easy to eliminate, architecture can open paths: to integrate and accept new voices, to allow and promote different types of thinking and of living. Architects haven’t been doing very well on that.
Designing change starts in the domestic space, so I began to analyze the domestic spaces we’ve done. How can we allow the other to be represented and to represent themself in our work? We haven’t arrived at a project where we’ve achieved that in a complete sense, but we’re searching for this in many ways: by designing collectively, using open resources and integrating possibilities for people to interact with architecture; by recognizing that architecture is only a platform and that anybody can decide how to live; by not labeling rooms with programs and imposing distinctions; and by thinking about economies of sharing and cooperative systems. There’ve been some interesting results. Yet, we have more questions than answers—I hope my whole life I have more questions than answers—but I hope that when we build architecture, we’re still able to ask and that the architecture still asks those questions. That’s what I wanted to present at GSAPP.
I’m quite interested in your involvement in the protests and lecture series in Oaxaca. Perhaps you could speak more to the political climate, particularly for anyone who might be unfamiliar with the ongoing protests in Mexico.
Gabriela organized the series before the women’s rights movement became super intense in Mexico because of the government’s insufficient response to protests organized in late November 2019. She wanted to highlight the many Mexican women practicing and doing interesting things in architecture. [Participating architects included Tatiana Bilbao, Sol Camacho, Gabriela Carrillo, Loreta Castro, Frida Escobedo, and Rozana Montiel.] To get together in a place like Oaxaca—where there’s a lot of discrimination not only toward women but also minorities—does create a domino effect. If female students and architects see us onstage, such representation shows it’s possible and we set an example.
I’m interested in the timeline, from that moment to now. In these weeks in between, how did the pandemic impact you?
Yesterday I was communicating with the group [of speakers], and I said, “Girls, it seems so long ago that we did this talk, but we can’t forget.” This pandemic is only going to aggravate problems. The virus does not discriminate against anyone, but the economic impacts that this will produce will discriminate much more than before. Like always, these crises hit more vulnerable people in the world harder. On the other hand, I hope we’re clever enough as a society to honor those who died and suffered, in order to really commit to different ways.
I was speaking with a colleague, and he said, “Tatiana, don’t you see what your life was and that hopping in and out of a plane every three days is super ridiculous?” And he travels like me, he’s one of those guys. I said, “You’re totally right. It’s totally nonsense.”
Considering the Covid-19 pandemic physically estranges people from one another and instead connects us digitally, what are your thoughts on the social effects of the outbreak?
I’m sure that the 1918 Spanish flu really informed the modern movement in architecture. Although influenced more by the wars, modernism searched for a sanitized city, which impacted how society was shaped. This pandemic will have a total effect on how we think about the city and design spaces, but I don’t know how.
I’m not sure that we’re going to move to the digital world faster—we’re social individuals. My studio has been working to understand how economies of sharing could change society and studying cooperative models, which are about sharing spaces and lives, communication, conflict, and confrontation. How can we shape common spaces after a pandemic like this? It will change things, but I don’t know what that looks like spatially.
I want to touch on the idea of domestic space, which you brought up earlier. If we consider the relationship between housing and public health, pandemics such as Covid-19 make a strong case for universal healthcare. Let’s consider the adage, “The health of all is the health of one, and the health of one is the health of all.” Do you believe something similar with housing?
Yes. Here is my theory on houses and housing: In the big cities we have lost the possibility of knitted communities. The individual dwelling unit gets aggregated into a building, where you have ten or maybe four hundred neighbors. You go into the elevator and get expelled down into the huge collective of the big city, millions of anonymous people. There’s no real possibility for a community.
It’s impossible to relate to twenty people, but it’s possible to identify with four. How can we create spaces where you’re able to meet regularly with four of your neighbors? The next stage of relationships would be with ten people. Next is sharing an elevator with twenty-five people. Creating stages that scale relationships, until they arrive at the city, knitting communities together. Architecture can do that.
I’m currently working on a monastery in Germany. The monks have this incredible staging system of relationships with their spirituality. For them, the first stage is the body. Then, the next stage is their robe, their cells, then the cloister, the monastery, and then finally the community outside the monastery. The architecture of monasteries promotes spirituality, not only spatially, but also physically, through relationships with other monks. If those relationships don’t work, then the community of the monastery fails. We need to have basic relationships with ourselves, with our inner family, with extended family or with the community. Housing and health systems could work exactly like that.
What type of resource strategies do you hope this pandemic might inspire?
We have to rethink the welfare state. What is the difference between a government that is less empowered to provide resources for its people like the United States, versus more totalitarian states, which in the end are welfare states, like China? Europe is somewhere in between. I’m not pro-totalitarianism, but a welfare system promotes a greater sense of community, where it’s understood that if you don’t pay taxes, you won’t get benefits or the basics you need. Whereas in capitalistic systems it’s exactly the contrary: in order to get those necessities, you have to fight each other.
Establishing the basis for a cooperative or capitalist system is a question that needs to be addressed. I want to see a system that is more socially responsible than individualistic—the pandemic encourages this. The problem with the economies that we both share is that people cannot go out and buy ten packages of toilet paper at once; they have to buy one package every day. If someone else takes them all, then someone will be out of toilet paper. It’s about thinking about and becoming the other.