A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE CITY AND ARCHITECTURE.
The Advanced Unit Analysis course I teach, which supports the workshops of Alberto Miani and Daniel Bermúdez, is understood as part of the foundation for decisions regarding the degree project. For this reason, its structure is based on the way the student approaches the project from a perspective of reality, in which they intervene from a critical and objective perspective, oriented toward a project that positively transforms it.
The analytical observation proposed by the course always seeks, as its ultimate goal, understanding by establishing problems that allow for the development of intervention strategies that organize thought and, consequently, the project.
All the information about the place, the inhabitants, the possible rituals and techniques of the project form a matrix of information that must be grouped into organized categories in such a way that the relationships between the parts and the whole of the project can be systematically understood.
The approach to reality constitutes the origin of the analysis that seeks to break it down and re-synthesize it through the project, understood as a way of capturing the past to dream of a better future.
This is not about taking a blind look at the city, but rather establishing an objective starting point that defines the way in which the environment is understood. To this end, the student must draw on their own experience and the age-old instinctive refinement of intuition as a means to formulate a possible name that defines the place they are approaching. During the first week, a hypothetical title for the project must be pre-defined. This will allow each person to approach the territory through an analytical path that will then lead to a site map that reveals (makes visible) the most representative aspects.
“(…) The site is what exists. With architecture, a place is created. To take root in a site is to create a habitable place. The geographical site is given, but with architecture, it becomes a place, a habitable place.”[1] ROGELIO SALMONA.
[2] A certain worldview gives rise to a world map; but the world map, in turn, defines the worldview specific to its culture.
THE CITY GENERATES ARCHITECTURE AND ARCHITECTURE GENERATES THE CITY.
The course answers several questions but, above all, attempts to define the student’s capacity for creative synthesis, understanding that architecture emerges from the synthetic act that concludes the analysis. For this reason, the course has two phases during the semester: In the first phase, the city must be understood as the origin of the project, and in the second phase, how the project generates an idea of the city. These two instances form a loop in which the project moves from a cyclical relationship of analysis-synthesis through which the principles are formulated to understand the site and intervene to transform it into a habitable place, a happier and therefore more beautiful place.
The Map, located between the first and second parts, serves as a bridge linking analysis with synthesis, preexistence (the past) with the project (the future), the city with architecture, the mind with the environment, the world of objects with the world of ideas and feelings.
For the purposes of the course, the map is therefore a form of communication and communion. It is a tool for re-presenting (re-presenting) the world. It is a pause that allows us to step back and understand the evolution of history and the many project paths that can emerge in response to the complexity we operate in as architects. It is an instant, a threshold that astonishes (brings us out of the shadows) and generates a new and renewing reality within itself.
THE PROJECT IS THE CITY, AND THE MAP MAKES THAT COLLECTIVE DREAM POSSIBLE.
All the projects in the course are part of a single city project. The entire group proposes a form of city that unites the landscape and the people, the geography and the communities that inhabit it, interweaving different ways of life into a single reality. The map of Bogotá’s historic center, created by the students, is a project in itself, a projection toward a better future in which the entire group agrees on the main systems and issues that architecture must address. The conflicting relationships between humankind and nature are recognized as opportunities for intervention. The larger project is the city, which is assembled from all the work completed in the course, organizing a set of specific interventions aimed at creating the larger urban complex. “(…) it is an architecture in which the façade disappears as a primary element. That is to say, interior and exterior intertwine in a single path, (…) this allows for a more elastic analysis of space, a topological analysis, of “topos” (…) a point that is important, but the topological notion that comes from Poincaré, the mathematician, was an analysis of the way of interpreting and reading geography, that is, maps.” ROGELIO SALMONA.[3]
The link between man and his territory is clear and has long been discussed, what many authors have called topos[4], which could be understood as a way of living, something that in HEIDEGGER’s words is understood as a way of establishing oneself under the sky and on the ground.
This ancient force that has led us to transform the natural condition, preparing it for human life, this physical and metaphysical act of the human body altering the territory, has a prior mental and graphic act. The technique owes its existence to the map as an understanding of the world that then allows it to be re-presented and re-created.
The map, then, seems more the result of an experience than a graphic representation that replicates reality. It offers a perspective, a tangible form of the students’ experiences, and can therefore be understood as a mental map of the course, rewritten on the maps of the city that the students have encountered at different moments throughout the project. From the grand cosmic scale of the sun, which organizes the planetary winds and, with them, the waters, we move on to studying the mountains, the rivers, the city, and with it the streets and blocks that receive the architecture, allowing themselves to be altered by it and, with it, alter the balance of the territory.
Once the order of the course was established and having already chosen the study sector, the students recognized the site through their experience and captured it on a map in which it was concluded that this point should be understood as an urban center on the edge in which the abstract mental matrix that arrived with the colony had been arranged on the inclined topography of the eastern mountain range and its rivers, generating an idea of order that was now recognized as disorder due to the way in which the natural condition had forgotten the experience of the place. The floating population, which also had no meeting spaces and could hardly move through the streets invaded by machines, had to settle and take root. New homes should appear and also more open spaces capable of reintroducing distant nature, creating moments for the pedestrian. The map generated by the group then takes on a name, and with it, all the architectures acquired that character of a landscape on different scales, giving continuity to the ancient dream of inhabiting. The map is not a figure or a static silhouette but a form, a dynamic logical structure that allows the formulation of thought; the map is architecture, it is creative synthesis.
[1] Rogelio Salmona: Open Spaces/Collective Spaces; Museography: José Ignacio Roca; Curatorial Consultant: Jean Dethier; Photography: Enrique Guzmán. [et al.]. Bogotá: Colombian Society of Architects, 2006. 100 pp., ill. Plans; 28 cm.
[2] Brotton, Jerry. A History of the World in 12 Maps. Translated by Francisco J. Ramos Mena. Barcelona: Debate, 2014. p. 27.
[3] National University of Colombia. Master’s in Architecture. November 1, 2005 – Conversations with Rogelio Salmona. 11/15 Time in the Work of Rogelio Salmona. Transcription of the Salmona Seminar, November 2005. Original DVD Recording. Transcriber: Julián Forero. Proofread and Edited by Sasha Londoño.
[4] “Life (use, activity, function) seeks through architecture to construct a space of clarity that is in harmony with that temporal tension and resolves it in a topos, a place, a founding consciousness of the civil element, of justice and of celebration. Architecture fulfils its true function when it achieves this: it thus makes its human contribution by formulating, then, the meaning of the construction of reality as an aspiration for a polis”. Antonio Armesto. Architecture and Nature. Three suspicions for the next millennium. ABSTRACTION. DPA 16, Edicions UPC, Barcelona 2011. ISSN 1134-8526, pages 35-46.
