Carlos Ott on Synthesis, Risk, and the Work That Survives

This conversation with Carlos Ott, the Uruguayan architect of the Opéra Bastille in Paris and of the MACA of the Atchugarry Foundation, was recorded in June 2021. Ott is also the author of the interior plates of Reason Under Siege — graphite and watercolor on paper — and left his aesthetic doctrine for the book written in a single sentence: “Perhaps the blade keeps cutting through the fog, and in doing so, it regulates.” It is published as an edited dialogue.

The interviewee’s opinions are his own; the Conversations section does not imply doctrinal agreement.

Synthesis

Jimmy: How many times did you have to iterate to arrive at this design?

Carlos: Many.

Jimmy: Pablo gave me the book and I’ve been looking at the drawings. The one on the cover has fewer than thirty lines, and you see it and fall in love at a glance.

Carlos: Drawing forces you into synthesis, and synthesis is essential. Every project requires the detail: how the concrete meets the wood and the glass. But that first concept must not be lost, because it carries a spontaneity that lies at the base of the work of art. Afterwards it takes a great deal of work and a great deal of perfecting. But that élan, that conception of the first moment, that first stroke — it must always be kept.

Jimmy: Do you believe synthesis is the highest degree of human consciousness?

Carlos: I do. Synthesis forces the human brain, which is enormously complex and handles every kind of information, to bring it all to a single point. It allows you to concentrate a great many concepts, a great many philosophies, a great many points of view into something: a musical note, a stroke, a painting, the little sketch of a building, the design of a car. In synthesis lies art. The great works of literature: you read a Kafka story a few pages long and everything is there. He wrote it more than a hundred years ago, in a completely different context, and I read it today in a country that has nothing to do with his, in a language that has nothing to do with his, and there it is — that core we all admire. Every morning I listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Each day I hear something different; each time it gives me something different. God willing, this building will give each person, in different situations, something different.

The Dialogue Between the Work and Its Beholder

Jimmy: At the Opéra Bastille the central concern was the sound — achieving perfection there rather than in the forms. What is the pursuit here?

Carlos: There is a similarity between the two. In both cases the architectural work — a museum, an opera house — is simply the habitat where a relation unfolds between subject and object: the spectator listening to Maria Callas sing Bellini’s Norma, or the visitor who comes to see Atchugarry’s work. And nothing around them must disturb so fruitful a dialogue. The same in a church, in a mosque, or in a synagogue: everything that accompanies the person must help that dialogue. A library, where the reader sits down with a book, must help him concentrate and enter the work. Someone goes to the cinema to see an Antonioni film: the whole cinema disappears the moment the actors begin. The raison d’être is not the setting: it is to foster that dialogue. And there, I think, we are coming back to synthesis: the synthesis of everything.

The Many Forms

Jimmy: What have you learned from your travels, from the different cultures?

Carlos: I have learned that no one holds a monopoly on truth. That two people can think completely differently and both be right, on the condition that each respects the other’s opinion — and that is essential. It forces a humility on you: what you do not believe, you must respect. If you ask me my favorite style, I couldn’t say. There are so many ways to make a museum: it can be white or black, round or square, minimalist or baroque, and they are all valid. It is like music: I like Bach but I also like the Beatles; you can like Gershwin just as you can like Debussy. I love Rembrandt, but I like Pollock too. That is the marvelous thing about humanity. The cuisine of India is very different from that of France, very different from that of Uruguay, very different from that of Japan, and they are all fabulous.

Risk and Imagination

Jimmy: How many risks are you willing to take in a work?

Carlos: All of them. I believe that if you don’t take risks, it isn’t worth it. We are not here to repeat; we are here to create. Man has always created. Man, from the moment he is born, will have to break barriers. All of them.

Jimmy: What governs the unquantifiable? Intuition?

Carlos: Albert Einstein said, I believe, that imagination is more important than knowledge, because in knowing you know, but you know within limits; imagination you do not control. Everything comes into it: experience, mistakes, intuition, luck. A long time ago I understood that falling is inevitable and that one has to learn from the falls. I never look back: what matters to me are the things I carry in my head today for the future. We are building a house and there is the husband’s opinion and the wife’s, and they simply do not coincide. And you are no Solomon: you cannot cut the baby in half. You have to listen to both positions, and perhaps the final solution is something that neither he, nor she, nor you had imagined. That is where imagination comes in: breaking molds, not repeating, seeking a new form.

The Work as a Child

Jimmy: You have called each of your works a child. What burden does that metaphor impose?

Carlos: The architect makes the work and, once you have finished it, it stops being yours. This museum, when Pablo cuts the ribbon, will no longer be Pablo’s: it will belong to the people who will come, and visit it, and change it, and modify it. Pablo wants this building to last five thousand years; I think it will last longer. And like every father with his child, you must have the generosity to let it go. It is lovely to have the child small, watching over him, teaching him, but sooner or later he grows his wings and flies on his own. It is an enormous act of generosity: letting that umbilical cord break and letting the child fly on his own wings.

The One Certainty

Jimmy: If you could choose one thing that would make you freer, what would it be?

Carlos: More time, more time. Time is the one thing we cannot replace: the minute already gone is unrecoverable. But I know I will not live one second longer than I am meant to live. We do not decide when we are born, nor do we decide when we leave. There are people who believe in God and people who do not. The only thing we know when we are born is that we are going to die. It is the one certainty we have, so it must be accepted.

Jimmy: Do you feel that making a work is, in some measure, not dying?

Carlos: Without a doubt. And that is why Dostoevsky writes, and why Bach writes, and why Antonioni films, and why Atchugarry hammers the marble, and why you are doing this interview with me. Perhaps a long time from now this conversation will be seen as: look what they were doing in Uruguay in 2021.

Conversation recorded in Punta del Este, June 2021. Edited for reading from the original video transcript.