1308: Detournement
Department of Architecture
Studio Option
8 credits
Wednesday 2:00 - 6:00
Friday 2:00 - 6:00
Instructor(s)
Cecilia Puga
Course Description
D'tournement
1. Presentation
The colonization of the Chilean desert, located between the 20th and 30th southern parallels, is historically connected with mining, shepherding communities and exchange dynamics between the high land and the coastline. The density of events derived from this occupation has marked the land with buildings, earth movements and imprints; many of which have been absorbed into the landscape to the extent of blurring their outlines.
Just as such representation as the debris photographed by Sophie Ristelhueber (1), some examples of these imprints appear on the abstract plain of these arid lands, far from the story of their origin.
Once the emotion of this story has gone, all that is left is geometry and material.
The retaining walls of an old dock, remains of dry-stone walls from a shepherd village and the imprint of a train line, are all part of these remains: located on parallel 29 south and longitude 71 west, 70 km north of the city of La Serena, there are examples in parts of the installations of the El Tofo mine and its area of influence. The first is an industrial ruin (the remains of what was the dock of Puerto de La Cruz Grande, which belonged to the El Tofo mining site), the second is a group of areas with the beginnings of an urban system (dry-stone walls from an old shepherd settlement), the third is the imprint a line which may connect them (drawn from the old electric train that once carried iron material from the mine to the boats tied in the docks).
Interpreting this reality that has been modified by man as a new material nature, avoiding all sacralization and "institutional" operation on the fragment and defining new architectural and constructive identities constitute the center of the work of this studio.
2. Method
Contrary to dismantling as a strategy for tackling the industrial remains and associated settlements, where mitigating construction erases experience, the studio understands material remains (constructions and imprints) and virtual remains (photographs, plans, geographic charts and texts) as inherited elements, , as valid platforms to begin new constructive and architectural realities.
From these elements the students will re-construct an assumed preexistence, and will create a collective place in the Chilean desert, induced from afar with some remains of indications of architecture which will comprise a constructive inventory which should form part of the personal intervention strategy.
This inventory is oblique, it is an invention which looks to generate a possible constructive imagination: Mono-material, low-tech, non-institutional, fragility, opportunity-randomness, outside time, self-construction, are words which will help define the examples proposed by the studio and the character of the complex to be designed.
- Molds from a Water Tower
- Half moon
- Amereida Aqueduct.
- Wooden warehouse on the road to San Juan.
- Wooden basins in a thermoelectric plant.
- Mining structures recorded by Bernd and Hilla Becher
- Refrigeration towers recorded by Bernd and Hilla Becher
- A poor circus tent
- Walnut-wood greenhouses
- Stone Horreos in Spain
- Shepherd housing structures
The studio is based on the idea that the shape of an object is not relevant. The aim, pedagogically speaking, is to be able to control and generate subtle variations within an existing and shared entity, applying to it diverse formal and constructive logics.
3. Programmatic setting / Tourism
Marc Auge, in his critical description of Center Parcs, refers to a tourism model which assumes a user who plays, who "acts as if", who looks for an ideal that is not present in reality but in what is real remodeled by intelligence and imagination, that is, the idea (3).
Along these same lines, Mark Neumann (4) refers to tourist places with discursive spaces which involve the participation of planners, politicians, conservationists, artists, businessmen and tourists, and where the discourse of each group "marks and domesticates" (touristic) places, comprising "a culturally generated spectacle" which may be consumed and experienced in different ways by different people.
Everything, from monuments to exotic vacation destinations, is redesigned and packaged for the consumer. As a result, says Medina Lasnsky, "this produces a new conceptualization of the history of buildings, of spaces and of concrete places; some have been preserved and reinforced, while other have been left to fall apart. In this process of amplification and elimination, buildings, cities and even whole countries have been restructured through tourist initiatives created to serve political, cultural, economic and academic ends" (5).
Chile in this scenario presents itself to the world as pure geography, as pristine unyielding terrain. Its (modest) cultural weight, of which these remains are testimony, is quickly erased in the search for a focused and comfortable location for a Chile on the map where the tourist is looking to "savor the pleasure of verification, the joy of recognition" (3).
From the reuse of physical and cultural remnants, and placing the program in the area of tourism, the studio will design a place and an event centered on the experience of the constructed setting, and it will address the distinction between "authentic" cultural places and "staged" cultural experiences.
4. Program / general description
The tourist settlement will be physically located over the Caleta Chungungo ruin and the Puerto de la Cruz Grande. The project, dispersed over this "terrain", will constitute an autonomous and self-sustaining unit and will be comprised of three basic programmatic areas:
1.Services
Accommodation/hotel: the studio will suppose a type of cooperative management, not institutional, non-hierarchical and dispersed. The "accommodation/hotel" will be understood as the sum total of small individual constructions, with some group programs. In this way, small devices will express who is in charge of providing the group with its urban condition.
Beach resort: the beach resort area will be organized into sectors, which will be defined in terms of environment units and different textures. These sectors will contain heated and cold water swimming pools, huts, a small hotel unit, public restrooms, a fishing dock, a craft fair, areas for a gym and for dance and yoga, and the beach itself.
The sectors will be interlinked according to an explicit script which will aim to multiply the experience of the user via "soft" operations.
2. Supply and recycling:
Fog garden: collection of drinking water for consumption and irrigation from the morning sea mist, known locally as camanchaca.
Sun farm: energy production necessary for illumination and basic consumption.
Vegetable gardens: growing both vegetables and fruit for local consumption.
Elements for water, energy and food storage.
Water treatment and recycling plant for irrigation.
Compost heaps using organic waste.
This "machinery" which will give life to the mechanism, the supply area, is understood as an integral and visible part of the proposals.
3. Connection
As part of the group, there will be a connecting element. It will be used to transport water and energy between the different parts of the project, and will also constitute a public space and programmatic area. It will be built following the lines of the old electric train and it will be fundamentally linear.
5. Programming of the studio
Given the importance and scope of the location and the program, the work will be carried out in teams of two students, who will be responsible for defining an intervention strategy on three levels: management model and organogram, rituals and locations, constructive and material expression and character. From this strategy, each student will work individually on part of the project until reaching the advanced stages of development.
Meeting will be held every 15 days, with work sessions over at least three consecutive days. One hand-over will be made in each meeting, which will also consist of group and individual correction sessions and the presentation of the task for the following meeting.
(1) Ristelhueber, Sophie / FAIT, Books On Books collection, Errata Editions, 2008
(2) Taller La invencion de Chile, Smiljan Radic / Cecilia Puga, Austin 2007
(3) Auge, Marc / EL VIAJE IMPOSIBLE, Gedisa Editorial, 1998
(4) Neumann, Mark / ON THE RIM. Looking for the Grand Canyon, University of Minessota Press, Minneapolis, 1999. / Op cit. D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism, Perception, Performance and Place. Oxford: Berg, 2004
(5) D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism, Perception, Performance and Place. Oxford: Berg, 2004