This summer, the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) welcomed architect and urban planner Jose Castillo to Cornell as Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture. Castillo, who is also a cofounder of the firm a|911 in Mexico City, will deliver a public lecture on October 16 at 5:30 p.m. in Milstein Hall with an available Zoom option. In advance of that talk, he shared insights into his professional trajectory, transformative experiences, and philosophical approach to architecture practice and pedagogy.

Molly Sheridan: I want to begin by going back to your own student days. Was there a learning moment or experience that had a particularly deep impact on your development, something that you still carry now as an educator yourself?

Jose Castillo: Perhaps there's a post-rationalization of tiny things that happened over a 40-year span that begin to connect to why I'm here. In 1988, during the first semester of my undergraduate architectural education in Mexico, our first project was to do very serious analytical work on a housing project in Marburg, Germany, by Oswald Matthias Ungers. Ungers was a crucial member of the faculty at Cornell in the 1970s. I mention this anecdote because later on, during the first semester of my master's education, I was lucky to have Rem Koolhaas as an instructor at the GSD. Koolhaas had spent some time at Cornell as a teaching fellow with Ungers, and of course, now we spend a lot of our time in Milstein Hall, designed by Koolhaas. I think that architecture and our work as architects is about making some form of connection between our own experiences and the world outside. How do certain experiences, whether personal, anecdotal, or communal, begin to create a sense of the worlds we see, of the worlds we live in, of the worlds we transform?

For me, it's not a sign or anything mystical. But I start with that because I do believe in ways of connecting our own histories to our own futures; our own lessons and experiences to the way we do prospective work and imagine deeper or more successful engagements. The Koolhaas experience was really foundational because he had already written Delirious New York, but he was about to write S, M, L, XL, and it was at a stage in which his interest began to expand from architecture to urban issues. That really triggered a particular interest in me. I recognize that Rem's footprint was fundamental in that regard.

MS: Fast-forward to the world and educational environment that surrounds us today. What topics and questions are now essential for you to share and explore with your own students?

JC: I think I've always been preoccupied with the concerns we have as a discipline and how they connect to the larger world, both as a social and political project. Architecture has not only the capacity but the responsibility to be effective on its own terms by engaging form, engaging materiality, addressing its own disciplinary problems, but also connecting to the big questions of our time.

For all its creativity, architecture is still a violent act: To happen, it requires the destruction of, or at least the transformation of environments, to build bricks, to mine gypsum, to move lumber, to make steel, to get stone from a quarry. We need to reckon with this level of violence — or, let's say, accelerated transformation — and to at least create a culture of awareness of what the act of making architecture represents. Rather than shy away from those implications, we have to reclaim and reimagine what makes this discipline unique, relevant, and meaningful in its own terms, but we also have to understand its ripple effects vis-à-vis the world at large. I consider myself an optimist in that regard, convinced that embedding architecture with the social and the political gives us a more enhanced power to become agents of change.

Continue reading on the Architecture, Art, and Planning website.