Earthbound Schools
*Finalist
In the Anthropocene, the philosopher Bruno Latour invites us to reflect on our models of territorialization. Within this questioning, the 'return to the countryside’ presents us with the double opportunity to vindicate the 'earthly', immanent and traversed; and to rethink the 'human', transcendent and dimensioned. The countryside is understood as an open territory contrasting the centrality of man on the organization of space. At the same time, returning to the countryside reminds us of the need to establish and strengthen more sensitive connections between peoples and their territories.
Looking for ways to strengthen these connections, our proposal starts from a fictional territory inspired by the magical realism of Men of Maize; a territory that looks forward and backward simultaneously. This double movement maps landscapes from multiple contexts of maize in the Americas: the river and its meanders, the lakes and their puddles, the hill and its terraces, the forest and its vegetation. The school, then, is dispersed throughout the countryside and architecture begins with walking between these contexts; through the pathways that connect different local geographies.
This strategy seeks to value the specificities of different landscapes and weave them into a network open to new encounters and relationships. From there, the schools are developed to host such encounters and capture the different intensities of each location. The projects develop relationships in form, materiality and program from an idea of perimeters poché. Thus, the fixed parts of the program occupy poché spaces—or intermediate zones—between geometric spaces open for learning activities, and non-orthogonal forms that dialogue with the intensities of the surrounding field.
Year: 2023
V Premio Félix Candela Competition
Architecture:
Luca Penteado Caiaffa
