Conversations: Federico Garcia Lammers
Federico and I are fortunate by-products of similar mentors and environments. We are both natives of the South American pampas, and graduates from American Midwestern architecture schools. There, we were encouraged by scholars like Malini Srivastava and Mike Christenson to look beyond architecture; to consider processes and methods to be just as critical.
We got a chance to talk once the spring semester of 2020 ended: Federico is an assistant professor at South Dakota State University Department of Architecture (DoArch), where he teaches and runs the design practice LAB-OR alongside his wife Jessica Garcia Fritz.
“I graduated in 2008-2009, when the bottom fell out for our graduating class. Jessica and I had decided to get married, and soon after we lost our jobs in Minneapolis. We took the opportunity to move to New York, which we may not have done if we hadn’t been in that position of starting over. We were there for about four years. There are certainly things I miss - I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a place where I don’t miss certain aspects of it. I’m a nostalgic person. I miss Uruguay a lot, no other place compares to it. I moved to the US in my last semester of high school. Due to the early 2000s economic crisis in Uruguay and Argentina, my family moved to South Dakota, and I immediately decided I didn’t want to live here. Fifteen years later, Jessica and I moved back to teach at DoArch, so now I never say never (laughs).
Once Jessica and I started to do work together and with other people, we wanted to keep some kind of parallel project that wasn’t necessarily tied to our day-to-day work. It is an opportunity to rethink some of the work already developed by the two of us and our collaborators, and it is closely tied to our teaching. As of right now, it turned into an archive of incomplete work where all can be revisited and you can thread the work together. We don’t have 30 years of experience doing the same thing with the same client, so it collects the things we do and puts them in places where we can revisit with hindsight.
We have both realized we didn’t know much about the actual labor that goes into making architecture. We just have become more and more interested in the boring things that define our architectural labor. They aren’t the most glamorous parts of design, but they are essential. Teaching also gives you a chance to dwell on things like specifications, regulation, and question why they often aren’t entwined with design education.
At this point, we haven’t really pursed an agenda to practice in Uruguay that goes beyond academic and research work. I know too many architects in Uruguay, and it’s a tight-knit community. I think my condition to taking work there would be to commit quite a bit of time and live there for a while.
The architects I know in Uruguay are a pretty diverse group in terms of the work they do. Some do work with varied client types and scales; other friends have smaller practices and also teach; and the smallest group of friends opened construction companies and are designing and developing their own work. A friend of mine, for instance, brought in expertise in metal stud and drywall construction and they are now able to provide that as a “high-end” method of construction. A lot of these high-end buildings come from a construction boom that happened in the last 10-20 years, and most of which comes from foreign capital.
In South America, the architectural practice terrain is like quicksand. How do you sustain your practice once you’re in it? If you have the privilege not to enter the quicksand (because you can teach or subsidize your practice somehow) (and it really is a privilege), one may enter agreements that undermine your own work and discipline simply in order to survive as a practitioner.
I feel that everything in my upbringing influenced me to be an architect. I’ve only ever wanted to be a soccer player, then a priest, then an architect.
I remember being very young and seeing people walking around with giant, blue-cloth cases, carrying big wood boards, and a pocket for a sword-like object. And they walked in packs - and I wanted to be like them. I later found out they were architecture students.
I would go by the University (Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad de la República) often - I don’t remember ever not knowing what that building was. And high school students taking pre-architecture classes would also carry those boards, so I thought it was so cool.
The single figure of the architect wasn’t really a thing for me. I knew they existed and that they walked in groups. I think in a lot of places, particularly Uruguay, architects were associated with radical, progressive thinking. There was something attractive about that. And I knew I wanted to be part of a group; if I couldn’t play soccer (I really couldn’t) then what other group could I belong to?
I remember mentioning to my parents that I might want to pursue that. Suddenly, both my grandmothers were on board. “My grandson will be an architect,” they said. They must have thought they would get free work (laughs). One of them was used to building things herself. She built houses, worked with her hands, and ran a textile factory. She liked the idea of architects - but never the architects that she had worked with in the past.
The high school structure in Uruguay is such that you have to choose a vocational path by the time you’re 15, 16 years old. Regardless of whether you’re in public or private education, by junior year you have to declare whether you’ll follow a path in science, humanities or biology. By the time you’re a senior, you have to specialize in one of these, and science includes engineering and architecture. If you want to go to architecture school, you have to follow this path in high school. Otherwise, you aren’t eligible to enter the program. It’s a good system if you feel decisive about your path; it’s a terrible system if you want to try to figure things out, or come to a different profession by way of a second career.
There have been proposals to change the entry path to the university system in Uruguay. Public university is free, and there is no entrance test; the only requirement is to have completed the high school work in the discipline you would like to pursue. It’s important to note that, while the system has built a wonderfully literate population and working-class people for a small country, the standards of education are radically different from one place to another. Over half of Uruguayans live in Montevideo, but the idea that a person gaining education in a rural area will have the same experience as someone in the metropolitan area is inaccurate. Beyond that, it’s not a simple feat to simply move to the urban area and study; there are financial and cultural burdens there, which only adds to the subsidization of the profession. There are inequities in the education model, which are reflected in the profession.
In the US, it feels like no matter what kind of practice you have, the primary perception of architecture is that it’s still a privileged type of service.
In Uruguay, to work with architects is commonplace. In the same way that if you feel sick, you go to the doctor, if you need to work through something that is related to building or design, you go to an architect.
I think that is the primary distinction for me: how rare, how unusual it is to work with an architect in the United States when compared to Uruguay. When I entered architecture school, I thought I was going into an utopian-seeking group of people, but quickly realized that this is an immensely conservative, pigeon-holed profession.
If architecture has the responsibility to foreground or challenge society’s values, then we have to be more accessible as a service, and we have to learn how to do it while not pretending we try to save the world while doing it. Right now, we are the people on the airplane putting everyone’s masks on before securing our own.”
As told to GB.
