Maintaining a visual contact with the outside world
By vanessa lamounier
7 Aug 2007
1.What kind of designer are you?
I am an architect.
2.What did you want to do for a living when you were a kid?
When I was young I wanted to become a ballerina.
3. What is it about your design work that makes your photography better?
And vice versa? Where do you see parallels between the two?
The design activity has to do with projection, with seeing things before they happen.
Most of the time design can be considered original if no one else can see the possibilities of the comprehension of a thing that the designer is anticipating.
Photography claims to have made contact with reality: a reality which being real, may yet reveal itself to future eyes in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations.
Although to photograph a thing is an instant act and opposed to that designing an object is a long process of solving many different, highly interlocked problems, the process by which we shape new ideas, aesthetic innovations and experimentation, as well as seeing and solving problems, especially problems like that of conception of inventiveness, the use of imagination and understanding can be said the same in both design and photography.
4. What do you find most challenging about your work?
For me the question is how we infer the existence of a permanent object, from observing its sensible qualities. How we got to know things and how can we reveal them in unexpected ways in the future, considering that the thing observed is an aspect of reality, possessing a significance that is not exhausted by our conception of any single aspect of it.
5. Do you have design heroes? Photography heroes?
Yes, especially Oscar Niemeyer and Vito Acconci.
6. Name some unexpected sources of inspiration you've had.
Fresh air.
7. Do you have any regular habits/exercises that make you a better designer? Photographer?
Yes, a daily walk.
