OLIVIER ZAHM — You also have the mural as a surface of expression. The massiveness of shapes, the stones.
CARLOS H. MATOS — But also the fact that you can build a house, and you can build a room that measures 10 meters [33 feet] tall, and you can build a very steep ladder without a balustrade and things like that. It’s something that really allows for architecture to keep on evolving and to create… In a way, we should all be allowed to build however we want to build. Because I studied in London, I have friends who remained there, and a lot of the time, they were working on projects with really amazing clients who were willing to push boundaries, and the projects got strangled by health and safety permits and regulations. In the end, you have the little Victorian house in London, and you do the little extension on the kitchen. Of course, I really admire that also because there’s stuff that’s incredible…

OLIVIER ZAHM — And imaginative.
CARLOS H. MATOS — Here, in Mexico, we have fewer regulations, but it’s kind of corrupt as well. It’s a funny subject because it’s the same energy that allows for destruction that allows for creation. You’ll see a building, and suddenly it will be knocked down, and there will be a cinema, with LED screens and a green wall or some shit like that. And it’s the same allowance that some asshole has that people with creative minds and culture have as well — to keep on doing architecture and art in a very unrestrained way. If you look at Félix Candela, for example, he also managed to develop a whole body of work that was really pushing the limits of structure because he was doing four-centimeter-thick [1.5-inch-thick] shell structures. But they were structural, and there are beautiful photographs of him testing the strength of the shell structures, with all of the builders on top. It becomes this very pragmatic thing and allows us to push boundaries.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Even though there’s the risk of an earthquake.
CARLOS H. MATOS — Yeah, exactly.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, you consider yourselves as both artists and architects?
CARLOS H. MATOS — More architects, I guess. It’s a back and forth, but we treat it as a whole. If you look at the Baroque building right opposite here, for example, you can see it’s heavily charged with sculptures.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Isn’t that one of yours?
CARLOS H. MATOS — Exactly. That’s us.

OLIVIER ZAHM — It’s appropriation.
CARLOS H. MATOS — [Laughs] That’s what we aspire to.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Like art?
CARLOS H. MATOS — But architecture — I mean, of course, after modernism and functionalism — all got stripped down. But we’re trying to bring back some kind of formality, ornamentation, symbolism into the architecture experience on a broader scale, so it becomes like a large sculpture you inhabit, almost like a ruin. But also, in the details. If you go to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, there’s a model of one of the Art Deco lights that was designed by…
LUCAS CANTÚ — Federico Mariscal.
CARLOS H. MATOS — Also, that building is another form of interpretation and another way to root a building to its context… Only it lifts you off the ground.
LUCAS CANTÚ — And if you go back, for example, to the most Baroque part of the Mayas, on the built side, you have sculptors as masons. So, sculptors were a big part of the process because the whole facade was a mural. In Mexico we have a very ancient relationship with murals, and that triggered a lot … with Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and all those guys. They also took a lot of the Venetian stuccoes and frescoes and all of those techniques and sort of mixed them with the pre-Hispanic traditions, like the Mayas. And you can see a big technical advancement in the murals of that generation. But in a very pragmatic way, half of the work is sculpture. Traditional sculpture.
CARLOS H. MATOS — I guess more abstract, nonfunctional, and experimental.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And totemic. Why do you choose to focus on this totemic symbol?
CARLOS H. MATOS — If you look at buildings, you have a lot of vertical elements that are columns. We probably started working with that concept of a stretched geometry that was meant to be a column. We liked the idea of a column becoming a kind of freestanding object. And also, objects becoming representations of a larger space — so, almost like maquettes. So, I guess in the lineage of Goeritz and Barragán, it has a lot to do with how you scale geometries, until they become special, architectural. Or maybe they become parts of the ornament. For example, that piece has been dissected.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Which one?
CARLOS H. MATOS — This one. It’s been dissected many times. This bell here is the top of that column. This part here is the bottom part of that. And on and on, throughout the…

OLIVIER ZAHM — Okay. So, it’s like a puzzle.
CARLOS H. MATOS — It’s like a dissection of how you utilize part of it to actually be architectural, but it can also be a sculpture on its own.
LUCAS CANTÚ — Also, if you go to a church and bring down a capital from a column or a saint or something and just put it in a museum, it becomes a free-standing work of art. In a way, the biggest definition of art is that there’s no function to it. Architecture has a clear function, and so there are contradictory concepts. We were reading an interview with Richard Serra the other day… Artists get a lot of invitations to do architectural commissions. And they’re like: “No way. My art won’t have bathrooms or lights or anything.” It’s a pure expression of art. But then, you start questioning that, and there are tons of examples for us for inspiration. Like Isamu Noguchi: he worked with light fixtures.
CARLOS H. MATOS — And Frank Lloyd Wright and Josef Hoffmann from the Vienna School. For them, it was about designing the fork so that it became this really complete experience.

OLIVIER ZAHM — In French, we call it art totale.
CARLOS H. MATOS — A total work of art. And to go back to the idea of the modernists, it was also about doing modernism, using architecture as a canvas. A bit like that, but actually less integrated into architecture and more like a very pragmatic insertion. The Guatemalan-Mexican artist Carlos Mérida coined the term “plastic intervention.” It was this idea of inserting art into architecture. Obviously with modernism, it was massive. You would get Mario Pani, and he would provide all of the balustrades of the staircase and the top bit. That’s your canvas — do your art.
LUCAS CANTÚ — In a way, I think that’s something that differentiated a lot of Mexican modernism from, say, that of the United States.

OLIVIER ZAHM — But I like that you introduce a spiritual aspect to it. That’s maybe something new because the modernists were very nonreligious, in a way.
CARLOS H. MATOS — Yes. Absolutely.
LUCAS CANTÚ — But all the churches built in that era are very important as a historical reference for design. We just finished a sauna, and, for us, the bathhouse is like a spiritual, primitive experience, where architecture inhibits the ego. You’re naked. There are no symbols of time there. You somehow feel ancient and connected to some sort of wisdom.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And no New Age music.
CARLOS H. MATOS — A bathhouse. It doesn’t necessarily need to be esoteric or anything. In Mexico, we have the temazcalli, which is a really beautiful version of the ancient ritual of the bathhouse. But it’s still a ritual if it’s an everyday thing, and you should see the onsens in Japan, or the Korean and Turkish bathhouses.
LUCAS CANTÚ — And we really like the idea that you can’t bring your iPhone inside a sauna. It’s a space where you’re disconnected from modern technology, it’s dark, you’re sweaty, girls don’t have any makeup on. We’re investigating how to find other ways to promote that in architecture with, I don’t know, maybe a bathtub.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is it genderless?
CARLOS H. MATOS — Yes, the bathhouse is. You can come in with tattoos as well.

OLIVIER ZAHM — [Laughs] Great. Is this your first one?
LUCAS CANTÚ — We’ve done one, and we’re building another one in upstate New York. It was a very nice experiment. We did it during the quarantine. We stayed in Oaxaca and designed and built it with four workers. It was very experimental. The way we heat the room, we innovated a little bit because it’s powered by fire, but in a different way than traditional saunas. And the new one we’re doing is also an experiment around taking stones and the whole ritual of how we take them in, inspired by a Mexican temazcalli. A lot of these buildings become like artifacts, inspired by machines and also by rituals, but not in a Tulum way — in a more primitive and rootsy, raw way.

OLIVIER ZAHM — It’s beautiful to be able to use the fire element in a piece of art.
CARLOS H. MATOS — Yes. Because a fire is a piece of art. You can look at the fire like a Van Gogh painting. And fire is where the stone that you create comes from. It’s the melting of stone.

ALEPH MOLINARI — It’s the melting of the nucleus of the Earth being manifested as architecture.
CARLOS H. MATOS — Yes, absolutely.

ALEPH MOLINARI — I also wanted to ask you about these skins that you create — because you talk about the relationship between sculpture and architecture, of art being inserted into a building. But in some ways, your art does the opposite. There’s a sense of reappropriating. Are you doing that with these skins of Carlos Mérida? Taking a cast of history and architecture and making it into an art object?

CARLOS H. MATOS — Yes, I guess so. Carlos Mérida was a project that we did for Richard Neutra’s VDL House. We got invited to do an installation in the glass pavilion, based on a text by a writer from LA. Basically, this text described a couple sitting in the glass pavilion and watching Los Angeles burn. This was when Donald Trump had just won, LA was burning, they didn’t know what was happening, and they’re just having a glass of wine and looking at this, going: “Are people celebrating, or is this, like, a civil war?” They start talking about how people are barricading, the brigadas capturing immigrants, blah, blah, blah. Then they start talking about themselves being immigrants, coming to LA, being part of the modernist movement, of this kind of utopia, of living completely exposed to all of the elements in super thin, fragile glass structures, and speculating about what will happen… And basically our response was to create a shelter and a bunker. And that’s when we decided, a little bit through free association: “Let’s bring a mural.” We’ve been talking about this: “Let’s do the plastic intervention.” Now we’re working on some murals of our own, but in the beginning, we didn’t feel confident enough. And Lucas, at the time, had found a book by Carlos Mérida that talked about the murals that collapsed in the [Benito Juárez housing complex] in the earthquake of 1985. And how they were resuscitated, and then they collapsed again. But we grabbed those murals that actually represent an abstraction of pre-Hispanic tales and wars and different creatures, and we re-collaged them in the modulation of the Neutra facade. We wanted it to be almost like when a hurricane is coming, and you board up your house.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Like a fortress.
CARLOS H. MATOS — Yeah. So the panels slot into the railing of the mosquito nets of the Neutra facade. And then fiberglass was an interesting choice because it looks very solid from the outside, and the kind of lightness of the Neutra House suddenly turns it into a plastic, more Mexicanized version of modernism. But then on the inside, it creates this very nice light, and the transparency is sort of emulating the curtains of the Neutra House.
LUCAS CANTÚ — But around that project, there’s a whole body of work that we researched by sort of mimicking something else. We were taking elements and re-collaging them. We also did a perforated brass sheet like Mathias Goeritz did. We replicated the maquette of an Art Deco lamp from Bellas Artes. We did a scale model of Torre de los Vientos by Gonzalo Fonseca. We deconstructed a whole Pedregal mansion from the ’50s, and we brought down wallpapers. We created sculptures with elements that we salvaged from the house.

ALEPH MOLINARI — So, it’s Tezontle reinterpreting the history of architecture in Mexico and art?
CARLOS H. MATOS — I guess so, but trying to salvage it as well.
LUCAS CANTÚ — Like modern archaeology.
CARLOS H. MATOS — Modern archaeology. Exactly. Our first workshop at Tezontle was based on this beautiful modernist house in Pedregal owned by this German couple with a Down’s syndrome kid, Walter. And we got this house, and it had all the history of how it was lived in. The house was going to be torn down, and we completely appropriated it. And we were saying: “It’s okay to tear down things because things need to be remade, and we cannot live off of preservation. Destruction is good, but we need to find new ways of figuring out what we salvage, how we salvage it.” And we were working at the time with Mario García Torres on a house in Tepoztlán that’s currently on hold. Mario García Torres being very referential in all of his work, he’s always drawing and finding and researching little bits and pieces and reconstructing narratives. I think he struggled a lot with the idea of the white canvas and building a house. So, we started bringing elements from this house.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, the house has been destroyed, but in a way you reinterpreted it?
LUCAS CANTÚ — We kept the columns. We kept the wallpaper.
CARLOS H. MATOS — We dismantled part of the house.

OLIVIER ZAHM — But why did they destroy it in the first place?
CARLOS H. MATOS — Because they were going to do a new project.
LUCAS CANTÚ — Because the house doesn’t make any sense nowadays. Who lives in this kind of house? Either Lenny Kravitz, or you do eight houses and a business.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Or Purple. [Laughs]
LUCAS CANTÚ — Yeah, Purple.
CARLOS H. MATOS — In Pedregal, for example, you have many of these…

OLIVIER ZAHM — It’s like a copy of the LA style.
LUCAS CANTÚ — They were done at the same time.
CARLOS H. MATOS — And it’s interesting because the modernist movement in both Mexico and LA benefited greatly from the weather that allows you to create these beautiful boxes. And Pedregal actually has this really amazing identity, which is the volcanic rock, which LA doesn’t have.
LUCAS CANTÚ — For example, this wallpaper we salvaged. You can see the air-conditioning — it’s an imprint of time. Then we kept these columns, as you can see over there. Here we were bringing down a tezontle facade. We brought it all down, and we created a sculpture. We squatted the house. We had part of our team living there.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, some elements of this house are transported and recontextualized…
LUCAS CANTÚ — Here’s a photo of us carrying the windows, and we’re going to put those in the house…

OLIVIER ZAHM — Crazy. So, it will be a total composite.
CARLOS H. MATOS — It’s midway between allowing history to continue and preservation.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Why do you think there’s such a buzz around Mexico and Mexico City nowadays?
CARLOS H. MATOS — But it’s been like this for years and years. If you look at the art scene, at the time of Diego Rivera, of Goeritz, the time of all the people whom we talked about — there were a lot of people coming from all over. And, of course, now, with social media…

OLIVIER ZAHM — There’s an amplification.
CARLOS H. MATOS — Which is great. I wish also it would slow down because I don’t think anything at this speed does any good to anything. Mexican culture is very welcoming, and it always has been. And Mexican culture is composed of diversity and of people coming and becoming…

OLIVIER ZAHM — Part of the city.
CARLOS H. MATOS — There are so many people, from Mérida to Goeritz and Chavela Vargas and her famous phrase she always comes out with…

OLIVIER ZAHM — What is it?
CARLOS H. MATOS — People ask her: why does she say she’s Mexican if she’s from Costa Rica? And she replies, “Los mexicanos nacemos donde nos da la rechingada gana.”
ALEPH MOLINARI — It means: Mexicans are born wherever the fuck they want.
LUCAS CANTÚ — I see a lot of people coming from big cities, like London, New York… I think people experience a sense of liberty here. As we were saying, in architecture, you can go faster for better or worse. Maybe if you want to produce stuff here, it’s faster, it’s easier. There are a lot of makers. And people find that it’s bubbling, it’s fresh. If you go to New York, you’re one of a thousand. And here, there’s space to do stuff. You can be innovative, creative, and it’s inspiring.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Also, people take the time to interact, to exchange. They don’t need social media for this. [Laughs]
CARLOS H. MATOS — Or even, in other places, in Europe, you have this idea of networking. It’s something they try to achieve. And in Mexico, that kind of happens when you’re in the cantina, and you sit at a long table, and you kind of meet everyone. It’s not planned. It’s organic.
LUCAS CANTÚ — I guess, in a way, it scares us Mexicans — gentrification and all of that. But if we look back at history, there’s a lot of cross-pollination that happened, cultural mixing. I think this is going to spark something. If in 2050, we look back to the 2020s, it’s going to be something special. I can feel it. That’s why a lot of very talented people are coming here.
CARLOS H. MATOS — The roaring ’20s.
LUCAS CANTÚ — Something is cooking, even if we don’t know what’s to come…

END

CARLOS H. MATOS AND LUCAS CANTÚ, THE TEZONTLE DUO