Entrepreneur? Agitator!
Making changes is difficult. Even though it’s for the better, any change is irritating. That’s why those of us who tend to propose changes – God knows why – initially cause irritation. Nobody likes being irritated. So, what we really need is to be flexible, so we can introduce change without making too many waves. If you are not flexible, a proposed change will falter and fail and another opportunity will be missed.

THINK AND ACT. An entrepreneur is someone who thinks and acts. Regardless of their company’s size, entrepreneurs always have the right attitude, even when they make their bed.
Entrepreneurs? There is an etymology for the word entrepreneur which may be true or not, but it is certainly evocative. The original French word entrepreneur is said to have appeared at the beginning of the 16th century in reference to the adventurers who travelled to the New World in search of opportunities without really knowing what they were getting into. In the early 18th century, the French extended the meaning to include those who built bridges and roads and, wait for it, architects! Its meaning in a business context was first defined by Richard Cantillon in 1755, in reference to those facing a process with a degree of uncertainty.

ENERGY. An entrepreneur is someone who has energy which is being used up as they go along but has strategies to recover such energy throughout any process.
We recommend plenty of practice using a certain ring-shaped toy made of wood or plastic, which induces little more than physical activity but may also serve as metaphor – the hula hoop. An agitator must be able to make a hula hoop dance. And what is that supposed to mean? It means they must be flexible. And what does being flexible mean? Well, a lot of things and everyone must find a way to be flexible. It’s not a question of opposing superior powers, but of using them, like the new generation of sailing boats whose rigging transmits opposing forces as they move instead of putting up resistance to them. It’s like having a weather vane which is constantly turning, but we have to know how to stay on course while making use of all the energy produced by the rotating vane. Did anyone understand the metaphor? Do the hula hoop.
Arc del Teatre/…

ATTITUDE. Attitude is a key word. Attitude is being prepared to do things with enthusiasm while completely rejecting the ridiculous. We should act much more like Americans and less like Europeans, with a touch of innocence, to be sure, something which is always associated with the capacity which enthusiasm has of seeing things where they are not. Give me an attitude and I will move the world.
Agitator! You should realise your work is associated with the act of agitation. You are an agitator who makes others lift their sedentary asses from the chair they are keeping warm.
Questions-Answers/…

CONVINCE. The capacity to convince, which is probably related to the capacity to make a negotiator participate in what you are proposing. It’s not so much the fact they are attracted by your project rather that you invite them to participate and suggest that they could play an important role.
Projects need to be shared. Nobody can undertake a project on their own, even less so in our field, in this small country of ours full of envious and lazy people. Something good can probably come out of this. Anyone who is in a position to help us must also see potential for themselves in our projects. As we may not know who can offer us help we may need in the future, we have to remain open-minded. An entrepreneur needs to be a great host who is building a large house where they can receive many people.
Chic&Basic Born/ Hospes Palma/ Hotusa Arc de Triomf/…

LAB and AGENCY. Owning a company where 50 % of your business does not make a profit, does not produce anything which risks being sold or generating any kind of economic earnings … at least in direct way.
In our field, architecture and industrial design, there are many people doing things and doing them well. It was very difficult to get ahead. The problem was and is that everyone works within very similar parameters. We needed to find a different approach. This, of course, involved looking in many different directions. We thus created the LAB, which is basically a place where a fair number of people are working in many different directions. A word secretly taken from a restaurant menu, for instance, could become a stimulus and lead to a particular line of work. Such a process may take a few days as it does not suggest anything. Or it may just grow and grow and end up becoming something which may be the beginnings of something else.
Galactic Suite/ Catalogue of high-rise buildings/…

SOMEBODY HAS TO BELIEVE IN YOU. It’s not possible to do anything alone. In our case, belief in you begins with a father, a mother, then continues with the Architect’s Cooperative Credit Institute and now is based in the company itself, 50 % of which does make a profit.
Risk? Change, uncertainty and often risk. These are terms traditionally associated with entrepreneurs, but everything is really much easier. Entrepreneurs aren’t actually the kind of people who like risk. Entrepreneurs are smart people who seek to make use of things they have around them. They reorganize and adjust the things they see in a way which brings a benefit, some value. It’s not necessarily a question of making money. The same thing goes for those who help us, after all there has to be a great deal of faith at the beginning as almost nobody is born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Those who are actually born with a silver spoon in their mouth start to use it without knowing what it is really used for. It goes without saying that the only person who can have faith in you is your father or someone similar.
Mother’s bath/ Architect’s Cooperative Credit Institute competition/ Be your own client: ONE,… /…

PROFIT? DEBT! It’s not very clear who profits. Companies move forward, people get paid and there is often debt. Debt is detrimental to profit but it doesn’t seem to be harmful for companies. I would even go as far as saying it was favourable.
Smartass!
Some people say that an entrepreneur is a smartass who sees an opportunity and organises resources to set things in motion or capitalise on it.
If you’re broke, buy houses!/…

ADD+ meets up in Cuba. He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. How a story can be created, invented, dreamt up from a few little details, hints, or rumours. Dirty tricks while flirting, being coquettish. Taking the game seriously, sifting reality through a sieve even more biased towards the host than a Champions League referee may be.
ADD+ invents programmes for itself, invents projects and invents clients. From a few scraps of information which others would throw to the chickens, ADD+ cooks up plots which ridicule the Maginot line of castles in the air and whose next link will sketch the Great Wall across the sky in China.
From a conscientious, meticulous gaze, ADD+ rediscovers something which appears, if not by coincidence, then a little unobtrusively, and very often manages to re-find itself. Travelling through Cuba, ADD+ discovers itself in the way Cuban women concoct some kind of relationship based on a glance cast by squinty, frantic eyes underlined with a touch of lust and lechery which greedily try to embrace a burst of curves.
Feigning disinterest, although it took a great hard work to get you to where you are, you thus find yourself with a project of your life without you under discussion, demanding to be called into existence at every stroke of the pen and through discreet babbling over the phone. ADD+, our woman in Havana. You said we’d get to know each other first. I am an honest woman and let me be quite clear. I am a lady in my own house.
They even expect you to cook.

Lidl is a European discount supermarket chain of German origin, which has already become established in 17 countries. It specialises in foodstuffs, drinks, cleaning articles and other household items, but no pieces of jewellery as yet. They have limited offers – normally for two or three days – on more expensive items such as electrical appliances, computers or tools, but no pieces of jewellery as yet. Lidl also sells own label products, but it hasn’t dared to sell any pieces of jewellery as yet. According to well-informed sources, the supermarket does all this so as to be able to offer the lowest prices possible, its main objective. Independent studies by consumer organisations have not detected pieces of jewellery amongst Lidl ranges, an item which could very well be offered at a much lower price than other brands. Giving people what they want is not a strategy. To a certain extent, it is a mission and not necessarily one with economic productivity as its only objective.

What is a jewel?
It’s an authentic piece which transmits a sense of well-being to the person who is wearing it and, above all, it engages them in communication.

What do you believe will be the jewel of the future?
It will most probably be a piece which contains information technology, something related to the potential of internet which enables people to communicate with one another. The piece of the future is one which engages the user, activates them and urges them to communicate with others. It’s a PIN which opens doors.

How would you define the current situation with regard to jewellery in Catalonia? Why has it come to such a situation?
The second question already gives away the fact that a gloomy answer is expected to the first one. Well, regardless of this to some extent, and very much as a result of it, I’m glad I’ve been asked this question. In the present situation outdated models have become exhausted. Thinking of a piece of jewellery as a unique piece and as something based on precious materials and on originality due to craftsmanship has no future in society.The future lies in communicating, making things social, sharing.
We have come to such a situation due to a certain persistence in insisting on a traditional characteristic of ornamentation – its uniqueness. It’s a restrictive idea, obsolete, something which belongs in a museum.

Do you think the sector is modernising itself?
No. It revolves around outdated criteria and efforts to modernise – which are, in fact, many – are focussed on approaches to management and not on putting forward a much-needed, new idea of jewellery.

Which path must jewellery take into the future?
First of all, calling itself ornamentation rather than jewellery as doing so will open up the field and prevent it from being restricted to an exclusive circle of people. The future of jewellery lies in creating pieces which are more like tools for making contact with other people and not like a beacon which announces the presence of a self-complacent ego. It lies more in pieces which multiply and bring about communication. A piece you buy in one place will also be accessible in another place or for other people, and will incorporate a way to establish contact. It’s here where information technologies should be used. An iPod or a mobile are pieces containing identity and communication. Such trends should be taken up by the world of traditional jewellery-ornamentation. But it’s not a case of embedding a diamond into an MP3 player, rather the piece which serves as an ornamentation for an individual should be a means of communication. It is shared with others, maybe many others.

What is your contribution to the sector?
Up to now ornamentation was a way to display social status. Jewels indicated the class to which the person wearing the piece belonged. DuchClaramunt has been saying for years that ornamentation is more related to the feelings inside a person and that the user’s interaction with the piece should be an unavoidable option.  Ornamentation is a way in which people can feel good. We could say that the thing which is related to people’s well-being today is a mixture between technology and sharing. In short, ornamentation is communication. DuchClaramunt is preparing a piece of ornamentation which will be on sale at newsstands. It is designed to reach the largest number of people in the greatest number of places possible without restricting it to one country. It’s a bracelet which is activated once it has been purchased, thus opening up the possibility of communicating with its twin piece which will have been purchased by somebody else in another place, which may be faraway. The piece offers an identity, but it also signifies belonging to a group and the chance to communicate with other members in the group. The concept of a jewel being something unique should be turned on its head and ornamentation should convert such a concept into a sign of identity which brings people together, leading them to a place where many people feel good and feel good together in a community. The newsstand bracelet is a tool for sociability.

Marco Polo was an explorer, so was Ali Bey. They were pioneers who dared to go where very few people had ever been before and then went on to publicise their travels and talk about them. There were many who travelled in the past, but only a few of them actually managed to make a record so that we could learn from them. They wrote about their actual travels, not the mere act of travelling, as there were also many others who used to simply travel, just like we continue to do so today.
When starting to think about the hotels we have to build, we decided to look back not at historic hotel architecture, its large or small buildings, and its architectural styles, but rather look at the individuals who travelled in former times. It was then we realised there was a difference between what we could call a traveller and what we now call a tourist. An aspect which caught our attention most and which we decided to recapture by adapting it to our circumstances and times, is the active character of a person who journeys about the world, the traveller, as opposed the more passive tendency of following established routes and routines as a tourist. Our latest projects thus revolve around returning a type of protagonism to people which goes beyond the tendency to treat them as someone who has to be led by the hand and considers them as discerning individuals capable of enjoying an activity. This is where the concept of interactivity appears, an idea we want to transfer to our hotels. This is not only to provide stimuli which will lead to responses being produced, but, more importantly, also to supply tools such as spaces, possibilities and times so that people can interact both with inanimate objects which surround them and with other people they come across in a place such as a hotel.
To turn from the more ethereal to something more urban, let us start by making notes about the role of light and interactivity. We might accept that if something cannot be seen, then it has no reason to exist. Now you see it, now you don’t. On this basis, light is fundamental, not only to make a certain atmosphere real, but also to establish the type of sensation it has in relation to the colour objects reflect. Once such a situation is established, our aim is to give the traveller the chance not only to experience different lighting ambiences, but also to exercise control over them. It should be added that the starting point is always the person and not the room, so in a double room both guests should have the opportunity to exercise separate control over the ambience. If there are two controls, it is bound to produce some kind of dilemma, which irresistibly leads to some kind of communication. Neither impositions or suggestions are accepted, the basis of communication is an action. In this sense there is a certain preoccupation with sustaining the functioning of the hotel, which is based on making the guest the protagonist. Actions traditionally carried out by hotel staff may be left to the guest. For instance, room service actually becomes a self-service area, or an open buffet as it were, where contact is encouraged between guests from different rooms. We regard this as another level of interactivity. It’s not a question of making customers work, rather it is providing them greater control over their environment and providing them with the opportunity to act.
Giving such freedom to the guest means some ideas we have about spaces inside a hotel are brought into confusion as regards fixed elements and mobile ones. This is what we could call the concept of a single-doored hotel. This means the only true door is the one which divides the street from the hotel interior. From there on, more than finding closed spaces and more doors, you will have the possibility of attaining greater intimacy without losing contact with the whole. This leads us to the fact spaces are multifunctional to a certain extent, a third level of interactivity, meaning corridors accept their role as an anteroom for bedrooms and stairways allow for peaceful conversation.
Last of all, the urban character of the building shouldn’t be lost, the indisputable fact that it lies within the city. Just as people should have the tools to interact, the building should also try to establish some kind of communication with the urban context. Coming inside from the outside street, there will always be hotel cafes, or now the healthy trend to recover the tradition of hotel restaurants. This is a strategy which helps to sustain quality cuisine combined with a clientele of travellers staying alongside other travellers or residents in the city. It is a way to reduce the sense of isolation with respect to guests in a hotel. Going outside the hotel from the inside strategies may appear to communicate not the presence of the hotel, but rather the fact that activities are carried out inside. From less to more and going back to little, just like the different lighting ambiences in the room being changed according to the mood of the guests staying in them are transferred to the areas of circulation in order to participate in their changing light configuration, the same light can be noticed from the street, thus involving the passer-by a little in the traveller’s place.

First of all, a series of premises are set out as a starting point, which should, theoretically, govern the research.
Regardless of what the governing part seeks to propose, the premises are interpreted by the performer, the servant, in the following way:
We have a mass or a certain something which is wrapped around the essence or core in question. The objective is to reach inside what is under the wrapping, and to find how to bring light to it, how to proliferate the light and diffuse it.  The next step is how to stop this light, how to deliver it.
The same strategy could be applied to light as to smell, sound and humidity.
Images will immediately come to mind long before modelling begins. The first rough attestation is created from the point of view of the governing part, where the performer will set out to search for such objectives independently from the process.  But curiosity is not subject to rational control and they say that’s the way cats get killed. Meow.
Four courses of action are considered.
The mass and its cracks. Poking about, sculpting and having Superman’s power of vision which allows you to see even through kryptonite. Second recrimination due to a whole series of actions without any apparent sense or adjectives, which denote an escapist attitude and lack of commitment.  Material: wax
The columned mouth or the toothless room, which more than a course of action is like a drawing where the mass is regarded as an accumulation of elements which become evident due to the absence of some or many of them from where you expected to find them. Material: card
The colander eclipse finds its origins in the notion that the moon has tubes, holes or something similar running through it, meaning it fails in its attempt to block the Sun’s rays as they make their way to earth, but, in turn, this attempt becomes a triumph with the success of Saturday Night Fever.  Material: alginate
The engine in a Cherokee, or how such an accumulation of contrasting elements make up content and a continent at the same time.  In other words, depending on how far you are involved, you don’t know whether the jumble is being hidden or the jumble is hiding something. The performer has always been surprised by the fact that, despite being an accumulation of elements standing apart from one another, not a single wave of light manages to get through. The engine from a Seat Marbella will not suffice. Material: Internet

1. the mass and its cracks.
The first step consists in going down to a shop run by Orientals at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon and looking for wax. Two types of candles are chosen – one of them stands out due to its colour and size. The other is completely inconspicuous – acquired just because it is white and to see what happens. The shop assistant says it is very beautiful and very cheap as he points to a clearly useless metal holder at the candle base.
One. The large one is circular, green. In parts it looks translucent, but this cannot be proven. Perhaps it is just our imagination.  It also gives off an aroma.  It has three wicks, meaning three flames came be alight at the same time. The performer looks at it and smells it.  He takes a pair of tweezers and removes two of the wicks carefully, leaving a tunnel which passes all the way through the candle. The third wick won’t come out, so it is lit and the wax melts. If we are patient, it may just leave another hole through the candle.
Conclusion: With regard to light: mass may not be opaque, and if pressure is put on the performer, it could be said that the candle can give off light itself.  With regard to smell: the material itself gives off a smell which hasn’t been added to it, but is rather a constituent part of its characteristics and can be stimulated, that is to say, regulated to a certain extent.  With regard to access: the candle becomes perforated as some of its components, the wicks, are removed.
Two. The small candles. They are released from their cellophane wrapping and the sky blue bow. They are examined carefully and as the performer cannot think of any use for them, they are placed in the waste paper basket. Tweezers are used once more to remove the wicks – successfully in one case, a failure in the other. This time a complete tunnel is not achieved. The performer takes a Stanley knife and tries to cut through one of the candles – surprise – a wall on the outside and one on the inside. One is made of wax, which gives it shape and covers the outside surface. The other is made of a synthetic material which acts as a filler.  We take a tin soldering iron and start to melt the filler in order to reconstruct the skin again afterwards. Filled beforehand, now empty.
The wax which melts solidifies quickly. A receptacle is made where the wax falls. Several perforations are made in the receptacle so it will be more stable on the table, but – or surprisingly – the wax partially leaks through until it blocks up the holes itself, a victim of its own success.
Once the mass is hollowed out, we put it up against the light and can see little. We are going to perforate. We look for an instrument which will enable us to make small perforations and we find a brass rod.  We heat it and focus our efforts a while on piercing one of the candle walls.
We construct a template so as to make the process less haphazard. However, the template is actually designed with the slight intention of creating two highly perforated areas, the rest less so and more random to a certain extent.   We perforate the other side directly with the hot tip of the soldering iron.
Conclusion: Perforations reveal the thickness of things and they also make us think about what is behind and the existence of places on the other side. By knocking gently we may discover that there may be something on the other side – instead of sounding hollow, an aria may burst out.
 
2. the columned mouth or the toothless room
One. The volume is added to. The aim is for it to be a certain three dimensional shape – above, below, to the right and to the left. Two horizontal planes made of card are set up and are joined together using three pieces of two different widths.  Each plane will have a minimum of two sets of three pieces of different lengths which will join it to the two planes at different distances. Three planes are perforated with circular holes. The groups of vertical pieces define the different areas like a cage, where little pieces of silver foil are placed.  If the paper is blown upon, it moves and makes a noise.
Conclusion: adding elements and holes defines areas, but without confining them. The openings which are made into the space itself help to deceive perception. This is the way to win the game. The planes accompany the light, particularly when they are linked to a perforation. The perforations on different levels may not be facing one another, so light enters in a more indirect way, thus making perception of the space more complicated.
Two. Between the mass, the adding of volume and the preconception of the moon being a colander, several sheets are perforated.  Certain areas are designated to be perforated generously, but without trying to achieve perfect alignment of the holes between the different sheets. Two sheets are covered by smooth silver foil on one side, a third one with crumpled silver foil.  A base is constructed with grooves at different distances – some are parallel, others are not – in order to be able to fit the sheets and see the latticed effect of the misaligned holes.
Conclusion: Making additions adds volume, but multiple perforations add air, so it isn’t a volume which is stifling. The slatted effect doesn’t have to be permanent, it can be modified. The walls can be alive. Light and perception can be changed at will, or randomly, or controlled by a complex system (such as the day).
 
3. the colander eclipse
The moon is a colander. In 1 we had a mass on which we performed different actions. Now we are going to do the reverse (the performer would say “a slight reverse”, knowing full well that the governing part considers the expression as a sign of insecurity) and the incisions or perforations are going to be planned beforehand.  A user-friendly, quick-setting liquid material – alginate – is used as well as translucent materials which are also edible – sweets, jelly beans. In this way slight expectation is created. Several tests are carried out. A. Different coloured jelly beans are placed in contact with the formwork (a plastic cup). Their position is adjusted with needles. Some jelly beans are placed at different distances from the perimeter. B. « Bridges » are made by stringing jelly beans together side by side, adjusting their position with needles. We ensure the skewered jelly beans are different colours. The performer manages to prick himself several times. C. Several tubes are put in place using needles, which will go through the mass.  D. Different tubes.  Jelly beans are positioned in the inside part, some just touching the tubes, others have the tubes running through them.
It’s possible to see how light comes through the coloured pathway of jelly beans. As you look through some of the tubes, colour can be seen at the end. The jelly beans seem to be dissolving, possibly as a reaction to the alginate.
Conclusion: intuition of “walled” elements gives a feeling of thickness in matter.  Light can be delivered, but at the same time it’s as if we become its baggage which it takes inside.  It’s also possible to think of a formwork which has disappeared instead of a missing formwork. This is somewhat like a technique for a constructor of pyramids, or like using ice as a dead weight in the Sahara Desert.
 
4. the engine in a Cherokee
We search for electric and combustion engines on the internet. We also open up the hood on a Cherokee Unlimited and a Grand Cherokee. This time we only look. The different elements such as tubes, metal boxes and bars go in and out, they duck into the jumble of metals and plastics only to come out again a few centimetres further along. Or then again, not. Their rounded edges prevent it from being perceived as a solid mass. They all seem to be elements millimetrically apart from one another.
While undertaking research we come up against a brain with all its protuberances, its grey matter, its shadows and its areas of activity.  They are different in each person, different according to the sun which shines upon it. 
Conclusion: Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between content and continent, between what is hidden and what it is hiding. There is team work here.
Roughness gives a vast feeling of heaviness, of seriousness, particularly if curved shapes predominate.
 
The outcome is:
Composite: composite: made up of disparate or separate parts or elements; compound. A picture, photograph, or the like, that combines several separate pictures. 

The starting points for our projects are not pre-established schemes which predetermine the final shape, rather they consist of ideas, concepts. These generate processes and systems which, once a particular need is covered, go on to find the next solution of their own accord. We thus understand how a tub, a peg, a tactile quality, an empty space, a face-to-face encounter, or bobbin lace can generate any kind of object. All that remains is to study what the object signifies as such, what its qualities are and redefine it. A new conception of the object emerges from this re-reading, thus giving it a new form.

The system is rooted in a constant revision of the way of understanding things, reinterpreting their qualities. The key factor here is that this represents a work tool which allows us to tackle a design on any scale, from a piece of jewellery to an urban planning project. It is thus understood that the same system can be used to find solutions for such apparently diverse designs – the qualities of a theatre curtain and its folds emerge as the Peça-Teló (“Theatre-Curtain-Piece”); the Termo-Pack gives the user the option of delivering a present hot or cold; the Pica-Container reflects the idea of something we can use to hold hygiene products without getting sprayed or dirty; The Arxiu-Mirador (“Windowed Archive”) in Vilafranca de Penedès came about after studying the concept of an archive and then removing it from the idea of a horizontal container so as to transform it into a windowed-vertical-store; the Cases-Mur i Espiral (the Wall and Spiral Houses) respond to topographical factors through their shape, whereas the Casa-Tub (the Tub House) responds to the geographical direction it faces. 

The system could be explained through POCKET-WORDS, ideas which study and re-understand qualities so they can be transposed into projects. In this respect, we can indeed talk of a pocket where a hand searches around, finds something, is surprised and makes a discovery. Starting from a simple idea, a product of a careful study of conditions, the complete design of the product emerges of its own accord, down to the tiniest of details.

Such a formula reflects a great honesty and greater care towards the object and its user. Leaving completely aside any personal influences on the design, the latter is a product, above all, of careful attention to the needs which the consumer demands, needs which are resolved in POCKET-WORDS.