Architecture in practice.
"We must see architecture in practice: in the world of work and business, of social prestige and political power, of engineering and computers, of romantic and daily life."

This statement results from replacing the word "poetry" with "architecture" in Mexican poet Gabriel Zaid’s essay titled Poetry in Practice. Initially, the substitution seems inappropriate. What could seem revolutionary in poetry—compromising it with practice, with the everyday—is in architecture, supposedly, a fundamental condition. Architecture exists only as it is linked to practice, to the world of work and business, to political prestige and power, to engineering and computers, and yes, to romantic and daily life. Nonetheless, some dream of an architecture that is autonomous, without external constraints; an architecture made as poetry is made: through the sole inspiration, judgment, and preferences of its author, without clients or codes, without boundaries or site constraints. Pure architecture like pure poetry, if such a thing really exists.

 Not surprisingly, those convinced that architecture is inevitably tied to a social context reproach the romantic minority for its exacerbated utopianism. Architecture cannot take place when it’s utopian: this is logical enough. However, the romantic few assure us that architecture, compromised as we often find it now with power, capital, or popular taste, loses the possibility for experimentation, subversive power or community sense. This division between the two camps represents  something of a caricature, but there is some truth to it.

Zaid’s essay critically refers to two opposing worlds: that of the arts and humanities, and that of science and technology. Their lack of interaction leads him to conclude that "it’s not that there are simply two cultures: there are two uncultures." Summarizing crudely, these two uncultures are poetry and practice, the two terms that the essay correlates. Zaid explains that poetry and practice were once synonymous, or at least, words that referred to two vast but related fields. "To make things (producing them, manufacturing them, inventing them, writing them) was ‘poein’ (from which came ‘poetry’). To do things (in a world of action) was ‘prattein’ (from which came ‘practice’)." In our time, poetry encompasses the arts and humanities, the intuitive and speculative, that which has multiple and variable functions— in other words, that which is considered to be useless, or at least not essential. In contrast, practice encompasses science and technology, the rational and the effective, the useful and the necessary, that which is hailed as most valuable to our daily life. This approach simultaneously denies both the productive and transforming potential of the poetic, as well as the not insignificant imagination and gratuity that exist in the practical.

In its usual written form, poetry is inseparable from the practice of speech. In a text appropriately called Literature and Life—poetry and practice?—Gilles Deleuze asserts that the writer’s task is to first become a stranger to one’s tongue and then to invent a new language within the old one. According to Deleuze’s characterization, poetry  involves the violent refusal of the common practice of language and its subsequent transformation and transcendence.  Poetry cannot separate itself from  language without simultaneously destroying both language and itself. Can we think of Architecture—like this, capitalized and italicized—in a similar way, despite its vastly and overwhelmingly mediocre built environment? Can we think of architecture as a poetic act in the broadest sense—an act of production, manufacture, and invention that violently  rejects and transforms the habitable and habitual environment and that, without being able to extricate itself from it, surpasses it, just as poetry does relative to language, since, through this act of extrication, it would destroy itself.  As Borges has insisted, poetry already exists in language and architecture already exists in the simple acts of dwelling and building.     

We must see poetry, or architecture in practice: in the world of work and business, of social prestige and political power, of engineering and computers, of romantic or daily life. Yet Zaid’s essay goes further. In a beautiful juncture, Zaid asks if it is possible to make a work—any work, be it literary, artistic, or architectonic—in the complete absence of credit. He is not referring to financial credit, although, as with any metaphor, and this is tangential, the word carries much of its original sense. The credit of which Zaid speaks—credere—is the confidence or belief that we have in works that are embraced and heeded because of their role in a practice that has no other name than life or culture.
Some architects—supposedly the best ones—complain about the increasing gulf between real estate speculation and what is assumed to be good architecture. There are also concerns regarding the separation between the political, economic, and social decisions that affect our built environment, and a certain type of work, each time more rare, dispersed, and concealed among anonymous housing. But the truly worrying fact is the ever-greater distance that separates architecture from culture or poetry from practice. An architect’s detachment from these aspects of the built world  is heroic and leaves the field open to supposedly less skilled practitioners who will readily offer a client what they demand and like without complications or refinements.

Practical Conditions
Not too many years ago, almost no one in the middle and upper classes dreamed of living in the center of Mexico City, an area seriously affected by the 1985 earthquakes and hampered by political inefficiencies. Those able to flee left the most crowded areas for the suburbs. However, in the areas of the city planned in the early twentieth century, development patterns changed slowly. In spite of crises and quakes, they maintained a certain urban coherence.  Without help from the political establishment, they attracted people with sufficient economic power to reactivate them. One of these areas is Condesa. From its inception, Condesa has been unique both typologically—long and narrow lots around a park that occupies the center of an old hippodrome—and socially, a good percentage of its inhabitants were European immigrants who, along with an erudite and emerging middle class, had different urban habits than the locals The area is characterized by a social and spatial fabric that is both coherent and flexible.
When both changing demographics and earthquake damage created empty lots in Condesa, an opportunity arose for those who were looking to return to a more urban lifestyle. These events provided the impetus for architectonic intervention based on a particular response to local conditions rather than on a utopian master plan. For those who were able to recognize them, the conditions for the meeting of architecture and practice were propitious. Little by little, almost unnoticed by the political establishment, through restaurants, bars, housing renovations and new constructions, Condesa was neither rejuvenated nor reborn: it was reinvented.

Pragmatism in Practice
If I had to label the architecture of Higuera y S·nchez beyond form or style, I would say that it’s pragmatic. It is a vague, imprecise and potentially confusing label, especially in a field in which practice—the act of continuously and habitually exercising construction and design skills—prevails over what is traditionally called theory—something brought to light through the discourse of actions—and over experimentation per se. If construction is the aim of offices bent on practicing, then the ways to effectively realize projects constitute their pragmatism. This pragmatism is understood not as a "theory of action" but as an interaction strategy—flexible and malleable, capable of engaging in subtle play with circumstances that determine a project’s feasibility. It is precisely the "exteriority" of such circumstances in reference to the project itself that is in certain cases reevaluated. The actions of any architecture office, from the more commercial and conventional to the more theoretical, take into account the fact that a project is determined by its conditions. However, despite the pretense of practical realism, most offices in Mexico producing critically sanctioned architecture are passive against the conditions that affect the realization of projects because they assume that these conditions are extra-architectural. A pragmatic approach involves considering as part of the project the factors that determine it. One does not start by tending to the conditions of the design but by designing the conditions. Higuera y S·nchez is one of the offices that is doing this.
This process is most clearly revealed in the "group" of buildings in Calle Veracruz. Here the word "group" does not designate a totality but rather a progressive assembly of various interventions in adjacent lots. Each intervention redefines those that precede it and fixes new conditions for those that follow. For example, the open space created in the first project due to convenience or restrictions later becomes a part of the central patio that defines the composition of the third set of buildings and forms a common space between the three projects that is at once fragmented and continuous. Between ‘old’ and new construction, between recovered and reinvented space, an interior, yet semi public common space appears. This gesture alone reconfigures the initial interventions that, in the strictest sense, were not yet part of a complex.

Another outcome of this pragmatic process is the direct participation of users in the shaping of their space. While it is common in the case of single-family dwellings for clients to transform the unit they finance and occupy, when this transformation takes place in  each apartment within a group of buildings, a different conception of the project appears. While the building’s exterior is governed by the rigor of a reinforced concrete structure and by the formal wishes of its authors, each interior permits small individual variations with a certain degree of freedom. This variable and undefined condition of the interior has led Higuera y S·nchez to a progressive purification through which initial formalist gestures disappear and leave in their place more schematic ones that respond to contextual conditions. Higuera y S·nchez’s more recent work approximates the diagram—rectangular plan divided by circulation in two smaller rectangles or two triangles—and proposes itself as merely the container of open space.In so doing, it exploits the occupants’ dispositionto enter a game that demands the conscious shaping of the space they inhabit. 
For Higuera y S·nchez, the redefinition of the project’s context and interior space is a process which begins with the economic and political conditions of each project. The project’s master plan is sabotaged from within through the acceptance of singular variations. At the scale of the city, a pragmatic vision makes possible punctual interventions within a flexible, even vague, urban scheme. To the Veracruz projects we could add Higuera y S·nchez’s other work in this area and, on another level, the series of new "authored” interventions and even preexisting buildings. Without larger pretensions and hopes for heroic urbanism, this wager on urban reconfiguration is made as it has always been made: through the addition of parts.  Obviously, the bet would not be fruitful without the backing from the cultural phenomenon of Condesa, which is distinctly different from the rest of the city. Other neighborhoods lack cohesion among inhabitants or the economic means to initiate interventions. Marginal but in no way a minority, these neighborhoods present themselves as challenges to pragmatism and assume, above all, the ethical compromise that architecture always entails.