DISEÑO DE LA CIUDAD_nº52 (february 2006)

The work of díez+díez diseño arises from the consideration of the project task like an activity that never can be loose of the previous experience; we consider an activity first of all existential.

Although without rejecting the theoretical component that can surround or precede to any work of design, our work tries to be based fundamentally on the personal establishment of the problem, requirement or circumstances that surround to the project; this exposition takes us to a constant process of observation, analysis and accumulation of data and the environment  that surrounds to us and we live in; for example, we continue considering the bookcase Virtual, produced by Miscel·lània, our better design, on having had born directly of the need experienced on having had to solve the problem of accumulating more than 5,000 books.

Another aspect of our work, getting in the field of the urban equipment, is the type of relation that we maintain with the cities that we visit in our trips, either be for professional reasons or for leisure; we like to live the spaces public in the cities that we visit sitting in its benches, using its litter baskets or their system of signaling, of a form more active than a simple tourist would do.

Of this type of observation we have got to perceive the public space as a tremendously changeable and dynamic area where factors as the immigration, the new forms of urban culture, the aging of the population, etc., etc., it demand of the designer a flexible response that gives place to the creation of polyvalent elements of urban furniture and in many occasions of new typology, What unfortunately hits with the commercial approaches of the businessman who tends not to assume the risks of the innovation until the competition do it, turning that way to the design in a mere instrument of formalization.

To this it is necessary to add a differential fact of the design of urban furniture with relation to another type of design of product; it is a question of his tax character; We refer to the fact of which whereas on having chosen as consumers a table or a lamp for our home we assume part of his suitability for the above mentioned area, since we presuppose certain critic spirit in the consumer fact, beyond the mere factors of price and taste, the urban furniture dominates; we want to say definitively that the user of a bench placed in a park cannot choose directly the model of seat that she would like to enjoy, which it supposes for us  a bonus of raising of awareness at the moment of developing our labor in this field; our last objective definitively is to satisfy the client/user of the secondary client/city council-construction company of our direct client/manufacturer.

As for our way of approaching our methodology of work we might say that we use the experiences and previous works to come to a certain extent from the tour that we cross with every new project; from a certain moment the above mentioned way multiplies in many possibilities of round which choice will answer and come determined by the project that in this moment we have in hands.

This get to us as well not to try to maintain an own style recognizable; we try that each project arises from its own necessity, as much from use, as formal or technical; thus, we can create pieces of essence so intimately minimalist as much, in its exposition as in its formal result as it is the Godot bench, as a design so absolutely baroque and maximalist in its conception high-tech like the Miriápodo bench.

We are interested neither in the modes nor the trends and we claim for our work the exact degree between contemporaneousness, which makes it understandable in the frame of the society in the one that has been created, and the atemporality that leads it to being estimated a lot of time after his creation.

Another fundamental component of our work is the use of which we denominated transversality, directly related concept with the lateral thinking; for transversality understand the type of conceptual approach that we use in the first stage of our work; As they use metallic rods or wires to define the soul or framework at the moment of shaping a figure in mud, we use materials by all appearances foreign to the field of the design like could be the poetry, the philosophy or the theatre, or more directly as the sculpture or the painting, but almost never the own area of the design; this approach leads us in the first stadium to elaborating a list of concepts, ideas or phrases that later are materialized in form of sketches and models nearer the classic concept of the design process.

Two significant examples of this method of work would be the Zen and Godot bench; whereas the first ones were born from a visit to a space so loaded with meanings as it is Chillida-Leku, the second ones they did it from our intention to define a furniture element that could be integrated in the stage scene of the existentialist work Waiting for Godot of Samuel Beckett.