Our job as architects is inspired and is threaded, on the one hand, with the practice of others who were before us and who left us –for better or for worse– our work areas: geographical, intellectual and also ethical areas. Cities, schools and attitudes. The necessary knowledge of these areas invites a study with its fluctuating balance between the systematic and approximate –between science and art– that keeps growing every day, on the boards but also in journeys –one could even say that is going where we go– tracing the guidelines of our research. There is a whole gradation lines, among those firmer, apparently indelible over time and with an unequivocal direction, to the apparently disjointed, gray or discontinuous. Between them the warp where we move on is woven, which sometimes serves as an Ariadne’s thread and others a trapeze artists safety net.

But there is also a link with other professionals like us and who, thanks to that proximity, it is possible to shape the discourse itself or build a common one, establishing a supposedly enriching dialogue for both parties. These links, and more in our days, are often built from friendship and geographical proximity, but others are from a more distant and conceptual relationship. This circumstance that can logically change over time is very clearly accidental.

It is finally possible as well as desirable the attention, and participation in their formative period, of future generations of architects, dialogue that occurs first of all in the classrooms or their environment, which is also a source of a mutual enrichment and that could serve as first explanation for the attention of teaching.

Extremes like naturalness, the awareness that what we pursue is there, implicit in the conditions of the project –work understood as unveiling, in both senses of discovering and effort– along with the uniqueness of the ambition to do one’s best, excellence.

Our work also moves between approximation and precision. Those of us who devote ourselves to architecture, and far more if we also deal with teaching, we know that our work has something of disclosure, as suggested above.

And what about the tension between tradition and innovation? Our work, we now know, is threaded, like it or not, in a tradition.

And we are certainly inheritors of the so called modern architecture, of the movement that would objectify architecture, but we also know we are children of the Baroque, the manipulation of the viewer and his senses.

In conclusion a more derivative remark of the above explanation: the importance of the place. Neither the place is the site –in the urban area– nor the data collected in the surveying. There is a huge density in reality, completely unattainable even in successive readings, accumulated into a new sort of palimpsest. Physical, cultural, social and political place: place as a suggestion, as an opportunity and also as a limitation.

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Eduardo Delgado Orusco

He holds a Master´s Degree in Architecture (1989) and a Ph.D. in Architecture (2000) from the School of Architecture of Madrid (ETSAM). His dissertation entitled “Spanish Sacred Architecture, 1939-1975” was awarded the Extraordinary Prize of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (2001).

He is the consultant for the City Council of Madrid for the catalog “Modern and Contemporaneous Architecture”. He is also a member of the research team “Cultural Landscape” of the Department of Architectural Projects of the Polytechnic University of Madrid and of the research team “Photography and Architecture” of the School of Architecture and Engineering of the University of Zaragoza.

He started his professional practice at the office of Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros. Since 2000, he is the founder and director of Reset Architecture. His architectural work has received numerous awards and has been widely published.

He combines the professional activity with research and teaching. He is the author of numerous articles and books on contemporaneous art and architecture.  He taught at the Centre for Integrated Studies in Architecture and the Faculty of Cultural Heritage Studies of the university SEK of Segovia, at the School of Architecture and Technology, and at the Institute for Innovation and Architectural Culture of the University Camilo José Cela, where he was head of the Departments of Architecture Design and Graphical Expression (2000-2008), and also at the Technical School of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He also taught at different European and Latin American universities. At present, he is an associate professor at the School of Architecture and Engineering of the University of Zaragoza. And, during the spring semester, he has been invited to the Department of Architecture of the School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania to conduct his personal research (U.S., 2015).

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