Lucas Muñoz Muñoz on creative honesty and design that makes sense
After the opening of one of his latest projects, El Puesto Guía Repsol, we had a chat with the Spanish designer about the process behind his works, the art of solving puzzles, and basketball rules.
Lucas Muñoz Muñoz‘s practice could be summed up in a simple, innocent question: if the material is already here, why would you go looking for something else? Starting an upcycling practice before the term was even coined, the Spanish designer generated a remarkably complex and creative way of working, demonstrating the hidden possibilities of working with what we already have.
The designer’s latest project is El Puesto Guía Repsol, a pop-up gastronomic platform commissioned by Guía Repsol, a Spanish travel and food guide. Occupying a former fishmonger’s stall in Madrid’s Mercado de Vallehermoso, the space is a feat of compact invention: almost nothing was sourced new, all materials have been repurposed. The soul of the old stall, what Lucas calls El Pulpo Inmortal, lingers in the logic of the design, which was unpretentiously built around what was there and what was asked for.
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How did the project start with Guía Repsol?
Lucas Muñoz Muñoz:
“I just received a random call from Maria Ritter, the director, and she explained the idea: to take this puesto, a former fishmonger’s stall in the market, and develop a restaurant there. I told her we were too busy, we were working on Infinito Delicias at the time and that project was growing fast, so we were already in a bit of a vertigo attack in the studio. But she insisted: “Please come and see it, you will probably change your mind.”
So we met there, and it was actually very attractive because it was very small, around 22 square metres. I liked that idea: to prototype the way we work in a reduced, compact, very intense way. I thought it would not take that much work. It did take a lot of work.”
Most of the components of El Puesto Guía Repsol come from the former stall: the metal from the fish counter became light reflectors and tables, the ceiling tiles were moved to the front of the kitchen, and the old frame became the structural verticals of the bar. As the team writes in the project’s zine: “the concept of new is a marketing myth.”
Working with found materials is great for ethics and sustainability, but it also creates a lot of constraints. Do you enjoy working with those limits, or do you feel you have to compromise on the final result?
Lucas Muñoz Muñoz:
“I don’t work with found materials because of ethical reasons at all. I’ve just been doing it for twenty years because it was there and it was free, and I could not afford to prototype in any other way. The first lamp I made was a chandelier made with 47 BIC pens, it looked like a glass chandelier, but when you got close you realised what it was. That was 2006, people called it cool, green, kind of like upcycling, but the word “upcycling” wasn’t even coined yet. For me, it was just something fun, it matched. I was just curious about prototyping it, there was never a statement behind it.“
“Later I came to learn certain things you cannot unknow about the impact of certain materials, and so on. But I don’t consider myself an expert, and I don’t consider that what I do has an ethical backbone. Even though it can be read that way, and I’m happy it has that connotation, it is not what drives it.
If I can do it with what is already here, why would I go and find something somewhere else? And it also makes things more creatively honest. I try not to make decisions based on visual balance alone, but more on the question: is this the decision that makes the most sense? Why does it make more sense? Because the material was already here, because it can be reused. Materials outlive us; we die, but materials are there forever. So it has a lot to do with sense-making. It just fits, you have the feeling that this is the right piece in the right place.”
There is a lot of systems thinking in your work, a design methodology that comes through in your texts and in your documentaries. Do you have a way of explaining your process, how you navigate those systems?
Lucas Muñoz Muñoz:
“Every project demands what it demands and is conditioned by what conditions it, like natural forces. The larger context is always determinant, or should be taken as determinant, and it makes the design more likely to be reasonable for the project. Then we go through what materials we have available, what we need to create for the project, and those together make a brief.
For Mo de Movimiento, we had been following a kind of hierarchy without realising it: if I can make it with something already on site, I use that. If not, secondhand. If not, local craft with local material. If not, upcycling. If not, maybe that element isn’t needed at all. That hierarchy now shapes most of our interventions.“
“The more rules a game has, the more fun it is to play. More difficult to learn, yes, but more fun to play, because each decision becomes more direct. If I have the potential of using any material existing in the world, how do I even begin to make decisions? But if I can cut out large portions of that possibility because of logical reasons, then it feels really, really good when you arrive at an idea that is probably the only option.
You know the story of basketball? It used to be a super boring sport, people would hold the ball and run and fight for it, and games would end one to nothing. Then they started adding rules. And basketball is now one of the most designed games that exists, they add rules almost every year to make it more dynamic, more exciting. Now you have a sport loaded with rules, and it is spectacular. I think design works the same way.”
As sustainability has become a mandatory footnote in every design brief, there is something subversive about a designer who shrugs and says: it was there, it was free, it fit. Sustainable work often tends to be self-congratulatory, asking viewers to admire its responsibility, but it truly should simply be work that uses logic and reasoning to get to a more intelligent solution for a product’s lifecycle. The refusal to moralise gives the work its integrity, making it more durable and honest.
Is there something you haven’t done yet that you would really like to do in the next five years?
Lucas Muñoz Muñoz:
“I would love to do a house in the middle of nowhere, something fully self-autonomous, off-grid. Because then the context becomes really, really open. Even though I find the city incredibly rich as an artistic environment, I think a non-urban project would be very exciting, something that has to do with the idea of what inhabiting really means.
That’s one of the first questions we ask ourselves on any commission: what is this? What is a showroom, what is it supposed to feel like, is it an immersion in a catalogue or a contextualised experience of objects? How can we challenge it back? A house in the countryside with all the high-tech and low-tech knowledge we’ve built up, it would be a genuinely interesting place to put it all together. In the end, I think it comes back to the same curiosity about objects. That’s all it is.”
