Abstract:

Located within the Desierto de la Tatacoa, a tropical dry forest undergoing accelerated aridification due to climate change, Aridscapes responds to a landscape on the verge of becoming desert. Rather than proposing a single architectural object, the project is conceived as part of a constellation of ecological infrastructures designed to edit the territory and slow down desertification processes. Moving away from the naïve ambition of “saving nature,” the project proposes the construction of an ecological skeleton: an armature intended to be used by nature itself in response to global warming, preserving a vulnerable biological hotspot. Conceived as part of a broader environmental mechanism, speculative narratives are transformed into operative devices and, ultimately, into architecture. A system of spatial interventions operates with time and seasonality—flooding cycles, migratory bird routes, and flowering processes during dry seasons. At one of the territory’s hydrological pressure points, an artificial wetland is introduced as a living infrastructure, enabling continuous water exchange between underground systems, surface flows, and the atmosphere. Emerging from this ecological base, a vertical garden tower reinterprets the garden as an experimental ecological artifact. Built in timber and wrapped in a biodegradable cotton membrane, the tower is designed as a programmed ruin that gradually loses its architectural condition to become structure, support, and habitat