Studio/Office: Place, Agents, Production

Resumen

As a discipline, architecture has built its cultural heritage to a great extent from concepts or ideas that may be recognised with a certain degree of precision and which are useful for knowledge building. Architecture studio and office do not form part of this conceptual matrix. Their conceptualization is elusive, embodying itself in different figures – studio, office, atelier, laboratory, workshop – that more than intending to clarify their identity, would seem to be responding to opportunist agreements, modelled by different professional and academic circumstances with the purpose of naming the generic space where architects work and are trained.

In this context, all definitions of architecture studio and office may seem rather biased if we consider that every architectural practice is different, that it pursues subjective interests and articulates its own work systems, thus singularizing its workspace starting from unique conditions. In these circumstances, architectural studio and office are understood from a useful ambiguity. We can visualize them like a 'place' where several actions occur, a physical space, an environment that allows architectural work to be developed. Thus, studio and office build a culture, a system of relationships between 'agents', whether they are people, objects, resources, data or tools, that are activated under rules and connections at the service of a common objective that could not work in isolation. Lastly, studio and office can be justified as a means of architectural 'production', as they pursue an objective that can be translated into objects, information, research or another form of expression.