- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Marisa Morán, Arturo Arrieta, Dinorah Schulte, Walter Shintani, Rafi Segal
sueños (in English, dreams):
dreams (of the past or future); a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal.
A participatory, architectural installation featured in the Mextrópoli Architecture and City Festival (September 21-25, 2022), Sueños con Fiber/Timber, Earth/Concrete unfolds stories about Mexico City through four materials, their provenance, and their promise for the future. Through its critical adaptation of traditional papercraft, creative reuse of recycled wood, and innovative use of earth and concrete, this site-responsive installation invites us to recognize the palimpsest of Mexico City’s histories and imagine new possibilities.
Sueños con Fiber/Timber
Sueños con Fiber/Timber reflects on the past and future of Mexico City. Built from wood recycled from the city’s iconic rollercoaster (La Feria’s Montaña Rusa), the pavilion adapts the pre-Columbian art form known as papel picado (perforated paper) whose openings invite ancestors to pass through to the present.
Dreams of Fiber/Timber is the first structure constructed from the salvaged wood of la Montaña Rusa which was donated by the developer Mota-Engil chosen to reconstruct and renovate the recently closed amusement park, renamed as Parque Aztlan. Built in 1964, La Montaña Rusa captured the imagination of millions visiting La Feria, Mexico’s first amusement park. Like the other large scale urban projects built in Mexico City in the same decade, the rollercoaster captured an era of massive socio-economic transitions and accompanying civic infrastructural development.
A Meso-American art form influenced by China and other cultures, papel picado’s perforations are seen as apertures between past and present. In Mexico, this artform is often associated with the Day of the Dead because the paper was principally created from the fibrous Amate tree (Ficus insipidus) whose prominent, above-ground roots were regarded as portals to the underworld. These spiritual-vegetal associations, along with the paper’s flexibility and absorptive qualities made Amate paper the primary medium used in pre-contact codices. As a key way that the Aztec/Mexica people preserved and shared knowledge, amate paper was regarded as a threat to colonial order. Spanish settlers soon banned the use and production of Amate paper, and production facilities were destroyed. The tradition, however, was kept alive in a few locations located outside the city.
Situated at the corner of the historic Alameda Square, the pavilion creates a new urban space of gathering and reflection. Activating the space at night, the pavilion’s lighting design emerged from dialogues with the Otomi artisans who produced the Amate paper for this pavilion.
Sueños con Earth/Concrete
Sueños con Earth/Concrete explores the future of affordable housing in Mexico by minimizing the material impact of existing construction methods. This pavilion has been developed in partnership with New Story, an international non-profit organization that pioneers solutions to end global homelessness, and Échale, a social enterprise based in Mexico that offers housing solutions through the integral development of communities. The horizontal roof structure takes the existing vigueta y bovedilla system as a starting point, optimizing the shape of the precast reinforced concrete beams to minimize the use of material and its associated environmental impact by 50% compared to conventional systems.
This elegant geometry, sculpted by varying width and depth along the beam’s span, is enabled by recent computational design methods developed in MIT research. 3D-printed clay blocks vault between beams as lost formwork that enables the casting of a topping slab manufactured by MANUFACTURA and ANFORA Studio.The use of tepetate, a local soil with high contents of clay, allows for fabricating compressed, sun-dried blocks that constitute the pavilion walls. This affordable, low-carbon solution, which has been successfully applied in the construction of housing communities around Mexico for more than 30 years, is reinterpreted here with a post-tensioning system that allows for assembly and disassembly. Sueños con Earth/Concrete lies at the intersection of local construction techniques and new digital fabrication technologies, resulting in a collaboration between industry, social enterprise, and academia as a model toward a more sustainable built
