Introduction to CAZA
Posted by Carlos Arnaiz on September 26, 2025
“Cooking is the language through which society unconsciously reveals its structure” -Claude Levi-Strauss
Our stance on authenticity stems from a love affair with the primitive forms found in the dustbins of Euclidean geometry. We have been stirring them around and firing them up, all the while imagining that we can remake the physical and chemical properties of known forms by putting them under specific kinds of pressure.
Not unlike the cook who stands between nature and the material world, we are occupied with the making of intangible forms of culture from blunt and plain objects. The ancient Greek word for cooking, mageiros, is etymologically linked with magic. We think it necessary that the practice of architectural wizardry include both a study of formal limits and a commitment to the making of new pluralities from old architectural concepts.
This is an architectural cookbook that documents how we get from the raw to the cooked. Authenticity cannot be a hierarchical pyramid of connoisseurship or a parametric sea of infinity possibilities. Our work is based on the idea that architectural experimentation consists of a small set of technologies that incrementally transforms material culture into bursts of social expression.
We have organized 7 projects into three states of transformation: PRIMITIVES, EXPRESSIONS & SIGNATURES. Each phase change has a story about how we understand the ingredients we have assembled. The work is described in terms of recipes encouraged to dissolve the sense of heavy material realism. We don’t have to believe that things are the way they are. A circle can be pickled and roasted into a triangle.
We have sought to avoid the tropes of late capitalist abstraction in favor of the pursuit of a careful transformation of geometry into something we don’t know. Our proto-culinary pursuits have enabled a mixture of errand and epiphany in our labors. We analyze shapes as if they were beautifully butchered hogs that arrived on our cutting boards—entrails and guts all conjoined yet open to dismemberment. We slice and pull, anticipating the marinade, preparing the stages of fermentation, and railing behind the ghosts’ of modernism while scoping the limits of contemporary beauty.
Architectural breakthroughs consists of incremental transformation of material culture into bursts of social expression.