We spoke with architects Aranguren + Gallegos

María José Aranguren López and José González Gallegos founded their studio in 1984. Since then, they have developed a broad and consistent career, recognized for its thoughtful and contemporary approach. Their work ranges from collective and single-family housing to cultural facilities, museums, and heritage restoration projects. Among the awards they have received are the Europan, a CSCAE National Award, and the National Fine Arts Award, among others. For Aranguren + Gallegos, architecture is more than a technical solution: it is a reflection of society, its time, and its values. Throughout their career, they have conducted in-depth research into collective housing, flexibility, and the possibilities of transforming the idea of living. A prime example is the social housing in the Carabanchel neighborhood (Madrid), pioneers in adaptable spaces and widely studied in architecture schools around the world. In the cultural sphere, projects such as the ABC Museum of Drawing and Illustration in Madrid—whose façade so fascinated a client that he asked them to replicate it for the ICA Museum in Miami—and the Parador de Alcalá de Henares stand out. Their work combines technical rigor, a humanistic outlook, and a critical sensitivity to contemporary challenges, especially sustainability, without ever renouncing a poetic vision of space.

Their most photogenic project? The Szoke House, on the slopes of Mount Abantos, which we recently saw in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. With more than four decades of experience, Aranguren + Gallegos continue to construct a serene, precise, and deeply contemporary discourse on how we inhabit the present.

If you had to define your architectural practice in three words, what would they be?

DESIGN. Conceiving architecture as a response to a place, a program, and those who will inhabit it.

BUILD. Bringing the imagined to life with the help of a whole range of trades that make it possible.

TEACH. Sharing your career as an architect with young students who demand honesty and clarity in everything you convey to them as a teacher.

Why does architecture matter?

Architecture is associated with man’s first actions to defend and protect himself from the natural environment. Today, architecture continues to help and protect those who inhabit it, but it is also a true reflection of society and the cultural and social values that sustain it. It is the expression of a society and an era manifested through construction.

The problem of access to housing is one of the major concerns in our society. What are your thoughts on this issue?

Housing has been a right and a necessity since the dawn of time. We all need shelter, not only physical but also emotional. We need privacy and to build our own intimate, personal, or family sphere that also protects us from the social and collective sphere in which we carry out our daily activities.

Faced with this need, today’s urban societies have encouraged the concentration of a large and growing population without planning the necessary housing for these new urbanites. Given the shortage of housing, the free market acts according to its own laws, making access difficult due to high rental or purchase prices. The market is not solely or primarily responsible; it is merely the consequence of a lack of foresight and planning.

How has your conception of housing evolved from the studio’s early works to the present day, and how are these changes reflected in your most recent projects?

At the beginning of our adventure as architects, we entered an international European competition called EUROPAN, for young architects under the age of 40. We submitted several proposals and won two first prizes in two competitions, EUROPAN 1 and EUROPAN 4.

These competitions, along with others organized by public administrations, allowed us to develop a very intense activity in thinking about and designing low-budget social housing.

We proposed homes where flexibility and the study of their layout allowed us to free up the limited space in the home to create empty spaces where different uses and activities could be carried out.

Currently, many of those young architects who were competing to build the aforementioned social housing projects are now competing in new competitions to build housing on the free market, this time promoted by private companies. The parameters have changed: the dimensions of outdoor spaces such as large terraces are a new feature of housing, buildings are grouped together to form residential complexes with extensive landscaping, gyms, workspaces, meeting rooms, coworking spaces, nurseries, etc.

In the two periods mentioned above, developing collective residential projects, after the years that have passed, we can now say that in both cases architecture is necessary and can be designed, and it is we architects who are called upon to conceive and build it.

What specific lessons have you learned from the post-occupation of flexible housing in the Carabanchel neighborhood? How have users perceived it?

The complex of 64 collective dwellings in the Carabanchel neighborhood of Madrid was inaugurated in 2004. The project won a public competition for ideas organized by the Madrid Municipal Housing and Land Company (EMVS). Originally, the competition program described a rental housing building for young people. However, after the competition, the nature of the development changed, and it became a sale.

The flexible housing units in Carabanchel are part of a well-established tradition in modern architecture. On the one hand, they are based on the functionalist approach of hierarchical spaces for specific uses, as described and required by the current design standards for social housing in Madrid. On the other hand, they include specific elements that allow the shape of the spaces in the house to be modified: firstly, the rooms are separated by folding partitions that allow the entire living space to be joined or divided. Second, the floor under the hallway and utility rooms (kitchen, bathrooms, and closets) is raised above that of the living room and bedrooms, allowing beds, sofas, and armchairs to disappear underneath.

We wanted to respond to the complexity and rigidity of Madrid’s regulations with a building offering affordable housing and adaptable domestic spaces. We proposed possible variations in the space based on a 24-hour cycle: throughout the day, during the busiest hours, the possibility of using the floor space as a single space for different functions (work, leisure, meetings, exercise, parties, etc.); at night, the compartmentalization of the space to form separate bedrooms.

The reality is that during the construction process, the EMVS, the developer of the homes, decided to put them up for sale, abandoning the goal of renting them to young people. We found that changing the user profile undermined the spirit of the project. A home for young people and for rent can be accepted as transformable, since it is a vital time of transience and life planning, whereas when the home is sold, it is not only acquired for living in, but as an asset, and the approach becomes conservative; if it is “different,” its market value may be in crisis.

The adventure has been worthwhile. A low-cost social housing model has been built, responding in a much more open way to restrictive and outdated regulatory limitations. It has won numerous awards and has been disseminated and studied in universities around the world. Today, it continues to be our calling card wherever we go to teach or give lectures, identifying us with this project that everyone knows.

You recently stated that housing is not just a container, but a space for reflection and a focal point for design. What does “the house as a space for reflection” mean to you, and how does this approach translate into decisions about materials, programming, and urban context in your projects?

Compared to other creative disciplines, we believe that architecture, as opposed to mere building, is capable of expressing and reflecting its time through construction, where technique is the necessary and precise means to achieve this. But architecture must also be thought of in terms of housing; this is a field of thought and reflection to which we architects must be called. Thinking about living is the origin of our profession. In Spain, for many years we have been called upon to erect the facades of residential buildings. The interior will be resolved by regulations with the “advice” of the user.

Architecture must resolve the new relationships between man, space, and technology. We do not believe in discourse that describes architectural work purely in terms of artistic and formal skill as the origin and end of the process. Architecture needs technology defined as the effort to save effort. To be essential, one must be rational and skilled in technical solutions, and collective housing is the battlefield.

We have always been forced to choose between form and function in their eternal confrontation. We must not confuse functional requirements with limitations on architectural creation. Walter Gropius said that architecture begins where engineering ends. The design, the form of a building, draws attention to itself only when it fails. When it works, it is invisible, it is pure logic, the radiance of truth in the words of St. Augustine.

Our work has attempted to design a residential project in an urban context where both can be approached from a similar contemporary perspective.

Both involve the use of open systems, with criteria of flexibility, whether at the urban level (dialogue between infrastructure networks understood as fixed urban service centers and the resulting territory as a void where the building operates with more open planning); or at the housing project level (relationship between fixed service centers—bathroom, kitchen, storage, etc.—and the empty living space where the required uses are generated through mobile or changeable elements). –, and the empty living space where, through mobile or changeable elements, the required uses are generated).

How have you integrated the principles of sustainability, circular economy, and flexibility into your working methodology, and what challenges do you continue to face in professional practice in the 21st century?

Sustainable architecture is not a type or specialty; it has to be the essence of architecture itself, a single thing. There is no such thing as good architecture that does not apply the logic of adaptation to a place, a climate, orientations, uses, and scales that take into account the human dimension, and materials that are suitable due to their proximity, economy, and recyclability.

Sustainability cannot be a kind of sacrifice and moral measure, a political dilemma, or a philanthropic cause. It must be a constant challenge in the design of good architecture.

En nuestro trabajo hemos abordado en proyectos y obras residenciales todos los aspectos que pueden ser definidores de una adecuada sostenibilidad obteniendo múltiples reconocimientos nacionales e internacionales como El Premio Nacional de Arquitectura Residencial de Consejo Superior de Colegios de Arquitectos o dos primeros premios EUROPAN de ámbito europeo.

De  igual forma en edificios públicos estamos permanentemente  reflexionando sobre cómo resolver todos los requerimientos de programa y costes  cumpliendo además los más estrictos requerimientos de calificación sostenible como el  BREEAM y LEED enfocados a reducir impactos ambientales desde la construcción y buscando una mejora en la eficiencia energética de los edificios con el ahorro de recursos naturales y el uso de ambientes saludables y ecológicos.

The Szoke house was one of the stars of Almodóvar’s film “The Room Next Door.” Why do you think it was chosen, and what does the plot mean to you?

Pedro Almodóvar is a great filmmaker, as we all know, but we were also surprised by his sensitivity in perceiving the spatial intentions and intuitions of our architecture.

The house is set in a natural landscape with double views from each room through two large facing windows that incorporate each room into the surrounding nature in a “visual escape.”

Pedro Almodóvar masterfully handles the dual and intimate relationship between the two protagonists with dramatic situations and an almost splitting and merging of personalities and emotions, using the double reflections generated by the glass fronts of the rooms in the house. Nature and intimacy merge with a strong dramatic charge.

We believe that the house has successfully accompanied and complemented Almodóvar’s intentions and decisions. Architecture takes on meaning when it welcomes and enriches those who inhabit it. Let’s say that perhaps it has been the frame that frames the true protagonist, which is the work of art, the film it serves.

What are you working on at the moment?

We are currently continuing to design and construct residential buildings, along with renovations in historic contexts.

However, over the last five years we have been building individual houses, something we had hardly done before, and we have discovered a new field of work and reflection that is much more detailed and demanding, but also very rewarding. Every family that has entrusted us with the construction of their new home has experienced a transformative process in how they inhabit their new domestic space. Architecture has an incredible capacity for transformation.

An unfulfilled dream?

To build an auditorium. We have entered a large number of competitions for auditoriums and conference centers, almost always winning prizes, but without ever winning the first prize that allows you to build it.

Written by: Beatriz Fabián

Beatriz is a journalist specializing in offline and online editorial content on design, architecture, interior design, art, gastronomy, and lifestyle.

Photos: Nieves Díaz