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culture and enough power of dialogue, and
with sufficient understanding of how best
to fill those empty spaces.
WM: I don’t like how people use the
word ‘culture,’ but this is a beautiful way
of saying it. That you need a certain cul-
ture to see slightly further and create new
perspectives.
EA: You need a common language, espe-
cially in recent years. I find it very hard to
talk to the new guys behind the finances,
those in possession of the investment funds,
who are unable to accept that numbers
sometimes don’t tell the truth.
WM: It therefore depends on the people
you come across. The ones that you meet
are probably between 30 and 45 years of
age, just starting out in the business and
pressed upon to meet a set of objectives,
opening a box on the spreadsheet. Those
individuals are the most difficult to deal
with. But at a certain point other people
come on board – more mature and even able
to direct the younger guys. Their ambitions
are already different. And, as you were
saying at the start, there’s the question of
how to innovate. We are currently work-
ing on a project in Taiwan for an energy
company, and everything about it results
from a competition in which our practice
proposed to make the entire building out
of solar cells. The image was beautiful and
interesting but the idea, in and of its own
accord, was not that much of an innova-
tion; there are numerous buildings around
the world that are completely covered with
solar panels. But then came the interesting
part: after showing it to the older, mid-
generation group of investors and seeing
that they saw something in it, we brought it
up to the company director herself, and she
grasped the potential and proposed panels
that would function efficiently even when
installed on the north-facing facades of
buildings. Hence, an initial sketch can put
forward something that is not particularly
innovative, and into the picture comes a
company imbibed with the spirit of chang-
ing things, and this is the point at which
true development is possible.
EA: Yes, exactly, but that would require
a certain perspective and a level of culture
that is really not so widespread. In truth,
it’s only a very thin layer of society that is
capable of absorbing and understanding the
complexity of what it is we’re talking about,
so we ought to work towards expanding the
culture, although always in a natural way.
I don’t claim to be anyone’s teacher.
WM: So how would you like to do it?
EA: It would be great if we knew how
to expand things beyond Instagram. The
problem is that in the end you deal with
people who are not speaking the same lan-
guage as you, and you are compelled to find
an in-between or hybrid language, which
is not even always effective. We have to
know how to convey to those guys aged 30
to 45 that we’re not proposing something
that can make them lose their jobs, how to
convince them that we’re not just trying
to fool them.
WM: Mutual respect is a very important
thing to maintain if we want to be able to
carry out new steps.
