Architecture
MULTIPLE USE - ACADEMIC PROJECT
Architecture should transcend the physical object. It should build an atmosphere that allows the user to undertake a sensory trip to a place that lies within intimacy. It is an intimacy based on the dual experience between the outside and the inside, a dialogue between space and individual.This architecture demands the present moment and the attention of the individual to build a narrative. It lies within a story which is told, constructed and manifested by itself in any scale or magnitude, finally settling, in that one moment, as a composer of the experience, transporting the individual to a relational model between themselves and their community Proposed as a new model of social life to generate a collective life, the neighborhood Minuto de Dios
(MDD) has undergone a process of both physical and social deterioration due to the changes in land use and the emergence of unplanned activities that altered the urban fabric and appropriation. Its formation and development has emulsified generations that relate in different ways to its surroundings, with a community that has been fading out of oblivion and lack of memory. An edge forgotten by the sector and the city. The C3 project proposes in response to this consolidated center of the MDD neighborhood a punctual intervention, a civic center in a place of typological convergence and lack of activity. The place puts together different scales and populations, making the site an entrance door of the urban scale and an exit door of the zonal scale. The project had to suture those edges with its morphology and program to respond correctly to its environment. To work with a more solid base and in order to activate and potentiate what has been forgotten, the project uses the historical and conceptual guidelines of worship, culture and education on which the Minute of God was founded to resignify the neighborhood. Its spatial configuration, morphology and transition from public to private were based on the typology of cloister with its four pandas and its convergent and central courtyard. The gradation of intimacy apprehended of this typology allowed us to generate the different levels of contact to ensure that the house was not affected by the concurrence derived from the equipment, thus suturing the various scales of the city, while maintaining the project unity. The program responds to the needs of the place, the location decisions of each of the elements are then given according to the activities in response to this gradient of intimacy. The result is a series of pandas that vary in program and activity to accommodate complementary uses and scales that gradually connect with each other in function of public space.
This new conformed space based on the cloister is deformed by the superposition of vacuum operations that metaphorize public space and the city. On the one hand, it varies in dimensions in its horizontal and vertical to give way to the gradient of intimacy and activity. On the other hand, the void, as a metaphor for public space in the city, recreates streets, parks, squares, generating a micro world where the importance lays in the human being as a sensitive being and as an actor of a collective. Two sides work as a mirror of the existing buildings in its facade, while, the other two on the extensive grove (walk), a monument is established that, due to its dimensions and activities, demarcates the territory as a landmark that stresses the current civic center. Conceptually, the scar is the form in which the cloister modifies its morphology; It is what remains after suturing the scales and the private public relationship within the cloister typology. The scar is what links these spaces and what determines the routes and ways of understanding the project. It builds a ribbon that begins in the most intimate of spaces, the student housing, and culminates in the most public, cultural (library and theater) and office space. This ribbon as it unwinds expands and contracts. On some occasions this tape involves the entire program combining and bringing commerce and complementary areas on the first floors together, and on others, it disappears to let the inhabitant experience the space in the absence of activity and excess of sensation and emotion. It is a path that breaks the corner of the cloister allowing that vertex to escape and alter the morphology vertically, thus a tower appears as a landmark in the grove (walk). A monument that appears in the territory to highlight it, establish a place of reference and a point of arrival of a pathway. Although it is intended to be solid and strong, the tower rises to allow the continuity of public space so that it is sensitive to its context.
On its opposite side, small cracks break down the perimeter circulation of the courtyard disturbing the path and allowing the public to decompose to access the private. These spaces are established as communal areas where there is direct contact with heaven and earth. Continuing with the guidelines of the neighborhood this symbolic connection gives the house the subtle character of the cult. On the one hand, they are depressed on their basement, seeking to generate isolation and activity pockets. On the other hand, the decks are habitable. A module with a core of its own services introduces new forms of lifestyles a new appropriation of the space, understanding the daily life of a student as a configurator of the new urban and architectural space. The prior explains the formal alterations and their relationship with their edges. But the fundamental intention of the project is to restructure fragmented relationships and reinterpret forgotten imaginaries to re-weave the community. For this we needed first to create a strong impact on the individual and it is with the contrast between opposites that it is possible to produce this feeling; since the light is brighter when the darkness precedes it. By promoting individual identification with the place, an emotional bond is promoted that would generate a collective imaginary and therefore a transcendent link in the community. That is why the contact with the project is based on a sequentiality of moments that, more than a beginning and end, are determined from what is seen before and after; and in what proportion this is done to be a cause for exaltation and emotion.
The gradation of intimacy presented throughout the project finds its moment of revelation in the «temple» and the courtyards. In these, the proportions and sensory conditions of the space determine the degree of contact that exists both with the environment and with the other. Subtracted from the typology of the monastery, the central courtyard shaping the space and the «temple», connection point between public and private space become the central articulators of the project. It is the moment of overwhelm after crossing the various interstices through which it is possible to access them, such as tunnels, platforms or small cracks between the houses and that are necessarily reduced and covered to exalt the courtyars as an architectural object of contemplation. The promenade is covered with the veil of illusion so that space is gradually discovered and achieves an emotional effect on the individual. This is how C3 weaves a sense of belonging that unites the individual with the community to bring the project to life.