Robert Smithson had a habit of looking where architecture preferred not to. Vacant lots, pipes, excavations, industrial remnants and apparently inconsequential pieces of infrastructure became material for a practice that questioned why certain landscapes were deemed worthy of attention while others were simply passed by. In his 1967 journey through Passaic, New Jersey, bridges and construction sites were recast as monuments, turning the supposedly banal outskirts of the city into evidence of a landscape already being continuously designed by industry, geology and time. More than five decades later, BEAR Architects finds in that attitude an unexpectedly useful question for contemporary architecture: what if the spaces we ignore are precisely the ones teaching us how to live?
For Ane Arce and Iñigo Berasategui, Smithson has been present since their years at architecture school, less as a catalogue of forms to borrow than as a way of understanding change. ‘The passage of time leaves its mark on the landscape, and the landscape is ultimately an accumulation of layers of sediment,’ BEAR tells designboom. ‘Every idea and every image we see of a landscape is composed of time.’ The consequence is deceptively simple: architecture cannot really arrive at a place as a finished, autonomous object. ‘In the end, we are going to add one more little layer, something that will become a new stratum within that landscape,’ the studio continues. Building, in other words, is less about beginning from zero than admitting that zero was never available.
BEAR looks to Robert Smithson’s ideas on entropy in Concéntrico Spain 2026 | image courtesy of BEAR
BEAR DIGS INTO THE LANDSCAPE AT CONCÉNTRICO
That reading became unusually literal with ‘Temblores de superficie. Vino y Smithson’, BEAR’s intervention for Concéntrico 2026 at Viña Lanciano in La Rioja, Spain. Confronted with a vast landscape framed by the Ebro River, an old bridge, vineyard ruins and mountains in the distance, the architects found themselves facing an uncomfortable problem of scale. ‘You look at it and think: what am I going to do here?’ they recall. Rather than compete with the territory, BEAR cut into it, excavating a roughly 15-meter-long furrow to expose the layers hidden beneath ground already repeatedly transformed by agriculture.
Stones, finer aggregates and soil emerge sequentially through the cut, while a pale three-dimensional grid marks the excavation with a language borrowed from archaeological surveys. Elsewhere, timber, textile cables and reflections frame new ways of looking across the vineyard. The architecture therefore does very little in conventional terms, and that is rather the point. Instead of depositing a shiny new object into the landscape, BEAR temporarily makes its existing transformations legible. The gesture echoes Smithson’s fascination with excavation, displacement and entropy: architecture becomes an annotation to processes already underway rather than an attempt to freeze them.
landscape becomes an accumulation of time and matter
ENTROPY COMES HOME
The argument does not stop at wastelands, archaeological strata or vineyards. BEAR sees a similar problem inside the home, where architecture is routinely expected to accommodate constantly changing lives while somehow looking untouched forever. The studio is cautious about connecting individual architectural decisions with sweeping political promises, describing some recent attempts to do so as somewhat naïve. More consequential, they suggest, may be the seemingly modest transformations that alter everyday relationships: where people gather, how rooms are shared, what activities become visible and which domestic hierarchies quietly disappear.
Take the kitchen. BEAR points out that its role today bears little resemblance to the more secluded and utilitarian room familiar only a couple of decades ago. It can now be ‘the center of the house,’ they say, ‘an almost festive, fun space where everyone wants to be.’ Bathrooms, meanwhile, need not be designed exclusively around a hygienic logic of compact, washable components; they can become fewer but more generous spaces, with daylight and enough room to actually enjoy being there. None of this sounds particularly revolutionary until one remembers how much of everyday life happens in precisely these rooms. Sometimes changing how people live together begins with everyone refusing to leave the kitchen.
the installation cuts into the vineyard terrain
MATERIALS THAT REMEMBER WHO LIVED THERE
The same acceptance of change informs BEAR’s approach to materials. The architects prefer to preserve what is already present whenever possible and, when introducing something new, favor materials capable of acquiring a huella — a trace of their relationship with whoever inhabits the space. That position puts them firmly at odds with what they jokingly describe as ‘ultra-processed construction materials’: industrial surfaces engineered so that every element is identical, nothing changes under sunlight and scratches are treated as catastrophic system failures. For BEAR, their apparent perfection can end up removing precisely the qualities that allow a building to become somebody’s own.
A timber floor offers another model. Sunlight can slowly alter its color; daily use can polish one area more than another; a dog can scratch it while young and leave that small history embedded in the room years later. Rather than signs that architecture has failed, these marks register occupation itself. Through BEAR’s reading of Smithson, entropy stops being something happening elsewhere — in ruined factories, abandoned infrastructure or distant geological landscapes — and becomes part of the way a home accumulates meaning. For MODES of Habitation, the proposition is a useful one: perhaps inhabiting the world more attentively requires architecture to stop defending itself from time, and start leaving a little room for what happens next.
BEAR inserts timber and metal volumes into the concrete structure of the Arratia Valley Music School | image: Luis Díaz Díaz
a triangular courtyard brings light into the corridor connecting the school’s four volumes | image: Luis Díaz Díaz
red-stained timber classrooms reach towards the river and surrounding landscape
BEAR transforms a former museum into a new landscape for Basque folk music | image: Luis Díaz Díaz
shelving structures reorganize BEAR’s open-plan home in Getxo | image: Luis Díaz Díaz
This article is part of designboom’s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take HERE.
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