“The profession needs authors and also those responsible”

“I’m going to tell you what worries me. I’m worried that, at least in Argentina, although it may be a global phenomenon, Architects are undervalued and? we are a kind of subculture“, categorically defines Maria Teresa Egozcue one December afternoon in his studio on Cerrito Street.

He already reviewed his professional life while sipping a coffee and now he talks about the general situation. “The other day I heard a comment that I thought was interesting. He said that current times are too marked by profitability”, he expresses, emphasizing the word too much. “I’m not saying that there doesn’t have to be profitability, but I’m not saying that the only variable to evaluate something is that.”

For her, the figure of the architect became blurred. “Sometimes the newspapers publish projects and who made them does not appear. Only the developers or builders are shown and it turns out that the one who provides the body, the responsibility and the one who can even lose their assets is the architect,” he states, almost on the verge of showing some anger.

“It can’t not appear. Those things imply, precisely, underestimating someone. I compare the project to a score of a symphony. Can Beethoven’s symphony still be played 200 years later without the score? No. Does any musician ever think of changing the score and playing the symphony in a different way? No. And why doesn’t the project, which is the score of the work, have a space where it says who did it? Or are we, the architects, who are allowing this to happen?”, he reflects out loud.

He barely pauses to take a breath and returns to his thoughts: “I don’t know why, but the reality is that this is not good for us. The profession needs authors and it needs leaders. I’m not saying it for ego, I don’t care about the author’s ego. I care about responsibility”.

In his analysis, the practice of architecture today is much more complex what a long time ago “Not only because of the technological challenges that it implies and the greater knowledge that is required, but because of the strong incidence of activities related to management that must be developed within a changing, complex scenario, and that require professional re-profiling”.

The current president of the Academy of Architecture and Urbanism (ACAU) refers to the fact that the architect not only has to “do” his specific job, but often “has to investigate where to generate work, find out where there is interesting land to invest or get investors or certain financing.”

Egozcue adds another symptom of these times. “Removing construction management from the project is not good for the profession either.. I believe that a project is completed with good construction management. And the construction management carried out by another head and by other interests, which may be more than profitability, ends up depreciating or lowering its quality.”

The author of Garrahan is concerned at this point. “I don’t mind the business. I think it is correct, that there has to be a commercial activity. What cannot happen is that it detracts from the responsibility and the professional who carries out the project.”

Egozcue exemplifies with the Provincial Council of Neuquén, a work that his studio won through a competition. “They took away our construction management and they took away the sunshades from the project. Today they are dying of heat inside and it is a shame because the work was perfectly designed so that that did not happen, that they did not suffer from the heat.”

The winner of the 2024 Career Award awarded by the SCA He emphasizes that the largest amount of work is in the housing sector. “However, schools, hospitals, clubs, courts are needed. It seems a shame to have very good architectural skills and little work in the entire field of culture, so to speak. What is not residential and what is not profitable is not done. In our country, furthermore, there is no vocation for private donation as there is in other places. And I’m not just talking about making museums, but also a plaza or a library.”

On the positive side, Egozcue values ​​vocational training in the country. “Argentine architects go anywhere and manage to work very well and are highly respected. On the other hand, I am sure that we are capable of doing more things than what is done.”

Although also emphasizes that there is not always work for everyone“neither here nor in other scenarios of greater development. I always say that the most difficult thing about our profession is not ‘doing’ the job, but getting it.

Founding partner of the EVPP Arquitectos studio. He specializes in health issues and hospital and healthcare infrastructure. Among his achievements is the Garrahan Hospital but also the renovations at Argerich, Británico and Santojanni, the expansion of the Pedro Elizalde Children’s Hospital and the FLENI CIM in Escobar.

I would be unfair to pigeonhole their professional practice when he also planned banks, a thermal hotel, towers, several housing complexes and neighborhoods of nearly 2,000 homes, a judicial city, a multi-gymnasium, a convention center and its driving range, among others.

Was tenured professor at FADUfor 25 years he was in charge of a taller del CBC. Also directed the postgraduate “Assisted Professional Practice Experience.” Today directs the master’s degree in Physical Resource Planning in Health, at FADU.

Was president of the CPAU and currently chairs the ACAU. He obtained more than 40 awards and recognitions. One of the latest, the 2024 SCA Lifetime Achievement Award.

One of the challenges What María Teresa Egozcue faces is to carry out the Academy of Architecture and Urbanism (SAC).

In her role as president, she has the objective of give the entity its federal character not only from the representation of the provinceswhich increasingly adds more academics, but achieve national status. “All the other academies are, so we are making the arrangements to make it happen,” he reveals. At the moment, “it is a non-profit civil organization called the Academy of Architecture and Urbanism.”

In the studio, in its subject of great expertise, the executive project for the third building of the Reina Fabiola clinic in Córdoba. He had already worked with the Catholic University of Córdoba, owner of the clinic, on previous occasions: in a new building, in another to which they added services and in an outpatient surgical center that operates in a shopping mall.

We have some other things that I can’t reveal,” he anticipates. “The only thing I can tell you is an invitation from a laboratory”, he adds when questioned. “It happens that health has no season, it takes all the time”.