In an era when mid-century Scandinavian furniture, with its disciplined and reassuring forms, enjoy an endless revival through a myriad of new interpretations, the designer architect Guillermo Santomà creates objects using cold and hard materials like glass, metal, rock and molded foam.
His modus operandi is more similar to a performer than an artisan, his functional sculptures are enriched with a certain poetry and can give an unexpected touch to the environments that host them.
Even his house follows this logic. Casa Horta is actually a three-storey building located on the outskirts of Barcelona that has maintained its bourgeois Art Nouveau facade but which has been completely modified internally, more redefined and developed than designed. A building with bizarre geometries in which Guillermo ignores the spatial logic in favor of color, a space similar to an immersive work of art that recalls the Muralla Roja by Ricardo Bofil.
Can you tell us something about your background and how your work has evolved?
What your projects represent for you?
All the projects are an investigation of materials forms and utility, I don t see the projects as individual projects I prefer to say that all the projects are the same is step by step the everyday working where I construct my project. I prefer to say that all these projects are like a vision, difficult to understand where begins the object and where I am. The materiality is not important for me, is just the medium to arrive where I want. I don’t understand the techniques. In the beginning, I thought that the only technique possible was thinking and now I begin to doubt that too
Do you have a material or a combination of materials that reflect your personality?
I don’t understand the materiality. The difference between objects and space is my real materiality. Is like when you are writing a note or seeing a movie, they tell you a historie and you read the poetry between of the lines, the history is important but all this images, words, materials, colors, all this is the most important for me
”To create is to destroy” I read this in one of your interviews…
I do not think I said that but I can understand why people think of my projects as a kind of destruction. The construction and destruction I think are the same thing, if we think of the classic sculptures created by the removal of material from a stone to build a beautiful body .. this is the kind of destruction that I understand.
What does Casa Horta represent for you?
Casa Horta is an example of how I work. My home is like an endless project.
What meaning do you give to the objects in your home?
I can’t consider an object as only an object because my whole house is like an installation, a daily performance in which all the objects make it possible to live the space. So the whole house is an object and all the objects change over time because you always need different functions, the function grows like materiality, I like to consider the function as a sculpture
In which room do you spend most of the time?
I don’t see the rooms in my house. The colors in each space connect to each other to understand that all that space is a home
What do simplicity and complexity mean to you?
I work with complexity to be very simple. You have to work really hard to be simple and is all this work that I consider complexity; all the time I use in building models, reading, writing, thinking … It may be the relationship between simplicity and complexity is the same between constructing and destroying. One is not possible without the other and this makes them the same
What is your wildest dream?
My wildest dream is to construct a new building from the beginning.
