Imperfection and Humanity: José Selgas & Lucía Cano’s Architectural Vision

Imperfection and Humanity: José Selgas & Lucía Cano’s Architectural Vision by Ángel Bolaños Méndez

SelgasCano's architecture, irreverent and ultimately innocent in the play and fun it emits, is also a reflection of a sincere and carefree search to create spaces that reflect those who inhabit them in their character of imperfection. 

Do you see your architecture as a way of giving the world a little ugliness by creating something that does not seem to be a machine, but rather looks more like a craft? Is that a way of giving ugliness to a world that is looking for the opposite, looking for perfection?

Current architecture, in its constant search to be “eye candy”, is driven by the need to seduce, to make you fall in love at first sight, seeking to achieve the creation of sculptural objects that border on perfection in their constructive qualities. In its constant industrialization processes, it has become a mechanized procedure where the traits of humanity fade in the experience of the final product. 

However, in the words of architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano, architecture must be made so that people feel at ease, in order to provide convenience, comfort, and well-being. It’s the act of generating atmospheres, and that is true beauty. Architecture must move away from aesthetic norms, it must seek to detach itself from the accepted canons of beauty since this is simply a perception, something that’s universally felt before being understood, without the need to analyze or study it. 

For SelgasCano, imperfection precisely makes you feel more at ease, more comfortable, freer to occupy the space and live it without restrictions, without the limitations of feeling imprisoned in the neatness of a work of art that seeks to remain unaltered. Throughout their practice, they’ve chosen to accept and even promote imperfection as an act of exalting the human qualities that distinguish architecture from an industrialized product. If humans are imperfect beings, the architecture we make should reflect that imperfection, those details, those vestiges of irregularities that give it character and turn it into a craft.

The topic of beauty or ugliness is absurd since it’s not about visual values, it’s an unconscious search, which is achieved when we move away from aesthetics, outside the visual perception of space, in the interaction with the atmosphere created inside. This beauty is perceived after the satisfaction of different values ​​intrinsic to human needs such as comfort, lighting, ventilation, and the resolution of these ​​is something that ends up becoming beauty, and that is the beauty that SelgasCano consciously seek to achieve with their architecture. 

Although the search for imperfection isn’t fully related to an idea of beauty, it responds to the idea of ​​glorifying imperfection or rather, the human qualities of workmanship, distancing the product from that which is manufactured in series, in stratospheric magnitudes. In so doing, it detaches itself from mechanized processes, from the robotization of the most human art that is architecture. 

Why is something beautiful? Because there’s variation, because it’s imperfect, it’s different, it’s unique, it’s human, it’s real.

SelgasCano designed a school for Nairobi with a scaffolding structural system which embraces imperfection as a means of practicality.