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Architects: Adamo Faiden
- Year: 2018
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Photographs: Javier Agustín Rojas
Text description provided by the architects. Finally, almost everybody agrees that our cities should be compact, dense, and programmatically diverse. Although there are quantitative nuances regarding these points, most of our efforts aim to consolidate a model of a city different from the positivism outlined in the Athens Chart. Rural migrations to urban centers overflowed imagined densities, forcing us to abandon the idea that there is a single program linked to large areas of land.
Assuming this condition has led us to imagine different ways to swell and diversify the thickness of our cities. The large-scale constructions called Mixed-Use are an example of this line of work where buildings with diverse programs converge in a single project. Today we have project techniques capable of establishing certain continuity between the proposed city model and large-scale constructions. However, in the range of the middle scale, this relationship has not been addressed in depth.
The Bonpland 2169 building tries to position itself in this debate, understanding in advance that its size will prevent it from reproducing organizational strategies linked to a larger scale of work. In this case, the starting point is to address the diversity of uses through spatial homogeneity. Instead of projecting a container to host previously established programs, a structure open to different appropriations is offered. A programmatically unstable but spatially specific environment, organized by means of five bays perpendicular to the dividing walls that delimit their technical aptitude at the same time that they offer a good margin of flexibility.
Although our field of action is circumscribed to the area of material organization, our field of reflection overflows it until we can accurately report it. The attention towards the new ways of using the city, the updating of its programs or the appearance of hybrid instances among the uses that we already know, are here moments of vital importance. The main argument of this project is developing a sensitivity according to the objects that each unit will occupy and assuming the challenge of each spatial appropriation allows us to see a new way of living.
