Interviewed in Dubrovnik 27 April 2014

Iñaqui Carnicero belongs to the younger generation of Spanish architects who appeared after the period of global success of Spanish architecture. Like Garcia Abril, he comes from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, where he taught before he went on to teach at Cornell University.

He is interested in conceptual and system processes within reduced material possibilities. His conceptual transformation of one of the halls of Matadero– a former Madrid slaughterhouse–into a cultural centre, drew attention. Iñaqui Carnicero's work is exploratory and aims for an optimum spatial performance. 

ORIS: Your Hangar 16 Project in the Matadero complex is a rigid construction considering the fact that it is resistant to change and processes revolving around it, while retaining the main concept, the main idea. You were forced to reduce the scale of the project, yet, in spite of that, it was ultimately left unchanged, just as you imagined it. Have you thought about it when you began the project?

Carnicero: In the case of Hangar 16 in Madrid those were the requirements of the competition. Flexibility was not mentioned, but the desire was to have a number of different programs simultaneously, which was, I believe, the first time I took the importance of this architectural strategy seriously. We had to do away with everything superficial and unnecessary, because the budget was reduced. We have ultimately realized what the important gestures are–those with which one can achieve a lot. For instance, the big doors, it is a very dumb, simple steel frame structure, but we discovered that by studying different ways of rotation we could develop different configurations to allow many activities in the space to happen.