Grupo Talca: The Latest Architecture and News

Los Andes, as an unexplored territory, is where the investigation and developing experience of the Andes Workshop is settled. Is here where a huge amount of establishments could achieve the domestication of their territory, where the complex locations and scarcity of resources are understood as a virtue that are part of the design, developing and construction process of solutions that give the territory an specific value defying these territorial endeavors capable of understanding the system as a total, where the communal job is comprehended under the reciprocity concept.

Andes Workshop is born by the understanding of how we are inhabit slight and precarious, referring to a low tech architect but with an powerful and expresive impact, understanding that the greater value of Chile and Latin America is in it’s territory:

“Before being a country, Chile is landscape” - Nicanor Parra, chilean poet.

Between Sunday, May 17 and Monday, May 18 projects developed under the second phase of Espacios de Paz (Spaces of Peace) were inaugurated in five cities across Venezuela. A genuine exercise in participative design, 20 Latin American architecture groups worked for five weeks with communities in neighborhoods dominated by violence, high dropout rates and crime to convert deteriorated and abandoned spaces into public places of peace.

For each project, four groups of young architects worked together to carry out a process of dialogue, research, design, and ultimately the construction of either an athletic, social or educational facility to be administrated by the local community. Espacios de Paz is coordinated by the local office of PICO Estudio, with guidance from public institutions and under the leadership of Isis Ochoa, the High Presidential Commissioner for Peace and Life.

ArchDaily en Español Editors, Nicolás Valencia M. and José Tomás Franco, were invited by PICO Estudio to document and view the five projects in their final phase of construction and speak with the architects and community representatives about the development of the projects and some of the challenges faced in the process.

Learn more about each of the five projects after the break. 

Grupo Talca’s four meter “Wicker Forest” has been announced as winner of the annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in Chile. Designed as an inhabitable landscape of wicker sticks, the red forested structure will “catch particles dragged by the wind, while providing shade and movement” to the visitors of CONSTRUCTO upon completion in Santiago next year.

Grupo Talca is the fifth winner of YAP Chile, following the commission of UMWELT’s “climatically responsive container for artwork.” You can find more images of the Wicker Forest, after the break...