The appointment is on a Monday afternoon in his office in Palo Alto, Barcelona. There, architect Luis Alonso (Madrid, 1955) receives us after several meetings with the office that the studio Alonso, Balaguer y Arquitectos Asociados (ABAA) has had in Santiago de Chile since 2011, when Alonso himself moved to take a first step towards the internationalization of the firm. "We took that path and opened offices in Santiago de Chile, Bogotá, and New York, and by working with different countries, cultures, and time zones, the excitement of projects since then is even greater," Alonso himself comments.
His legacy reaches more than 700 projects geographically distributed in 12 countries, with outstanding past works, already converted into references, which are followed by very recent ones such as the Iberdrola Innovation and Training Campus, inaugurated last April. "It is a collection of eleven multi-use buildings, what we like to call functional promiscuity, which translates into the coexistence of different uses and services.
This project also includes a 15,000 m2 photovoltaic pergola that covers the buildings at a height of 25 meters and powers the entire complex with electricity. Ten years ago, when we won the competition, this was an absolutely novel topic. Today, fortunately, electricity generation is already on everyone's lips," as the author himself explains.
Another of the novelties in development is the new Andorra Communal Stadium, which adds one more work – now 74 – to the studio's specialization in sports architecture.
Although life is full of coincidences, the passion for sports of both founders of the studio may have something to do with it. "Both my partner and I have been very linked to the world of sports; we were athletics rivals at 18, competing in different teams, and then we went on to compete in marathons." It was 1983 when the ABAA studio designed the Arsenal, the first urban sports center in Barcelona. "From there, we started a whole series of works where we sought specialization in this field. We developed the Metropolitan, Europolis, O2, Duet chains and are currently doing the same with Youtopia in Chile, in addition to developing all the spas for the Aire company. In all of them, we have sought to respond to one of our main concerns: people's well-being. And that involves sports, spa, and culture in general."
After 43 years of experience and a pandemic in between, the studio faces new challenges for the future with solutions that provide an extra level of functionality and well-being for the user. "When we consider homes for tomorrow today, we start from the intuition of trends. In this sense, the Covid-19 pandemic has become an accelerator of trends and has contributed to people being more sensitive to certain issues that were circulating."
Works such as the Bacatá Tower, in Bogotá, take all these issues and project them into what will become the tallest skyscraper in the Colombian capital. A residential building that will coexist with offices, shops, restaurants, a student residence, and a health center, among other services. "We all talk a lot about the concept of sustainability, and for Alonso and Balaguer, there is nothing more sustainable than buildings and neighborhoods being in operation the greatest number of days a year. That is truly sustainable. Energetically, it is much more attractive because everything is always functioning."
Given this desire to make neighborhoods much more livable and "more functionally promiscuous," Luis Alonso sees the real estate sector's strategy shift in recent times as key. "Until now, it moved by location, and everything else almost didn't matter. Today, that is changing, and the sector is opening up to other principles such as flexible housing and services, which we are developing a lot in our projects. This means that you can have your 90 m2 loft-type home in which we only fix the wet parts (bathrooms and kitchens), and the rest can adapt to the needs of each vital circumstance using prefabricated pieces that one can manage oneself.
Thus, if the case arises, everyone can set up one, two, or three rooms and adapt the space to functional needs. In addition, in some of the developments, we are trying to integrate all kinds of services that contribute to making life easier, such as urban gardens on the roofs, gyms, spa areas, centralized concierge, cold and hot storage outside the home, PET spas, or even drone parking."
Barcelona, a cohesive example
"Architecture has a giant social responsibility that architects, in general, have not known how to transmit. It can transform the city and its citizens, and the great example of this is Pascual Maragall, who managed to cohere the citizenry through good-level architecture and urban micro-spaces with which he generated a friendly city. The problem is that, in general, this must be accompanied by a significant political commitment. And it is that behind a good work, a good architect is not enough; a good client who commits and a political authority who believes and accompanies a little are needed. In this sense, the work of Las Arenas (Barcelona) is an example of this with added value that turned out good for everyone."
Barcelona, like many other cities, transformed at the beginning of the 20th century with the appearance of the car. The invention of the elevator by Elisha Otis gave it verticality… And everything indicates that now the pandemic will also change the city in terms of sustainability and shared services/environments. "The desire to share has come to stay. An example of this is the proliferation of carsharing, in addition to other trends such as sharing workspaces (coworking), community service spaces, or public spaces, among others."
The ABAA studio in Palo Alto is a clear example of these shared and flexible spaces. From here, a cohesive team works daily to offer functional and timeless architecture, based on criteria of coherence with the environment and generating great complicity with the client, whom they place at the center. But, beyond his role as an architect, Luis Alonso uses his free time to escape. "Reading is my passion, I keep running, and I write a book every year." And he meticulously records all this activity in small notebooks – he is already on number 50 since he started this particular logbook a decade ago – where he can consult all the books read and movies watched, with their respective rating, as well as the kilometers covered each day. "It's a matter of functional promiscuity brought to my field. One must be consistent with oneself."