Interviewed in Zagreb, January 10th 2007

Iva Letilović and Morana Vlahović appeared on the Croatian architectural scene with an incredibly mature work that immediately raised the dust of established patterns and showed that the architecture, and what is more, the socially oriented residential architecture can again be both unique and speak with language relevant in the trade, ask serious questions that makes us wonder about the order of things. The house in Krapinske toplice was not just the herald of the exceptional residential buildings that followed in the POS program but also one of the first works of Iva Letilović and Morana Vlahović that proved the continuity of their artistic impulse, present in their residential buildings, decors and exhibition layouts.

ORIS: When you sent me your latest work, “The Green Urban Villa”, you told me that the house had a theme – in this case, it was a pine tree. You did something like this before, you wanted to have a small syntagm associated with the project, a title, a pet name almost. Is that some sort of a methodology, a way to describe the concept of your approach to the project, or do you use it just to think about the concept more easily?

Letilović: All our projects need to have a working title, a core, a framework, an axis around which the work will be done. They need to have an overall concept, and we always turn it into a working title that has to remind of an image, but the projects don’t need to literally refer to it, it is more a working title for internal purposes.

Vlahović: One of our associates noticed this very nicely. When the three of us tried to talk in that way, he simply said: “I don’t understand your meta language, tell it to me in a different way.” It’s a part of our methodology. When we define a project like this right from the start, we feel and understand it in the same way, regardless of which one of us is drawing it.