PUBLIC MACHINES
ANATOMIA ARTIFICIAL
Capsule Project / 1996-2005
INFRASTRUCTURE AS TRAVEL SUPPORT_Road infrastructures constitute one of the most significant forms of Territorial Domain. They provide connections for Urban Areas, reduce travel periods, and increase the number of possible destinations. This shows signs of urban development, but also represents an act of segregation. Though they connect long distances, they divide bordering zones, causing undetermined situations, undefined thresholds and, according to Augé, non-places or spaces of anonymity. Poverty has seen velocity as a way out. Necessity has encouraged these operations, finding in mobility a platform for new ways of informal occupations. To this effect, the infrastructural system traces a movement that defines travel, not only as the significance of a destination, but also as a projection of time, an active period, a type of public place: ephemeral, temporary, movable or transitory. It is therefore a politic act, a programmatic foundation, an opportunity for social reinsertion and for the most sophisticated environmental techniques. Finally, within the scope of Utopia, it represents someone’s possibility to have a future.
TRANSITORY URBAN DEVICES
Descriptive Memory: Movable Prototypes
It is not an illusion to imagine the future of our planet saturated with disused artefacts and waste such as trucks, tanks and any other object used to build the infrastructure of our cities, those objects that we once interacted with.
3XP- MP constitutes a multidisciplinary search aimed at promoting recycling, reuse and relocation of waste discarded by the consumer society. The main idea consists on activating such devices by means of applied technologies that will then positively intervene upon the social and environmental damage in our planet. The Project develops low-cost transitory service modules with different programmatic variables and several operational scales. These modules are inserted in the city using the infrastructure as a support for mobility. The infrastructure appears as a platform for the motion of the programatics modules: depending on the circumstances of temporary spaces in which they function, different urban scenarios are determined. Movable objects are transformed depending on the scale they are perceived.
The object consists on the development of sociocultural programs and their insertion within the city, through movable and changeable urban devices (Nomad Units) and with high levels of interaction with human participants.
The design of these new hybrid specialties is focused on the capability of their parts or components, which enables their development as independent and intelligent entities.
The Project consists in a general action plan. A strategy develops Nomad Units with Educational, Sporting and Recreational Programs that function within territories. It inserts classrooms, computer laboratories, sport areas, cinemas, medical and sanitary facilities, as well as other programs, in the urban net through its road infrastructure. The modules are in motion along a road system that enables a predetermined search among the cities, offering evaluations, diagnosis and training for needy children, adolescents and elders.
Each Nomad Unit tracks, recognizes and activates the areas with the largest soil occupation frequency, succeeding in the establishment of a short, medium or long-term global action strategy.
The Project sets forth reconditioned units in order to dispose an interurban search. It redesigns one-decker buses for the city and two-decker buses to travel around the periphery and other satellite cities, including La Güaira, Guarenas and Güatire ―cities in Venezuela. It also recycles objects in disuse and activates them for a new programming.
The infrastructures and vacant lands or dumping places of the city are the support for its mobility. The modules function with a global positioning system. This monitoring and tracking system enable its communication with other modules via MODEM or GPS establishing a coordinated action. They can be connected to the infrastructure of the city in order to level its fluid system and its energetic charge.
The performance level granted by the mobility to the modules makes possible the monitoring of the city, establishing routs of analysis and social care. The Units could move through communities providing programs of mass attention, so children and adolescents might find opportunities to increase their knowledge by means of training courses for first aid, sports or computing. Upon acquiring such experience they will be able to help others setting up a growing dynamic.
The modules have signage and iconography, which makes easier for children to identify them by action programs. Therefore, once they recognize the established routes, they will be able to make the most of the transportation system and to strengthen alliances.
The modules are equipped considering mobility as a variable. The interior design of the Units should focus on the motion as the key point. The joint devices must adjust to the surfaces and fix to them in order to avoid emergencies in case of an accident.
The Nomad Units allow the exploration of the interstitial spaces of the city employing the road infrastructure as a platform for the search and support of complementary activities. Is in such places with a periodic occupation pattern, where the Project is contemplating developing theme parks, in which different Nomad Units will fit.
Assembly platforms inserted in the nodes and further road infrastructures that allow the fitting of movable service and social care modules, i.e. self-sustainable platforms that use service supply networks of the city. These platforms are like located centers of temporary housing, where children and adolescents could be examined and then sent to specialized organizations.
This strategy of colonization and refounding of the city does not function dividing layers but suturing distances and taking aparts caused by the implementation of large-scale road infrastructures. The Project develops social fields in the interstitial spaces of the city; some institutional instances have already experienced the benefits of such territories.
The modules reuse the spaces and structures aimed at advertising as units of decentralized logistics. These units develop support programs, and function with different programmatic scales ―urban rooms to convert the intermediate levels between the highways and the soil stratum of the city. They take vacant lands and receive support from strategic alliances with the advertisement industry, and they offer temporary rooms.