Asiel Nuñez: You like to refer to your work as “engineering wonder”. Can you explain what this term means to you?

Marc Fornes: I think the phrase engineering wonder carries multiple layers. It speaks to the tension—and the balance—between technical precision and emotional experience. On the one hand, it's about the art of engineering, such as designing a bridge—a discipline grounded in performance, structure, and rigour. But on the other hand, it's also about fantasy—about creating spaces that transport you, that momentarily lift you out of reality. While our research is deeply serious, the outcome is meant to make you forget all that engineering and simply feel. It's about the moment you lose yourself, first in the environment, then in your own thoughts. So, for us, engineering wonder isn’t just a phrase; it’s a practice of crafting that sense of awe with intention and specificity.

Where does your fascination with the duality between engineering and wonder, or experience, come from?

I think it started with where I grew up, right on the border between France and Germany. I’m French, I carry a French passport, but culturally, so much around me was German—the food, the traditions, the mentality. Just across the border was the Autobahn, that stretch of highway with no speed limit. And I’ve always been fascinated by it. Because you don’t just drive on the Autobahn with any car. You need something engineered for it—something that can go fast, brake fast, respond instantly to the tiniest shift in conditions. That’s precision. That’s control.

But once you’re driving, you don’t want to think about all that. You want to just enjoy the ride. You want to lose yourself in the motion, the momentum, the thrill. And to me, that’s exactly what our work is about. In the studio, everything is about detail—the technical logic, the making, the constraints. But the end result? That should feel effortless. You shouldn't have to think about how it was made. You should just feel something.

So, in a way, our projects are like those high-performance machines—deeply engineered, but built to deliver an experience that feels fluid, emotional, even dreamy. That’s why I often mention Porsche, for example. German engineering is a great parallel to what we do: it’s extremely precise, but it exists to support a kind of escape.