Fran Silvestre

Spanish architect Fran Silvestre graduated with honours from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Valencia in 2001, obtaining a year later an MA in urban planning at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, also with the highest grade, while working for MVRDV architects. Having won a scholarship, he subsequently worked at the studio of Pritzker Prize laureate architect Alvaro Siza in Portugal, until 2005 when he founded Fran Silvestre Arquitectos, with projects that redefine abstraction, emphasizing white coloured plasticity and clean geometries, and delivering many awards and publications in the international press. Upon completion of his Doctorate, with distinction cum laude at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), his academic career became a worthy rival to his professional.

Μ.Κ.: You have lectured at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), and teach at the Projects Department of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), where you currently also hold the position of Director of the MArch programmes, as well as being visiting professor on several architecture schools in Europe, and most recently at Kansas State University, in USA. Does this proximity to architectural theory feed into your own architectural practice, and how?

F.S.: Teaching gives you an enormous amount of energy. In the end, it is an exchange between the teacher and the students. If they maintain an interest, they will keep you updated and also maintain your initial investigative intention, your curiosity. The talent is always there, playing an active part in the whole procedure, as happens in all creative professions. However, this specific field of architecture requires a more personalized approach.

Μ.Κ.: Your design, be it buildings, furniture or sustainable wind towers, is permeated by the modernist essence. According to Le Corbusier, that is perfectly captured in the Cycladic vernacular, with the Mediterranean Sea as its common denominator; white volumes of fluid plasticity, nothing unnecessary, everything integrated. What new can one offer to this complete set of aesthetics?

F.S.: There is always the quality of continuity that one can offer, to an environment-framework that ought to be respected, but also understood from its own spatial and temporal point of view. In this way we can give value to an architecture that is capable of persisting in time without becoming obsolete.

Μ.Κ.: Your projects share your subtractive aesthetic approach, each with distinct variations. What is your main concern, designing them?

F.S.: The focus in all my projects arises from a double commitment: the will to give a technical response to a specific context and the desire to seek beauty through the built work.

Read the full interview at the Villas 2018 annual issue.