Civic infrastructures, soil reengineering and connectivity patterns manages new relations between massive housing plans and informal settlements. The projects is part of a series of operative surfaces and cultural grounds as a support for productive activities, conceived as Collective Landscapes with a cooperative urban methodology for political and economic reengineering. Through the development of civic infrastructures and environmental playground scenarios, the project has accomplished to amalgamate in a legal foundation model, all the cultural, sporting and aid groups, experimenting with a new micro economies model based on a collective landscape.
Nominated for the MCHAP Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize 2016
XV Venice Biennale of Architecture 2016 Reporting From The Front
Winner of Urban Design Awards at XX Panamerican Quito Biennal 2016
The project is focused on the renewal and resuscitation of inactive and non-regulated landscapes that derived from Venezuelan post industrial cities in the beginning of the last century after the stunning fall in oil prices.
This system creates a new environmental playground scenario, which is an open theater that reveals the free stage mechanism and the different grounds of expression and cultural effervescence. Taking advantage of the topography, a stratification process began through the creation of boardwalks and connecting paths that activate the territory. The intervention strategy fragmented the program into specialized components and spread its over the territory, acting as creative social Network of interconnected infrastructures, avoiding conventional centralized cultural buildings. The project integrated and incorporated a sequences of preexistent events into a network of community initiative.
The proposal is immersed in a crisis between a formal grid of massive housing plans developed in the earlys 80’ and an informal slums that surround it. The situation increase in the last decade producing an a impenetrable hermetic barriers and psychological boundaries between their citizens. The social rejection of using the interstitial space have left the conquering of this transitional ambit to delinquency and crime. The intervention was directed to produce a new macroeconomic systems imprinting connectivity devices and programmatic units that intertwine local productivity and talent cartography.
A landscape operation and the creation of new geographies was achieved stacking and packing the removed ground for a second set of productive units. The confrontation of this system creates a new environmental playground scenario, which is an open theater that reveals the free stage mechanism and the different grounds of expression and cultural effervescence. Taking advantage of the topography, a stratification process began through the creation of boardwalks and connecting paths that activate the territory. The way of combining the territory reengineering with a cultural park that houses at least six programs, through the integration of a battery of containers strategically placed in borders for the contention of the land; provides the creation of a clear central public space. These containers cast the productive units that support the active diverse programming of restaurant / bar culture, information Centre, furniture manufacturing workshop, stage devices and a textile workshop for making costumes for festivals, insure the progressively development of the community.