Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat is an exhibition that explores the life, work, and legacy of the Italian-Brazilian architect, designer, curator, museum director, writer, editor, and set designer. Bo Bardi broke down the hierarchies between the arts and shaped a new language for the Modern Movement, adding her own radical vision rooted in Brazilian culture.
Construction of Colombia's second-tallest skyscraper, BD Bacatá, is finally resuming following an agreement signed between BD Promotores, Prabyc Aluman, and Acción Fiduciaria. The deal involves a total investment of 48 billion Colombian pesos ($15.5 million), according to reports by local media outlets Portafolio and W Radio.
BEMA is a new space by dèrive Lab opening its doors in the Historic Center of Querétaro, Mexico. The project restores and reactivates a building that previously functioned as a squash court, an event hall, and a commercial kitchen. This new space aims to become a platform that fosters impactful cultural and artistic projects to rethink the city, providing a sanctuary for gathering, production, and the exchange of ideas and experiences around urban issues.
From March through June, “Real,” the new exhibition by Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, will be on display in Córdoba, Argentina.
In Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, nearly 800 students from Latin America kicked off the 27th edition of the 2019 Latin American Encounter of Architecture Students. This event provides a platform for collective participation, integration, and learning, organized by the Latin American Coordinator of Architecture Students (Co.L.E.A - Cono Sur)—currently comprising Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, and Paraguay—with local support from the Paraguayan Union of Architecture Students (UPEA).
As is custom, connections were established with architects and workshop leaders to reflect under the theme "Designing a Sustainable Culture," focusing on three main axes: environmental and urban; sociocultural and political; and technological.
In this edition, official activities began on Saturday, October 28, with the Jaguata urban recognition walk, followed by the first lecture, 'Ecosystemic Urbanism,' by Salvador Rueda, Director of the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona. Rueda reflected on the importance of taking immediate action against the climate emergency, presenting examples of new urban models in cities.
It is time to close AutoCAD and Revit, turn off the computer, and put away the ultimate architect's uniform: black clothing. Summer is here, and with it, vacation season. Whether for a few weeks or just a couple of days, here are some activities to clear your mind without leaving the discipline behind.
Originally published in ArquitecturaAhora, architect Ana Sugranyes explores the origin and evolution of the concept of the right to the city, from 1960s Paris to its global expansion.
In the name of social integration or sustainability, the United Nations New Urban Agenda (2016) also incorporated a reference to the right to the city. “Words, then, are of no use: they are just words,” says Alberti. Meanwhile, Chile maintains its high level of income inequality, which has a direct, correlative effect on the deep socio-spatial segregation of its territories and cities; this, in turn, corresponds to worrying levels of social, cultural, and structural violence.
The "Single-Family Residential" Architectural Design Workshop, organized by the architecture firm Cota Paredes Arquitectos, concluded its eighth edition, which invited graduate architects and senior architecture students to develop a single-family housing project over four weeks in either an in-person or online format.
It is inspiring to learn about new architectural practices innovating with natural materials. Chilean architect Domingo Arancibia is the founder of NORMAL, an architecture office characterized by conducting interdisciplinary regional studies that allow them to experiment with local materials and apply them to construction systems.
Based in Chile, a country with more than 6,400 kilometers of Pacific coastline, the studio has spent over two years researching the properties of cochayuyo—a unique seaweed found along the country's coast—and exploring how it can be used in architectural projects.
The Mexican architecture firm Comunal Taller de Arquitectura has been announced as the winner of the 2019 AR Emerging Architecture awards, alongside two highly commended practices—Estudio MMX and Estúdio Gustavo Utrabo—and the joint winners of the Peter Davey Prize, TAKA Architects and Clancy Moore Architects.
In Bogotá, the mayor's office has launched an initiative to build seven public Happiness Centers (CEFE), where residents of each sector of the city will have access to cultural spaces, Olympic and recreational pools, gyms, and leisure areas. The competitions have been managed through the Colombian Association of Architects (SCA). The CEFE Chapinero—named after the locality where it will be built—will be located in the El Retiro neighborhood.
Do you have ideas on how to improve existing social housing to transform environmental conditions? That was the question posed by Proyectar a Conciencia 2.0, a competition open to students and faculty throughout Chile, aiming to intervene in the Family Heritage Protection Program (PPPF) of the Chilean Ministry of Housing and Urbanism (MINVU).
Since the mid-twentieth century, Latin American cities have undergone metropolization processes in which transportation has been heavily impacted by the exponential growth of private vehicle use. This is driven by rapid, unregulated urban sprawl that causes cities to spread extensively across the territory. This physical expansion is compounded by deficient public transit management and weak domestic socioeconomic conditions, both of which severely constrain the development of transportation systems.
Córdoba, Argentina's most populous city after Buenos Aires, is a prime example of this paradigm, featuring one of the largest urban footprints in the world at 576 square kilometers (excluding its metropolitan area). Its physical structure is radiocentric, with transport corridors converging in the city center, creating a dense core where services are concentrated and an ever-expanding periphery.
In light of the social crisis Chile is currently experiencing, ArchDaily speaks with urban and regional planning specialists to understand its impact on our cities. On this occasion, we speak with Isabel Serra, an architect graduated from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, specialized in public policy, a member of the City and Territory Laboratory (Laboratorio de Ciudad y Territorio) at Universidad Diego Portales, and an academic at the same institution.
In this article, Beatriz Coeffé Boitano presents a portion of her Master’s thesis in Arts and Cultural Management at King’s College London, titled “Brutalism Revival: media as active spaces of urban memory.” The piece reflects on the documentation and construction of a collective discourse around urban memory through social media platforms, focusing on the demolition of the brutalist Robin Hood Gardens complex by Alison and Peter Smithson.
At each Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, the Ibero-American Prize for Architecture and Urbanism is awarded: a recognition for those who have worked to promote and defend the values of the discipline in the region.
The Superior Council of Colleges of Architects of Spain (CSCAE) has announced the State of Oaxaca Historical Archive Building by Mendaro Arquitectos as the winner of the 2019 International Spanish Architecture Award, which is presented to encourage and promote the global expansion of Spanish architects and architecture firms, recognizing their architectural and urban quality while consolidating a shared brand.
In February of this year, construction will begin on the renovation of Plaza de España in Madrid. The project is a collaborative effort by design firms Guadiana and Porras La Casta Arquitectos, led by architects Lorenzo Fernández-Ordóñez and Fernando Porras-Isla.
The project, known as Welcome Mother Nature, seeks to create a large green area in the city center, recovering its long-lost identity as a "plaza," which had been reduced to a transit space. The proposal emphasizes the definition of a plaza as a "social place of expression, gathering, and freedom." The project's main priority is to create a space where "it is easy to build shared civic experiences," while creating a new lung for a city that constantly lives under a cloud of pollution and smog.
As part of the celebrations for the Bicentennial of Peru's Independence, the Ministry of Culture, the Municipality of Lima, and Grupo Centenario announced an international architecture and landscaping competition to design a metropolitan park along the perimeter of the Pachacamac Sanctuary in the Lurín district of Lima. The competition sought to encourage reflection on Lima's relationship with its historical and landscape heritage, as the Sanctuary houses some of the most important structures of the national archaeological heritage, spanning more than fifteen centuries of human occupation.
With the launch of the new Urban and Building Code, approved by the Buenos Aires City Legislature in late 2018, the city of Buenos Aires has begun to reconfigure how information is accessed in the urban and architectural fields. In line with this approach, Plano Abierto BA serves as a tool that allows any resident to access online data regarding development capacity, permitted uses, building heritage listings, maximum heights, construction records and inspections, and the current status of each individual plot in the city (including cadastral data, built area, and number of floors). This provides indicative urban planning information to facilitate the understanding of the New Urban Code of Buenos Aires.
Today, when it comes to urban planning, the design and pursuit of inclusive cities is generally promoted. That is, fostering collective environments where all sectors of society can thrive.
How much easier would this task be if spaces were created where different segments of society could express their needs regarding how they live?
“Leo Leo! Que Ves? La ciudad contada por los niños y las niñas” is a project that originated in the city of Córdoba in 2017, within the framework of the artistic and cultural activities program of the Undersecretariat of Culture at the National University of Córdoba. It continues to develop activities such as “Ciudad niñez-ca,” led by Paola Antonietti and workshop facilitators Camila García Reyna, María Paz Pérez Roque, Rocío Maldonado, Gabriela Soto, and Matias Zanetti, alongside FAUD's Urbanism 1A department and the City and Territory Studies Workshop.
We explore this project through the words of its creators.
To date, the Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh) has restored more than a dozen historic houses in Valdivia, and is expected to continue this work in the coming years. Located in two main areas of the city—Isla Teja and the corridor known as the Yungay-General Lagos Axis—the university is committed to repurposing these existing structures, transforming them from family residences into public-use university spaces.
Dear readers,
Mares is an urban transformation and social economy project developed by estudio SIC, VIC (Vivero de iniciativas ciudadanas) and TXP (Todo por praxis) in Madrid, Spain. The project reclaims four former buildings across four different districts of the city, converting them into innovation hubs. Each hub is linked to key urban challenges: Mobility, Food, Recycling, Energy, and Care.
