José María de Cárdenas: “If we realised that everything is still to be done, the anxiety would go away”

The Andalusia supplement of El Mundo devoted its “Conversaciones en Andalucía” (Conversations in Andalusia) section to José María de Cárdenas, introduced as one of the founders of EDDEA, a Seville studio that, in the depths of a crisis that was hitting the profession especially hard, was growing and working on a large-scale development in Moscow won against sixty teams.

Reorganising in 2005 to weather 2008

De Cárdenas explains that the studio began to consolidate in 2005, when its partners suspected that the pace of construction could not last: six complementary partners, among them economists and lawyers, sixty people and a sustainable structure. His diagnosis of the sector provides one of the interview’s headlines: given the construction forecasts, half of all architects are surplus to requirements. Studios, he argues, will be either very large or very small and highly specialised; the mid-sized ones, of ten or twelve people, are those that will have the hardest time.

“General Urban Plans are a great obsolete document”

“General Urban Plans (PGOU) are a great obsolete document, deriving from a law of 1956,” he says, calling for “a new generation of urban planners”. He argues for redefining the role of the architect so that it can address how to make a fairer city, “and that is the same in Stockholm as in Tangier”. Even then, the studio was already working with forecast maps of urban growth to 2050: North Africa, the west coast of that continent, Asia and Russia.

A metropolitan scale

He makes the case for thinking metropolitan, against the logic of every municipality wanting its own conference centre or sports hall (“Andalusia cannot have lots of large ports, or dozens of empty conference centres”), and wonders how the map would change if Cádiz, Málaga and Seville looked at themselves together. On the operation then under way in Seville comes the other headline: I wouldn’t start the Torre Pelli while the savings bank is asking the FROB for money.

Tablada, Sweden and the origins of Citythinking

The conversation turns to Tablada and the proposal, presented together with the Estación Biológica (Biological Station), to return it to its original marshland character, and to his time in Sweden after graduating, where he picked up the idea that underpins the studio’s laboratory: that innovation lies at the frontier between disciplines. Hence Citythinking, where urban planning meets sociology.

Interview by Berta González de Vega, photography by Fernando Ruso. El Mundo, Andalusia edition, 3 July 2011.