A CONVERSATION WITH STUDIO PAMPA
We hat a chat with Juliane Maier and Luis Etchegorry, co-founders of Frankfurt based Studio Pampa. With extensive international experience and a blend of practical and academic insights, they shared their innovative design philosophies and discussed the latest trends shaping the future of architecture and interior design.
How has your extensive international experience shaped your design philosophy, particularly with regard to the bold use of materials and colors to create innovative and atmospheric interiors?
Juliane Maier: Having worked in a renown, international architectural office, exposed me to many diverse, exciting project, experiences and people. Designing projects of the most different scales and typologies all around the world, widened up the vision towards extremely exciting horizons and cultures. The constant questioning of the conventional and status quo, makes one to think-out-of-box, searching for innovative solutions. To develop interesting, relevant architecture and interior design concepts, one needs to dive deeply into the past, to understand the present and project unseen atmospheres into the future. In other cultures, colour is often used much more consciously and boldly to create moods and atmospheres. In combination with distinctive materials and their surface characteristics, colour plays a central role in the design and experience of interiors. Playing with contrasts and the effect of light and shadow creates a multi-sensory experience.
How has your diverse international experience, particularly your time at UNStudio and your work as a visiting professor, shaped and influenced your approach to architecture and design?
Luis Etchegorry: These experiences should be seen as high-performance environments, on one hand, practice at one of the upmost avant-garde architecture office, dealing with large scale projects with extremely contemporary social, environmental programmatic demands. While on the other side, the academic realm deals with speculative, experimental yet practical architectural ideas within a young, refreshing student context. Both the one and the other retro feed each other, one could put into practice and experiment many, diverse concepts. The two experiences helped me to focus on bringing bold, cutting-edge concepts into real context, orienting them to the user. Lastly but not least, the relation to an audience, in the academic ground, the leading of highly motivated and critical students is as demanding as the most professional client of any international project. We always say: always behind a great project, there is always a great client.
What inspires you most when designing new projects and where do you get your inspiration from?
We always find inspiration whenever we get captured by something that provokes effects and affections with a highly bold, abstract and conceptual essence yet dislocated from the standard or conventional, independent to time and space. Natural or man-made objects which have plain, honest, simple effects but with a ‘twist’, trigger our imagination, deeply.
Our favourite list of inspiration, ranging from classical to now-a-days:
Vilanova Artigas, Landart, James Turrell, Anish Kapoor, Stanley Kubrick, Eduardo Chillida, Dieter Rams, Peter Zumthor, Ben & Rem, Aires Mateus, Valerio Olgiati, Fran Silvestre, Sabine Marcelis, Andrés Reisinger...
What trends and developments in architecture and interior design do you find particularly exciting and how do you integrate them into your work?
The latest developments in A.I. are extremely exciting to us and we starting to integrate these apps into our design tool repertoire. The creation of novel, innovative atmospheres using A.I. is captivating, examples of the work of Andrés Reisinger are always under our radar. We are always looking into new social, environmental demands (reuse, looping, cradle to cradle strategies) and trying to integrate them into our design whenever we can.”
One last question, which I'm sure you've been asked many times before – how did you come up with the name Studio Pampa?
PAMPA is a horizon, a flat environment or landscape and as a landscape, it creates atmospheres. We consider studio PAMPA as an open platform where together with the client, external and internal parameters, we give form to new demands, reflecting these, of course in our projects. We passionately believe in the transformative power that architecture and design have on our lives, as well as any landscape affects us. Echoing our office’s name, studio PAMPA views every endeavour as an open field of possibility. We provide a common ground for interdisciplinary collaboration where the client, stakeholders and partners come together to develop tailor-made solutions that encapsulate the essence of the project. For us, this participatory process is key.