Articles

Understanding play as a social transformer and a key influence in defining public space, urban life is shaped by a diverse range of individuals across different ages, cultures, ideologies, interests, classes, and social groups. Thinking about how play inhabits cities means thinking about all generations, and about the need to build public spaces with urban equipment designed to endure and be preserved over time.

The performance of play structures calls for an examination of the different stages of their life cycle, along with their impact on the configuration of the urban environment. Analyzing the life cycle of urban play equipment means understanding everything from materials, durability, and maintenance to the role of certifications, applied manufacturing technologies, and environments that are more conscious of their ecological impact.

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Videos

It is eight in the morning, and the car's dashboard display reads 36°C on the streets of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The sky is almost clear: an intense blue with a few bright, drifting clouds. The air conditioning in the cars—all with tinted windows—makes you forget that upon stepping out, the warm, humid air will immediately weigh on your shoulders and break a sweat.

Puerto Cortés on the Caribbean coast is too far away for a quick dip, but in the neighborhood of Armenta, the eponymous river flows almost silently down from the Sierra del Merendón, running from west to east through gray stones. On the northern bank, tall, leafy trees along the upper edge of the ravine shade a long, dry, and dusty plaza, while thick, exposed roots give texture to the ground. The sun is less punishing.

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Architects, designers, psychologists, and sociologists alike recognize that aesthetics and their underlying philosophy have the power to change how we perceive the world around us. Consequently, a deeper understanding of what is beautiful has the power to shift how people respond to their environment. Exploring the different meanings of aesthetics in architecture—from 'form follows function' to the new aesthetics of the metaverse—can help us understand the potential of our physical and virtual environments on the path toward a better world.

Much has been written on the subject, from Alberto Pérez-Gómez's Lo bello y lo justo en la arquitectura to Pablo Caldera's El fracaso de lo bello. However, we wanted to open the debate to our readers to share their views on what makes a building or a city beautiful.

After reading and compiling around 300 comments from construction professionals, students, and architecture enthusiasts alike, it was a pleasant surprise to find common ground regarding the importance of collective beauty, referencing both the urban and natural contexts.

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As part of the programming for Mexico City Art Week, CAPITALES presents its fifth exhibition, titled "Objetos Arquitectónicos" ("Architectural Objects"), from February 8 to 13, 2022, at Frontera 88, Roma Norte. Produced in collaboration with Manada Architectural Boundaries, the exhibition features 27 studios, including Alejandro Tapia, Ariel Rojo, Blanca Arcos, Carlos Bedoya, Carlos Candia, Carlos Torre Hütt, Chuen Mx, Déjate Querer, Dosa Studio, EDAA, Enrique Rosas, Estudio Atemporal, Fernando Polidura, Jimena Hogrebe, Julia Reyes Retana C, Lanza Atelier, Lupe Toys, María Santibáñez, Martacarmela, Onnis Luque, PRODUCTORA, PLECA, Rafael Rodríguez, Roberto Michelsen, Unidad de Protocolos, and Vera Primavera.

“Reading for Life” is the name of the pavilion of the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá designed by Yemail Arquitectura for this latest edition of the Bogotá International Book Fair (FILBO). Welcoming over 30,000 visitors, the pavilion made a significant impact by presenting a narrative that allowed visitors to understand the Colombian capital from different perspectives. It took into account the city’s rural composition while proposing a future with a more organic connection, where the diversity of the neighborhood, water, air, land, and all the cities found in reading, community, and nature coexist in a single space.

The fourth season of the podcast Causa Común—a co-production between Fundación Lepe and Fundación Aldea for the OH! Stgo festival, held in mid-January in Santiago, Chile—explores the past, present, and future of the capital, alongside the role of its inhabitants in prioritizing the common good and collaborative ways of making, inhabiting, and imagining our shared home.

Directed and coordinated by Francisca Cordero, Soledad Díaz de la Fuente, Magdalena Novoa, and Trinidad Piriz, the six-episode season examines the everyday stories, communities, monuments, and public spaces we inhabit from new perspectives. Featured topics range from the multiple identities of a public square, female leadership in housing projects, and the construction of urban memory, to island hills as socio-environmental opportunities, Mapuche urban dwelling, and the GAM building as an exponent of architecture and social change.

"Lima La Impostergable" (Lima, Unpostponable) is an initiative by the Lima Regional Chapter of the College of Architects of Peru. It aims to establish a roadmap for priority issues to be addressed by the 2023–2026 municipal administration of Metropolitan Lima and Callao, built through a platform of citizen engagement.

The project “Moray, the lost territory – Experiencing Muyus” was developed as part of AAVS Nanoturismo, an experimental teaching, research, and development program by the AA Visiting School of the Architectural Association, School of Architecture in London, United Kingdom. It was carried out by a multidisciplinary team in 2019 in Maras, Cusco, Peru.

Nanotourism reconsiders traditional tourism, shifting it toward a critical, creative, and local perspective. Accordingly, the study utilized the PAR (Participatory Action Research) method, which, through participation, action, and research, identified key “hidden” aspects within this context.

“Architecture is embedded storytelling,” wrote Marco Frascari. Emphasizing the reciprocity between architecture and narrative throughout his career, this Italian architect, theorist, and educator saw stories as the key to creating a “nontrivial”—and therefore transcendent—architecture. It is from his ideas, writings, teachings, and studies that the reflection inspiring this text arises.

This article by Jheisson Joseph Lasso Imbachi was originally published under the title "Habitar tras el destierro: Desplazamiento forzado y retorno como configurador de nuevos hábitats en el Putumayo" in the 30th issue of Dearq journal on May 1, 2021 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq30.2021.05).

It explores migration processes in the south of the country, a consequence of extractive economies that have shaped territorial organization and caused exile, forced displacement, and two lesser-studied phenomena: the settlement and permanence of the population in a host territory and the return to their place of origin. To this end, documentary and testimonial sources were studied, analyzed, and interpreted, allowing a direct approach to the community displaced by violence, in order to analyze the diverse ways of living after displacement and conclude with some considerations for future rural housing proposals that are easily accessible to the victim population.

Below, we present it as part of a joint collaboration to contribute to the dissemination of research, analysis, and opinions developed by the national and international academic community on architecture, urban issues, and related fields.

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As part of the cultural program for Art Week and as a response to the pandemic crisis, a new space has opened its doors in Mexico City to reimagine our current situation and rethink our relationship with public space and the Chapultepec Forest. From the roots of change generated by this crisis emerged the opportunity to recover and repurpose the iconic building known as "Restaurante Lago"—inaugurated on October 24, 1964, and designed by architect Alfonso Ramírez Ponce—giving it a new purpose: "to transform the private into public, the exclusive into inclusive, the social into cultural. To peel back the layers of history and return the present to its origin, rediscovering an icon of 1960s modern architecture."

An increasing number of disciplines are engaging with the right to housing. Whether in the realms of architecture, law, economics, urban planning, geography, or political science, diverse voices have sought to identify the obstacles to its fulfillment, especially within increasingly hostile urban environments. Yet, while we all talk about the right to housing, we are not speaking of the same thing.

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Valladolid is a town of just under 50,000 inhabitants, located in eastern Yucatán. It sits halfway between Cancún and Mérida, about 40 minutes from the Chichén-Itzá archaeological zone. Initially, the tourists who visited did so as a stopover during their travels across the peninsula. However, its gastronomy and architecture transformed it from an involuntary rest stop into a tourist destination in its own right.

Peru is a country with an extensive, rich, and deeply significant archaeological heritage. Unfortunately, the passage of time has brought severe deterioration. In their article, "Captura de datos 3D para virtualizar el patrimonio cultural" (3D Data Capture to Virtualize Cultural Heritage), authors Norma León Lescano, Yann Barnet, and Alvaro Racchumi outline the method they used to capture a three-dimensional replica of the Palace of Puruchuco. By doing so, they aim to provide the necessary information to guide and promote the virtualization of this remarkable cultural heritage, expanding its reach, appreciation, and preservation.

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One of the defining features of cities is their undeniable capacity to bring together creative talent through multiculturalism and transdisciplinarity. Today, it is increasingly vital to generate spaces and platforms within these urban environments that serve as creative laboratories—places not only to share but, above all, to reflect on contemporary practice, viewing design not as a decontextualized entity, but as an integrated concept that bridges diverse disciplines.

In the mountain range of the Andes in Peru, at over 3,700 meters above sea level, lies the Q'eswachaka suspension rope bridge, declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. The hand-woven bridge, which connects both sides of a gorge over the Apurímac River, has become the last remaining Inca bridge in use to survive modern times. This has been made possible through the transmission of Inca culture and engineering across generations, which renew the bridge every year to ensure its preservation.

Rodrigo Lagos Vergara and Macarena Paz Barrientos Díaz originally published the article titled "Architecture Education in Chile, 1999-2019: Ecological Potential and Collective Political Meaning of Design Practices" in Revista [i2]: Investigación e Innovación en Arquitectura y Territorio, from the Department of Graphic Expression, Composition, and Architectural Projects of the Universidad de Alicante, on January 1, 2022.

Below, they present some of the most important points of their publication: three pedagogical actions in Chile that understand teaching as a central practice through the academic exercise of the design project.