Territory Of Collectivity And Artistic Production
INTERTICIAL PARK
Tiuna el Fuerte Foundation, Caracas Venezuela / 2005 – on going project
Selfsufficient social environment based on participation protocols community self iniciatives developed and built on an abandoned parkinglot with local workers.
- Honorable Mention Social Habitat and Development. Panamerican Quito Biennal 2010.
- 1st Price at the Eme3 Architecture Festival. Barcelona 2010.
- Venezuelan Culture National Award Architectural mention 2010.
- 1st Price the IAPA International Award of Public Art. New Zealand 2013.
- Honorific Mention at the Venezuelan Architecture Biennial in Urban Design 2017
Part of a series of operative surfaces and grounds as a support for cultural, sport and productive activities conceived as Collective Landscapes with cooperative urban, political and economic reengineering focused on the renewal and resuscitation of inactive and non-regulated landscapes.
This project emerges from within a complex urban story. The area has been badly affected by slow infrastructure development and suffers from low quality social housing interventions by the state in the 70s. The area is dominated by a sophisticated modernist road network and an overwhelming slum, the inhabitants of which are skilled at integrating their local knowledge with new waves of culture. Add to this a strong military presence (Fuerte Tiuna military base) and all of this combines to create an intricate geomorphology. In the middle of this complex structure, Tiuna El Fuerte Cultural Park was developed. Promoted by local artists and a significant number of urban activists, the park managed to occupy an old and abandoned parking lot thanks to a legal loophole that allows for the use of unused lands under a bailment structure (that is, without transfer of ownership) for twenty years. Out of this first community action sprang a whole chain of cultural ones, which progressively transformed the inactive ground into a sophisticated support system for the collective dynamics of the community. The space experiments with various administrative, organizational, operational and political formats (foundations, companies, social enterprises, NGOs, collectives, groups and investigation labs), employing as a participation methodology an internal weekly assembly during which basic items of maintenance, entrepreneurship, and project formulation and revision are discussed, as well as other issues such as systems for the exchange of values and information, alternative pedagogy, and a productive and autonomous society. The space and its infrastructure (workshops, classrooms, radio station, recording studio, video and communications rooms, Library, auditoria and a small cafeteria) are open to the public and only require that participants develop educational and formative programmes in line with this ethos.
Promoted by local artists and a significant number of urban activists this self-managed cultural park accomplishes the conversion of an abandoned parking lot into a territory of collectivity, artistic production and new markets. It’s a 12 year autonomous sustainable environment built through collective dynamics and local intelligences
A hybrid program, a stratified typology:
A port of embarkation and departures. An aerial pedestrian passage. A high public topography.
An operating plinth loading and unloading, eight towers operating in variable combinatories. Two public ramps as extensions of urban land. A raised pedestrian street. A shortcut to escape the domestic, the everyday, the standardized and observe what is and should not be. A militarized green zone. a perfect view that questions the reason of a military fort from the poetic hopeful of a cultural fort.
A balcony facing the highway.
A seawall with rolling traffic waves.
A multiple program platform. Two poles, two ends.
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A building that assumes program frequencies with variable frequency.
A strip of intermediation for human and object transactions.
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An extended skin on which the vegetable is printed. There are already antecedents. The endemic, the local awaits its opportunity.
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Everything happens in the same mestizo body: the roof is a floor, the floor is a market, the street is the city. Without streets, there is no urban genetics.
A building that is born of another: its waste, its fragments, what is left over, what is stored. Everything serves, they are parts of previous histories that transcend in lines, weaves, fabrics, meshes or surfaces: A moiré of the obsolescence.
