Lucas Muñoz MuñozHis practice could be summed up in a simple, innocent question: if the material is already here, why look for anything else? Starting a practice of recycling before the term was even coined, the Spanish designer created a highly complex and creative way of working, showing the hidden possibilities of working with what we already have.
The designer’s latest work is The Repsol Guide Posta pop-up culinary 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 has been sourced new, all materials have been repurposed. The soul of the old bench, what Lucas calls El Pulpo Inmortal, lingers in the logic of the design, built unassumingly around what was there and what was asked for.
The Repsol Guide Station by Lucas Munoz Munoz © Manu Toro
© Lucas Muñoz Muñoz
The Repsol Guide Station by Lucas Munoz Munoz © Manu Toro
The Repsol Guide Station by Lucas Munoz Munoz © Manu Toro
The Repsol Guide Post by Lucas Munoz Munoz © Marina Guerrero
The Repsol Guide Station by Lucas Munoz Munoz © Manu Toro
The Repsol Guide Station by Lucas Munoz Munoz © Manu Toro
How did the project with Guía Repsol begin?
Lucas Muñoz Muñoz:
“I just got a random call from Maria Ritter, the director, and she explained the idea to me: to take this puesto, a former fishmonger’s stall in the market, and create a restaurant there. I told her we were very busy, we were working on Infinito Delicias at the time and this project was growing fast, so we were already in a bit of a tizzy. changed his mind.”
So we met there, and it was really very attractive because it was very small, about 22 square meters. I liked this idea: to prototype the way we work in a reduced, compact, very intense way. I figured it wouldn’t take that much work. It took a lot of work.”
Most of the ingredients of El Puesto Repsol driver they come from the former counter: the metal from the fish counter became light reflectors and tables, the ceiling tiles were transferred 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 many limitations. Do you enjoy working within these limits or do you feel you have to compromise with the end result?
Lucas Muñoz Muñoz:
“I don’t work with found materials for ethical reasons. I’ve only been doing it for twenty years because it was there and it was free, and I couldn’t afford to innovate any other way. The first lamp I made was a chandelier made with 47 BIC pens, it looked like a glass chandelier, but when they called it very green. Kind of like upcycling, but the word ‘upcycling’ hadn’t even been coined for me yet, it was just something fun, just curious to prototype it, never had a statement.“
“Later I came to know certain things that you cannot know about the impact of certain materials, and so on. But I don’t consider myself an expert and I don’t consider what I do to have a moral backbone. Although it can be read that way, and I’m glad it has that meaning, that’s not what drives it.
If I can do it with what’s already here, why go 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 decision the one that makes the most sense? Why does it make more sense? Because the material was already here, because it can be reused. Materials are beyond us. we die, but materials exist forever. So it has a lot to do with meaning making. It just fits, you get 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 writing and in your documentaries. Do you have a way to explain your process, how you navigate these systems?
Lucas Muñoz Muñoz:
“Every project it requires what it requires and depends on what conditions, such as natural forces. The larger context is always decisive, or should be taken as decisive, and makes the design more likely to make sense for the project. We then look at what materials we have available, what we need to create for the project, and these together make a brief.
For Mo de Movimiento, we were following a kind of hierarchy without realizing it: if I can do it with something that’s already on the site, I use it. If not, used. If not, local craft with local material. If not, recycle. If not, this item may not be needed at all. This hierarchy now shapes most of our interventions.“
“The more rules a game has, the more fun it is to play. Harder to learn, yes, but more fun to play, because every decision becomes more immediate. If I have the ability to use any material in the world, how do I begin to make decisions? But if I can cut out large portions of that possibility for logical reasons, then it feels really, really good when you come up with an idea that is maybe the only option.
Do you know the history 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 out there, they add rules almost every year to make it more dynamic, more exciting. Now you have a sport full of rules, and it’s spectacular. I think design works the same way.”
As sustainability has become a mandatory footnote in every design brief, there’s 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 should just be work that uses logic and reasoning to arrive at a smarter solution for a product’s life cycle. The refusal to moralize gives the work its integrity, making it more durable and honest.
Is there anything you haven’t done yet that you’d 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-contained, off the grid. Because then the context really, really opens up. Even though I find the city incredibly rich as an artistic environment, I think a non-urban project would be very exciting, which has to do with the idea of what it really means to inhabit.”
This is one of the first questions we ask ourselves on any committee: what is it? What is a showroom, how should it feel, is it an immersion in a catalog or an immersive experience of objects? How can we dispute that? A country house with all the high-tech and low technology knowledge that we’ve created, it would be a really interesting place to bring it all together. In the end, I think it comes back to the same curiosity about objects. That’s all.”
