What if we left our comfort zones behind?

Logan Rubasch: How do you fold aspiration into your practice?

Jean Pierre Crousse: We, as architects, normally have a lot of uncertainty in our practice. So that develops in us an inner optimism. You can’t be a pessimist as an architect because what you are doing is improving things. It’s not only solving problems with some program because that, for us, is construction.

LR: So, architecture is more than construction, it’s—

JPC: Nobody cares about architecture. Everybody cares about construction, and you must give them architecture.

LR: This past week, you took a group of students to places in Peru where you have been working and thinking about. Did you feel any moments of shared connection between people to place?

JPC: Yeah, you must be patient because real change takes a lot of time. So, whatever you do, in the best-case scenario, you are planting a seed. What you can do is trigger different mindsets. You plant a seed when you say, “no, it’s possible.” Maybe it isn’t possible today, but there can be other ways of seeing the future that are not the way that you are thinking and not the way that I am thinking.

I think the students appreciate this. The first day, we tell them that Sandra and I, we are doing studios where we don’t know the answer. The uncertainty for us is the same as the students, the only difference is that we know the context better, and surely, we have more experience. It’s very painful, isn’t it? You go into uncertainty, and you go outside your comfort zone, but I think it’s…it’s..

LR: …a way to…

JPC: to improve, no? your practice.

LR: Has working with students at Yale changed your mindset or given you a peek into the United States?

JPC: Yeah, I think it’s a matter of trying to find answers or trying to formulate questions in all these different places. When we went to Europe, we became autodidacts. We had to create our own culture of seeing and living in places by going to see the work first, and then read, no? Reading Le Corbusier himself, yes, but not the critics that write about Le Corbusier before going to see the work. And so, we developed this certain way of distrust. A good distrust, it’s not cynical. It’s kind of, “Okay, they’re saying this—even if it’s Ken Frampton that is saying this—I want to see it by myself.” And, also to develop distrust of your own thoughts. So not taking for granted what you think is good, no? And when we came back to Peru, it was the same. Like, trying to see from a fresh viewpoint what you are seeing without any Preconcepts. And that is the thing that we are doing in the U.S. also. So it’s a kind of effort to not be in the comfort zone, to take a step back to always see things. Trying, at least, to see things with a certain perspective, huh?

LR: I mean, you distrust the comfort zone, and that generates almost your entire practice; it seems.

JPC: Yeah, that’s exactly the thing, no? It’s…yup.

LR: It’s incredible. It’s incredible to watch and behold.