Before It Becomes Inevitable
I am an architect and researcher working across territorial systems, material cultures and ecological processes. Over two decades, my practice has moved through architecture, urban planning, public administration, teaching, artistic practice and research—progressively expanding what I understand architecture to be.
I began designing buildings and urban transformations, then worked within the City of Barcelona on strategic urban projects, regeneration programmes and digital and regulatory infrastructures through which the city is managed. Working inside these processes shifted my attention from what gets designed towards the conditions making certain transformations possible: who decides, through which instruments and resources, and with what consequences for territories.
My research in regenerative design and living systems gradually expanded towards governance, infrastructure and political economy. Recently, at Fundación RIA, the think tank founded by David Chipperfield in Galicia, I worked across situated research, exhibitions, content production and public programmes.
This trajectory has produced a critical position towards practice itself. In a professional culture driven by urgency, technical efficiency and production, I am interested in creating space to think before acting: to question the assumptions behind a project, make its consequences and alternatives discussable, and ask not only how to intervene, but when—and whether—to intervene at all. Research, writing, teaching, mapping, exhibitions and design are instruments within this expanded spatial practice.
Inevitable Studio emerges from this position: an independent spatial research and design practice working before decisions become projects and projects appear inevitable. It investigates and makes visible the relations, narratives, regulations, infrastructures and material flows shaping territorial futures, creating conditions to discuss, imagine and design otherwise while alternatives still exist.
Territorial transformations do not begin with construction. By the time a factory, mine or energy infrastructure becomes visible, land has been identified, regulations modified, investments committed, infrastructures planned, impacts classified, narratives of necessity established. How does the field of possibilities of a territory narrow before its material transformation takes place?
I investigate this question through EMME, a proposed nickel and cobalt conversion plant near Bordeaux, framed within Europe’s energy transition and industrial sovereignty. What initially appeared as a bounded industrial project soon exceeded its site. EMME depends on mines, global supply chains, maritime logistics, port infrastructures, energy and water networks, finance, environmental compensation, regulation and public participation. Each is governed and documented separately. The territory receives them together.
I call this condition fractioned governance: transformation produced through separate projects, permits, institutions, scales and temporalities, divided to be governed yet coordinated to become possible. Its opacity does not necessarily result from secrecy. Information can be abundant while the relations between its fragments remain invisible.
The research therefore moves from objects to relations, and from impact to reversibility. Inevitability may not result from one decision, but from accumulating decisions that progressively reduce alternative futures.
Architecture usually enters once site, programme and brief already exist. I want to move spatial practice upstream: to reconstruct the material, ecological, political, financial and narrative relations producing transformation while they can still be contested and changed.
The project asks what spatial practice might do before the project appears inevitable: not only reveal how a territory is being transformed, but reopen what it might still become.