Mercedes Simón
My name is Mercedes Simón, I was born in Madrid, and I’m an architect although I have other interests that run the gamut from the internal to the external, from the exoteric to the esoteric, from fragmentary dreams to three-dimensional structures, from moving photographs to shared urban spaces, from Greek agoras to Venus and Mars.
After a long university studies programme, which I combined with a scholarship to IIT in Chicago and courses at Harvard and in New York, I graduated with an architecture degree from ETSAM, summa cum laude. After that, I worked for very short periods at several studios, and wore myself out presenting projects for contests. I’ve done some remodelling and small projects –I may do some more--, I’ve exhibited photographs and drawings, and above all, I’ve continued trying things out here and there, like sculpture at Escuela La Palma or philosophy at the UNED.
My interest in pattern languages arose some years ago, out of feeling, still intuitively at that time, that I didn’t have an architectonic criteria rooted in the experience of the commons on which to base certain decisions that structured projects; and out of feeling, explicitly, that what was missing from the habitual process of designing and building buildings were external agents —discriminated against by a system excessively limited to those with architectural expertise—who could take part in those processes… In other words, that my mother or grandmother, or the owners of the flats in a building, or an entire neighbourhood, if they wanted, could become an active part in urban development and planning.
That is why, currently, I am mainly engaged in research on pattern languages in architecture and potential ways of putting them into practice, a subject I am also developing in my doctorate at ETSAM and with my colleagues at the Laboratorio del Procomún Estético (Laboratory of the Aesthetic Commons).