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Eva Franch i Gilabert at the New York comedy festival, November 2016. Photograph: Lars Niki/Getty Images for Academy of Moti
Eva Franch i Gilabert at the New York comedy festival, November 2016. Photograph: Lars Niki/Getty Images for Academy of Moti

Architectural Association awaits its ‘Spanish tornado’

This article is more than 5 years old

The association’s first permanent female leader, Eva Franch i Gilabert, takes up her post on 1 July. Is it ready for this ‘force of nature’ with radical ideas?

The Architectural Association is an architecture school like no other. It is a hothouse, beneath its sober Georgian facade in London, a laboratory, finishing school, club and catwalk wherein genius and absurdity are nurtured, a never-ending carnival of creativity, pretension, inspiration, ambition and debate out of which, over the decades, individuals that change the world of architecture keep on emerging: Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Amanda Levete, the recently departed Will Alsop. It is English in its way, like a gentleman wearing exotic lingerie beneath his Savile Row suit, but international in its input of people and output of ideas.

Yet it has never had a leader like Eva Franch i Gilabert, a woman described as “a tornado… truly a force of nature” by those who have worked with her, and who will officially start as its new director on 1 July. She is someone for whom, as she puts it, “every single act in life is a creative action”, but without a single agenda or view of the world. She is, I put it to a former colleague, an incredible cloud of energy, intelligence and sociability without it always being clear where it all goes. “Exactly,” is the reply.

Stories about her abound: for example, that a potential career as a figure skater was cut short by injury at the age of 17. Or that, among the clothes she makes for herself is a dress made out of the mattress cover on which she and her siblings were conceived. She had youthful passions for triathlons, other forms of athletics and handball. Also for mathematics – “Especially,” she says. “I fell in love with second derivatives, problems of optimisation, and intersection of equations into space.” Having grown up in a rice-growing region of Catalonia, goes another story, she can tell at a glance what kind of rice is growing in a given field. “I can also recognise trees,” she adds, “and herbs, and clouds, and weather, and plants, and oranges.”

Born in 1978, she is the youngest holder of her post in the AA’s 171-year history. She is also the first woman to hold it permanently (her immediate predecessor, Samantha Hardingham, was a temporary appointment). Not that she wants to dwell on youth or gender. “People discriminate by the questions they ask,” she says. “People see me as this crazy young figure. My question is: why? There are presidents of countries who are younger.” She also resists being measured by those stories of her past: “I do believe that one can make oneself anew, with every place, and at any given time.”

The US pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale, co-curated by Eva Franch i Gilabert. Photograph: Marco Secchi/Getty Images

She has been working in the US since she won a fellowship at Princeton University in 2006 (“I dream in English, I curse in Catalan”). Since 2010 she has been head of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, a small but influential gallery-cum-thinktank. The architect Charles Renfro, president of the Storefront, says that she gave it “global reach… the entire world was her oyster”.

The Storefront project that she and others talk about most is called Letters to the Mayor, in which groups of local and global architects write to the leader of a given city – Nashville, Buenos Aires, Taipei – and propose ways of improving it. The mayors respond with various degrees of commitment and the project has led to such experiences as discussing, on Ukrainian TV, whether to preserve Soviet-era monuments. For Franch, however, the best thing about it was having the conversations that led to the letter, “with people who do not usually hang out – young, old, established, avant garde”.

Having the conversation is generally a big thing for Franch. She has talked of her fondness for cooking paella for colleagues, and then asking challenging questions, as a parent might, when they are most at ease. It is something she likes about the AA (which offers foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate courses)– when she was scouting the premises before her interview, students started talking to her without knowing whether she was a teacher or another student. “The real power of that school,” she says, “is you can have a conversation with anyone at any time about anything: architecture, politics, life.”

“The power of architecture,” she says, “is in bringing us together. I am highly optimistic that in spite of big tragedies architecture is still one of the most beautiful practices because you have to accept you are building for everyone.” At Storefront she edited a survey of the office manuals of American architectural practices called OfficeUS Manual, a lethally dull subject, you would have thought, but one she and her colleagues somehow made witty and surprising. Its purpose was to show that the production of buildings is collaborative and structured. “Independence isn’t an option” and “catastrophe can be avoided” are among its insights.

Procedural though it sometimes is, she says that architecture can also give you goosebumps, a phenomenon on which she started to write a paper at Princeton. “Indian culture has 16 senses,” she tells me, “and one is goosebumps.” She felt them, for example, when she visited Mies van der Rohe’s crystalline Farnsworth House in Illinois, in the snow, and found that its stone floor was unexpectedly warm. She felt them again when she chanced upon Gaudi’s alterations to the cathedral of Palma de Mallorca, having previously seen drawings of this work in his archive.

Her understanding of architecture, in other words, is broad, from the effects of acknowledged geniuses to the business models and organisational charts of practices. She also has a knack of making other activities sound architectural, such as the way her father “designed” the planting of orange trees so that they ripened at weekly intervals, “so that we could have orange juice in its prime taste throughout the winter”. “I loved the speed,” she says of handball, “the feeling of the group behaving almost like a swarm, the strategies developed and the creative process that the game became in every single match”.

Her willingness to embrace the technical and the procedural will come in handy at the AA, which has been suffering multiple crises to do with both budgets and the official processes of accreditation, without which its foreign students might have lost their right to stay in the UK. There was a case for choosing another candidate, more familiar with the arcana of British academic administration. Franch, however, says that “the first thing I asked for” were the accounts, budgets and strategic plans. “You learn a lot from loans, mortgages and interest rates,” she says. “Bureaucracy is just time. And knowing.”

Franch is someone for whom almost everything is fascinating and who is fascinating about almost everything, but some things remain elusive. She talks about the importance she gives to ideas and issues, but it’s hard to say what those ideas and issues are. After two hours of lunch-assisted interview, it dawns that to try to pin these down is not really the point. Renfro, who is also stumped when I ask for specifics, then finds a good formulation: “The way she approaches dealing with ideas is one of her ideas.”

Her energy has the potential to revitalise the AA. There’s also a non-zero chance that she and it will rapidly find out that her personality and singularity will be too much for their structures. Either way, thanks to the influence of the association, the effects could be felt in the world of architecture for decades.

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