lima, miraflores

Oceanfront beneath the cliffs of Miraflores, the city's most glamorous district. The waves' sound as they retreat back through the rounded stones (in the image I've caught them mid-backpedal) resembles a cross between sandpaper and crumbling styrofoam soundclipped in reverse. Very groovy.

medellín, santo domingo and la ladera

(Perhaps not entirely successful but at least well intentioned self-portrait with reflected Medellín land- and skyscape in green opaque glass through punched openings in faux stone wall whilst using the internet. Photograph by the author.)

The city of Medellín has entered an important transitional phase. In the last few years it has rebounded from its narco-traffic legacy (this was the home of Pablo Escobar, after all) and it is now reaching out to educate and incorporate the broad, sloping margins of impoverished neighborhoods. Architecture is at the heart of the city’s recuperative campaign…not in an environmentally deterministic mindset, mind you, but in one that is playfully mindful of figure and ground's interplay. The city is employing Colombia’s architects to revamp its public spaces with formal ambition and spatial sensitivity. The crusade is ongoing at the local and regional scales. As the city proper (financial center, civic center, universities, etc) extends north-south along the Río Medellín, here “regional scale” means down-in-the-valley and “local scale” means up-in-the- flanking-hills.

So far Medellín boasts five local-scale interventions. The two I show here are designed by Mazzanti Arquitectos, the office I visited in Bogotá. Their full names are, respectively: “Parque Biblioteca España en Santo Domingo Savio” and “Parque Biblioteca León de Greiff en La Ladera.” The appellation “parque biblioteca” most comfortably translates as community center. Instead of serving as passive repositories of textual knowledge (although they do harbor small collections) the buildings' main focus is housing a myriad of programs, resources, and services dedicated to all ages...small children being the most vocal.

Informal developments are relentless in their cellularization of space into semi-private and private claims. As such, they can approach modular homogeneity with a density in plan that renders it difficult to discern the circulatory network allowing them to function. In such an environment, a carved and carefully cared for public space coaxes out the public with capillary action. Projects such as Mazzanti’s, positioned in the thick of the informal mash, are fed directly by the pressure of the surrounding urban density. The interventions do not structure the surrounding built fabric so much as redirect its flows and concentrations, rending discreet reconstructive scars that heal into continuities over time.

Parque Biblioteca España en Santo Domingo Savio insets three immense geometricized stones high on a hillside overlook. The top image places the buildings in their social context. Note their modest, tip-of-the-iceberg massing versus the glowering monumental masks visible from below (see image at left). Several security guards--a common sight in Colombian cities--and a few waist-high safety rails are all that protect the parque biblioteca’s property. Its wood-floored main entry rests adjacent to the existing road. Across the street is the church of Santo Domingo and, above it, a sheltered ball court.

The image to the left looks upslope to the chamfered boxes. On a hazy day, the mottled black stones fade into the mountain’s silhouette. As one approaches by the newly installed “metrocable” (also highlighted in red), corners crisp and details clarify. If the library seems more comfortable than usual with my graphics it is because the initial scheme was presented in model form as three glowing red resin blocks.

The metrocable ride is surreal. The cars’ forms mimic those of the library and confuse scale, distance, and function. The system is minimal in some senses and massive in others. Each car is intimate, seating only eight people, and there is no continuous track or trail that needs to be cleared on the ground for the line to pass through. Terrestrial impact is limited to enormous cylindrical footprints and a progression of mammoth station stops. Floating between these implants one drifts quietly, dangling past the (clearly visible) private daily lives of all the conglomerate below.

The center image’s downhill stance elucidates the project’s immediate contextual relationships, conveys the breadth of the landscape beyond, and relates the stones’ idiosyncratic creasing to their interior tectonics. The buildings climbing the slope to the right (a church and ball court), while no architectural gems, mark the neighborhood’s communal center. A clear departure from the local architectural vocabulary, the library blocks’ stolid opacity squeezes the panoramic spectacle to their interstices, where a strong prospect-and-refuge effect begs photographic exploitation (see link to New York Times article below).

The stones’ roof lines reveal them as folded, suspended sheaths. Inside, canted walls whitewash interior towers with reflected daylight. Windows are minimal and placed as much for graphic effect as to account for sight lines. The buildings’ surprising lack of transparency intensifies their figural quality and illusive solidity. Even as the walls’ thinness and luminous interiors belie their ostensible material sincerity, the resultant spaces’ emphatic interiority enhances their union to the landscape.

Finally, the image to the right depicts a stone gabion retaining wall upslope, the main platform above, and an entrance to the partially sunken socle ahead. A layered forest of steel tubes lets air and light into the sub-platform plenum that conjoins the boxes beyond without undermining its solidity.

In Parque Biblioteca León de Greiff en La Ladera, Mazzanti Arquitectos address a similar brief to Santo Domingo by likewise anchoring three discreet boxes in a common armature.

However, whereas Santo Domingo looms with iconic imagery at high visibility, La Ladera hunkers into the landscape. It combs the topography over its head with a formal discipline bordering on Modernist orthodoxy. The building is more intent on views from within than from without. The boxes are view-finders that don’t have to do much searching.

The top image—courtesy of Mazzanti Architects—catches the building at its most charismatic. Below that, the image to the left peers over the library’s right shoulder as it hunkers into the terrain’s broad slope, tracing a contour line while its constituents slide forward out of their holsters. The slope here is much more gradual than at Santo Domingo and its green space more generously inhabitable.

The composition’s concavity catalyzes voyeuristic interrelationships. The image at center looks from one box to its neighbors’ similarly split-level condition. As is also visible in the image to the left, the uppermost deck gently slopes down to enjoy the modules’ formal frontal gestalt’s framing and shading potential.

Finally, the image to the right faces the entrance from within the communal arm. To the left is the ground, to the right are two boxes are highlighted in red, and from above the sunlight filters through young palms rising toward the new ground.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/travel/12nextstop.html?8dpc
http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/hiperbarrio/

medellín, orquideorama del jardín botánico

bogotá, transmilenio

I came to Bogotá for two main reasons. First, the city provides a prime Latin American case study on infrastructural development at the metropolitan scale. Like Mexico City, the bulk of Bogotá sprawls across a vast plane of reclaimed land. Unlike Mexico City, Bogotá has decided to develop its roads and bus system instead of implementing an underground Metro. Second (and this is related to the first) I am interested in the work of Giancarlo Mazzanti, a local architect who takes systemic approaches in creating public projects. The two interests dovetail in the pedestrian bridge system his office designed for the Transmilenio bus stations. The bridges, a kit of supports and sections that can kink over and around contextual obstacles, now mark the rhythm of the bus routes throughout the city.

http://www.transmilenio.gov.co/nuevapagina/home_english.htm

bogotá, collegio gavilanes

The school is less formally-minded than other Giancarlo Mazzanti projects and, as such, it provides perhaps the most concise example of his modular design strategies. The small campus is elegant in its simplicity and organizational clarity. Conceived as a chain of modules to be snaked and shifted into various contexts, the string is tethered by a library/auditorium at one end and a kindergarten at the other. From one of these two singular structures to the other, the chain of one and two-story classroom modules enfolds a central common space (center image) like a necklace. Upper lab rooms, wrapped in stone and ribboned with colorful glass, float above the cloister’s plastic continuity (left and center images). Distances among the modules remain constant but the architects reserve a modest degree of freedom in determining the connective ground story’s final configuration. This reservation allows them to fine-tune the space within and its relationship to the neighborhood without.

It is essential to see this neighborhood (visible in the center and right images) in order to understand the project. While not the poorest of Bogotá’s barrios, poverty is omnipresent in its ramshackle assortment of mortared clay and unpaved roads. Workers were installing utility systems and erecting housing projects to the east and north when I visited. Construction of Collegio Gavilanes is almost complete (note the paint-spattered gentleman putting finishing touches on the ball court at center) and it will be interesting to see how town and gown interact as the project matures.

*aerial photograph courtesy of Mazzanti Architects

bogotá, selected rogelio salmona works

biblioteca pública virgilio barco

nueva santa fe community center

colombian archives

torres del parque

bogotá, view from cerro monserrate

The image above, taken from high in the eastern hills, shows three streets that help explain the city's peculiar urban character. Bogota’s traffic has neither the US’s barreling self-restraint nor India’s equilibrating dynamics, and its regulation is a central issue in the city’s contemporary development.

The first street is Jimenez Avenue, which snakes downhill on the left side of the image. It was recently refurbished by a team led by Rogelio Salmona and consists of a stepped linear fountain flanked by trees and lined with lanes of traffic. It was built above a riverbed that had been long been covered. The pedestrian-minded road is a scenic, graceful gesture that doesn’t knit things together so much as rend a linear pause in the city center’s gritty discontinuities.

The second is Carrera 7, the most important organizational element in Bogotá’s urban development. Called “La Septima,” it runs from Plaza Bolivar (highlighted in red), the center of the Spanish colonial grid, to the old salt mines far to the north.

Instead of climbing the Andes’ steep slopes as its population grew, Bogotá spread westward and digested its vast agricultural flatlands. The result is that the city’s main organizational corridor—along with its cultural and financial centers—have been displaced to the modern city’s far east. Its an odd situation that exacerbates traffic pressure. There are miraculous (i.e. highly controversial) plans to install the Transmillenio bus system on La Septima, which would consume precious lanes but ultimately raise its efficiency.

The third street I've highlighted is Calle 26, a high-traffic artery that extends as far as the international airport. Assuming a highway format, it is the most expressively symptomatic of the need for east-west connection. As Calle 26 nears La Septima it sinks below grade to allow the original grid to bridge over and then uses exit-ramps to disperse traffic as it passes the financial center and the Andes’ slope increases. I took this photograph in the morning while the city readied for its birthday celebration on La Septima. It’s one of those pictures that takes down a whole flock.

First, note the yellow sign at center that claims the street for the “Cyclovia” (pedestrian and bicycle use only) on Sundays and festivals, from 7:00 AM until 2:00 PM. I took the photograph on a Sunday that was also a festival day, although unfortunately I had to scoot out before the big parade fired up. Bicyclists are few but you can see plenty of pedestrians taking advantage of the traffic cease-fire.

Second, note the balcony, tarp, and bright light just below the sign. There was a camera crew up there with folks on couches warming up to color-commentate the occasion.

Third, note the tall rectangular sign rising behind the smoker’s head and the tip of the roof poking out from the behind the building on the far left. This is the Transmilenio stop on Jimenez Avenue, which runs perpendicular to La Septima.

Fourth, note the mix of buildings present. The textured wall to the right marks a Spanish colonial church. Far in the distance, partially obscured by the trees, rises a belltower of the cathedral in Plaza Bolivar. The rest of the buildings were established in the 1960’s and 70’s. The avenue here is fairly narrow because of the original Spanish grid in which it sits but as the road extends to the north it widens to take on several lanes of (choked) traffic.

Finally, note the Colombian flag in the upper left and the fellow smoking in the foreground. Bogotá is in Colombia and a fair number of people smoke here.

expense list, page 12

panama, san blas

Miffed and scorned by the boat-wielding Panamanian public (my plan to sail the Canal as a line-handler never materialized), I re-directed my last few Central American days to San Blas, a string of islands off the coast that, along with a 232-mile strip of coastal Panama, belongs to the indigenous Kuna people.

It was an odd and incredible experience that I have yet to wrap my head around. Far from any trace of urban armatures that could possibly rationalize such a side trip, my days on the islands were some of the richest of the year. This is not the least because I got to share them with—in addition to the Kuna—the two Irish architects and an entirely impressive UCLA business student that filled out our gaggle of gringos.

Our visit was remarkable for time as well as place. A prominent islander happened to have a daughter going through her first menstrual cycle. Now, ordinarily this isn’t a fact to which I’d be privy but for the Kuna it calls for a celebration including a haircut, a naming, and an island-wide celebration.

The celebration that ensued would never fly at Disney. First the women and then the men proceeded to get absolutely sloshed on traditional sugar-cane liquor and rubbing-alcohol-grade rum. Drunken scuffles interrupted the ceremonial dances while children darted everywhere like a school of skipping, clapping sardines (not the canned kind; the swimming-in-the-ocean kind). It seemed to be an important moment of release, especially for the women, whose social role appeared more structured in terms of dress and behavior. The girl’s newfound adulthood served as little more than a pretense for the party and we visitors never actually even saw the special girl amid all the revelry.

It astounds me that the Kuna were as comfortable with us in their midst as they were. As a people, they retain their traditions with uncanny self-awareness and open-mindedness. They seem to take money with a grain of salt—until recently, coconuts served as currency—and a modest tourism trade garners sufficient cash for whatever modern conveniences they deem appropriate. There’s nothing like a native on a cell phone or Linkin Park in the hut next door.

Part of San Blas’ magic was the odyssey it entailed. Our crew woke up at five, followed a three-hour highway schlep from Panama City with two more hours of mud-slinging jungle adrenaline (top image) and, after out-juking a team of oversexed Caterpillar trucks, we headed to the river. Settled in our canoe, we floated down past crocodiles and toucans until the river spilled into the sea and delivered us to our final destination, a low sandy island barnacled by thatched huts (bottom image). There we slept on hammocks and dined on more crab and lobster than we could eat, spending most of the day on deserted islands with powdery beaches and palm trees (middle image). I may have sacrificed a few layers of skin and a few gallons of perspiration but the pay-off, I dare say, was tremendous.

panama city, miraflores locks

Image and footage of a ferry in transit...the ship is a flea compared to the usual freighters passing through. The widest of ships leave a mere two feet to each of the locks' walls. I'm going to try to hitch a ride up the canal as a "line handler" in the next few days before I move on to Colombia. I realize that the Panama Canal doesn't quite fall in line with the other case studies I've adopted so far in terms of scale or urban interaction...but it's damn interesting and impressive so I'll just stick it in the BF Infrastructure category for now and have a good time with it.

It doesn’t organize Panama City with small-scale sophistication (it's more like a raison d'etre) but, for such a gargantuan gesture, the Panama Canal seems surprisingly ambiguous. It is not the Lay-Z-River Sharpie slash that I imagined. Instead, the canal is a nexus of infrastructures—from dams to locks to railway lines to freight vessels—that relies on an intimate relationship with Panama's topographical and ecological peculiarities.
I happened to visit during the rainy season, which means chronic dampness and oppressive humidity. Such weather isn’t conducive to daytime activity (nightlife is another story), but the canal depends on this inordinate amount of precipitation for its viability. Daily deluges descend on surrounding swathes of spongy jungle. Dense root networks minimize soil erosion and corresponding dredging requirements. From rain forested slopes, water coalesces in Lake Gatún, an artificial lake 26 meters above sea level that is maintained by three dams. This lake stores the water needed for all the lock operations. There are no pumps. The Panama Canal’s locks operate gravitationally to flush about 26 million gallons of freshwater into the Pacific and the Atlantic per use. As long as the reservoir isn’t overtaxed it’s an incredibly efficient system…and one that is about to get more efficient when a more sophisticated and water-saving set of new locks are completed in the next few years.

mexico city, zócolo demonstration

I'm still not completely sure what the people were protesting....something about the government taking the shirts off their backs....but I certainly admire the group's pluck. It was coming down pretty hard at the time. The Zócolo is Mexico City's main square and one of the largest civic plazas in the world. The red square in the image at top indicates where they were and the video below should explain the rest.

mexico city, centro historico

The image above, scanned from Benevolo's History of the City, overlays the original Aztec city (left) and the subsequent Spanish grid (right) on Mexico City's center as it stood in the 1970's.
Mexicans are entrepreneurial masters of sidewalk and subway. The city feels oddly European—even American—in its structure and organization but the way in which its standard communal spaces are inhabited can be completely different. For example, in the metro one is passed by a steady tattoo of small-time sales(wo)men. At high tide there may be one hawker per car, although rarely do they allow themselves to overlap. Most sell CDs (pens, gum, and DVD’s are other favorites) and as they shout out tracks and titles they blare their wares from small speakers in their knapsacks. I have found that Mexican volume, at least in its commercial capacity, is twice as loud as the typical color scheme. Above ground, space and sunlight allow for more flexible salesmanship. About half of the average walkway width is taken up by informal venders…no matter how narrow that sidewalk may be. The images above depict two views of a particularly striking downtown street that goes so far as to color-coordinate itself. In the image on the right, you can see how dense the corner becomes before pedestrians can cross the street. The pressure is so intense that I came close to getting intimate with a bus when I was in their position.

mexico city, tlaltelolco

Right next to the Plaza of the Three Cultures (so-called because of its indigenous, Spanish, and contemporary architectural constituency) there rises a host of high-rise housing developments stranded in neglected greenspace. A suspended pedestrian roof winds through the site, held aloft by orange frames. It’s almost as if someone connected the dots in Cristo’s Gates project. Although the intervention does distract from the scene's general banality and provide a thunderstorm service, it doesn’t exhibit any of the other capacities that have marked other similar projects I’ve seen. It appears to be a mono-functional, circulatory gesture more than a spatial, organizational, or structural armature.

mexico city, xochimilco

The image shows one of the Xochimilco’s garden-lined canals originally coaxed—and still cultivated—by organically landfilling an ancient lake. The right side of the canal has been shored and concretized but the left bank remains in its original earthen form. The trees growing along the bank were planted to prevent aqueous erosion. Their densely netted root structures act as an effective landscape cloth. Let me call your attention to the festooned flotillas you might have missed floating in the foreground, each with a built-in table, room for fifteen or twenty, and an oversized paper mache faceplate on front. I imagine the scene would be a bit more active if I had come during the weekend. The boats number in the thousands. Unleashed, they must be an awesome sight. Finally, in the distance undulate the impossibly thin concrete curves of Felix Candela’s Los Manantiales, a restaurant constructed in 1958. This building haunted my structural engineering lectures for years but I never quite understood how it sat in the landscape. It’s under renovation at the moment but I did manage to scramble under its petals for a quick snap-happy look around.

mexico city, casa luis barragán

Luis Barragán, an engineer-cum-architect with a love for both modernism and Mexican dwelling, inhabited and periodically redesigned the house from 1948 until his death in 1988. Visitors are supposed to set up an appointment to get in but I stumbled upon its stoop just as an American tour group had arrived. They were more than happy to share the experience….and their impressions along the way. Note the personal testimony halfway down the stairs. The house was impressive for Barragán’s daylighting techniques, his sophisticated interior-exterior relationships, and his remarkable ability to exploit ostensible solidity for scenographic effect. It is an essay in the phenomenal potential of pared essentials.

mexico city, issues of scale

The image to the left pairs a totemic monolith with a modern onlooker at the museo nacional de antropología. While the museum’s extensive collection runs the gamut, pre-Columbian sculptors seem at their most impressive when operating in stony solidity. It is a monumental sensibility shared by their architecture. The image to the right depicts the ruins of Teotihuacán, a massive pre-Columbian capitol. Rising from an expansive valley, Teotihuacán uses orientation, geometry, and a sublimely hubristic scale to embed itself in the panorama. Views are carefully considered. I took the photograph from atop the so-called Temple of the Moon, which stands at the head of the city’s wide central corridor. This corridor continues for an indeterminate length toward the distant hills. To its left, slightly set back, a massive pyramid referred to as the Temple of the Sun geometrically regularizes its mountainous halo. The minor pyramids scattered at its feet cement the geologic analogy. Touting their power with acoustical response, the precinct’s ancient planners created a grand gesture of which even Le Corbusier would be proud.

uc berkeley, branner midterm report

elkin, the ballard estate

I am in North Carolina again until July 3, basking in southern humidity and parental hospitality while I parse the infinite and profound lessons of my ongoing international investigation. Since the sorting has so far been the frustrating opposite of instantaneous, I try to spend as much time outside as possible QT'ing with my dog and reveling in the bliss of a perpetually available washing machine. This image is of an interim project to the north of my parents' house: bounding some previously planted bushes and roping our arbor into the gently rising hillside.

selected video segments

Some colorful cuts culled from a couple of the more cogent clips I could collect since cutting out of the country...

selected sketchbook pages

A few of the more legible (to me, at least) European sketchbook pages, freshly scanned and occasionally relatable to the grand scholarly scheme.....

Corbusier's cabin and gravesite in Cap Martin, France

Villa Savoye in Poissy, France

Notre Dame au Haut in Ronchamp, France

Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy

Laurentian cloister and sculpture in Florence, Italy

Artwork from Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and from Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria

Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, Italy
Ca' d'Oro in Venice, Italy

The Peristyle in Split, Croatia

Wiessenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart, Germany
Olympic Park in Munich, Germany