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ooiio fotos 10 years SPAM low version 2
It seems unbelievable, but 10 years have already passed. It seems unbelievable, but the studio has survived with everything against it all this time.
OOIIO celebrates a decade of work.
Every birthday deserves a celebration, but when it comes to a round number like 10 it seems that we have to get more solemn.
How was OOIIO founded?
Well, on the fly, without much idea of how to do it, like a great improvisation. As soon as I finished my degree I was very lucky to get my first job in Norman Foster’s office in London. I was there learning for 2 and a half years, and then I moved to Rotterdam, to OMA, to continue learning now from Rem Koolhaas. A fascinating training stage that undoubtedly marked me forever as a person and as an architect, but somehow I needed something more. It was not entirely worth it to be in some of the most important and influential offices in contemporary architecture in the world, because something inside me said that I had to try to set up something, to make my own architecture. It didn’t matter if we never again designed those wonderful buildings in global premium locations. And so it was that one fine day between 2009 and 2010, some friends asked me if I would make them a house. I was delighted to leave the “star system” of architecture and returned to my village in La Mancha to design that first house.
That commission was followed by another, and then another. Luckily there has always been something to do. This despite the fact that 2010 and Spain was far from the best place in the world or the best time to found anything, let alone an architecture studio.
The first 7 years of the studio’s life, we have basically focused on surviving and trying to settle down. The completely adverse economic context for the construction and architecture sector in Spain has undoubtedly profoundly marked the reality and the way of working of the studio.
It has been very difficult to keep the team afloat with pyrrhic resources and everything against it, but over time I am realizing that this context in our early years has actually made us know how to get a lot out of very little, to exploit and squeeze the resources we have to the maximum. That has remained in our DNA, in our way of planning and looking for simple and realistic solutions to our orders.
Our buildings look much more expensive than they really are, we use common, cheap, local materials, which the workers have used a thousand times before in other works, and we reinterpret them in a way that we seek to transmit emotions with them.
10 years and more than 235 projects of all kinds later, it turns out that everything is different and the same. As a team the studio has evolved enormously, the know-how and experience accumulated in a decade of hard work is enormous. How much all this knowledge would have helped in the beginning! Although the context seems to be too similar, a new crisis of unknown dimensions threatens to give us another reality check. The world is turned upside down again, now with the problem of Covid-19. How profound will the changes that come with this crisis be? How touched will the market be again? Will we make the right decisions in the face of the challenges that await us?
Well, there is no choice but to continue rowing into the unknown, against all odds. We will have to continue pushing this great little madness with a strange name, OOIIO, based on a lot of effort, intuition, improvisation and trying to achieve a lot with very little.
Joaquín Millán Villamuelas
Founder and Creative Director of OOIIO Arquitectura
