Edible iconography

One of the first competitions we won was "Gastronomic Palapa" for Mextropoli 2020. Our proposal was a public pantry that acted as a communal gathering place, a public chillies drying room, a cathedral of sounds and colours, punctuated by three convivial tables. Due to the pandemic, we remained in Mexico City for much longer than expected, and this was our chance to learn about the various typologies of chillies and the processes of drying them depending on the season. With a year of delay, an inverted thatched roof was constructed with 3500 bunches of chillies, an edible iconography, highlighting the ephemerality of an architecture in evolution.

Building a network

The first summer after graduating, we decided to leave London to explore the Bolivian altiplano, interested in the phenomenon of the new vernacular architectural cholets by Freddy Mamani Silvestre. We started the AA Visiting School in El Alto by inviting photographers, anthropologists, and architects to research this incredible landscape through motion pictures. We learned Spanish and convinced Freddy to work together. This year Alma Films won the Sundance Festival with their movie Utama. We are very proud to have built close relationships with people who believe in your ideas and will be with you throughout your career.

Indulging in the ordinary

As educators, we work as a tight collective where we direct our students, trusting their expertise and passion in what they want to work with. As designers, we like to work with colleagues and collaborators often in very informal settings - either through long dinners cooked at home or walking around London. We do like to build projects through convivial moments where people feel comfortable expressing and fulfilling exuberant wishes, through creative exchanges, fun and joy. One of the best things about working in this way is that every ordinary moment becomes a chance for us to build our personal archive of ideas and conversations.

Pedagogy as practise

As in the teaching environment, we build our expertise through an ongoing exchange between professionals, stakeholders, and acts of negotiation. We strongly believe in building a network of professionals and students interested in working in a certain way, and perhaps this is why we do not call ourselves an office or a studio. Lemonot is a platform that blends spatial and relational practices. We ethically challenge, influence, pushback, and recommend changes based on new ideas or even intuition. Saskia Lewis, who has been one of our mentors, often reminds us to act through creative disobedience.

Breaking out of the script

The figure of the traditional architect was tight for us; we wanted to research and develop our ideas within the realm of performance, building a universe of gestures, utensils, devices, and urban types of machinery that could constitute useful vocabulary. We have worked in the kitchen with La Rivoluzione delle seppie, as auctioneers for the Bangkok Design Week, as card players for Manifesta, as collectors of marble waste in Puglia, and in many other roles. We are constantly building a new vocabulary to redesign the role of the architect and how we relate to the city and the landscape.

Towards an afterlife

We wish to build projects that can cross physical or digital boundaries and itinerant frameworks which could be borrowed to be used in more diverse contexts by multiple audiences. a never-ending afterlife to any project that can be appropriated by people. For Lemonot, we are looking for a physical space to become a place of production and encounter between artists and designers, an open door for informal gatherings and suppers that could host friends, colleagues, and passersby at least once a month!