ARCHITECTURE IN COHABITATION

The formal construction of the dialogue between humans and nature

Bruno Marambio Márquez, Architect - Naturalist

Eloísa Pizzagalli Andreani, Industrial Design

Sergo Elórtegui Francioli, Biologist - Naturalist

Sponsored by:

Project financed by Fondart Nacional, Call 2019, Valparaíso Region

Supported by:

We invite you to explore these pages, which describe the process and results of a research project that seeks to establish a relationship with nature through architecture.

The project “Architecture in Cohabitation” is a research work, financed by the Fondart Nacional, call 2019, Valparaíso Region, which addresses the question of how architecture happens in the territory and enters into a relationship with its components.

When architecture is found in a territory with such a characteristic nature and with such great environmental values as Chile, it becomes essential to think about the territory and the landscape. From this perspective we have adopted an ethical stance to create an architecture that dialogues with the natural environment from the observation of the natural entities that inhabit this particular territory. This, in order to be able to understand and comprehend these natural habits that allow us to think of an architecture that adapts to the environment, not through mimetics, rather recognising the formal value of the architecture itself, but which in its creative design process can incorporate and open a place for the continuity of the inhabiting of these other entities.

The purpose of the project is to investigate, through observation and the creation of architectural prototypes, the different ways of inhabiting nature. In particular, we have selected the case of small birds, mammals and bees that nest on rocky reefs, in Mediterranean scrubland and coastal dunes. This, understanding them also as dimensions that build the territory. The effort is to think creatively and deploy a built space that welcomes human beings, but that can also contain these other beings. That is to say, through a place that means an invitation to nature to relate to and cohabit with humans.

Cohabitating

“Cohabitation” is a complex concept that is usually linked to something that happens only among humans, referring to thinking and the awakening of a consciousness. However, advances in biology and neuroscience open up the concept of inhabiting and invite us to think on multiple levels of a “non-human inhabiting”.

The exploration of the living world carried out by the project opens up the concept of cohabitation and brings it back to the original questions: What are we humans in relation to all other living beings? Where does our way of inhabiting come from and what hope do we have of reunderstanding ourselves in relation to the natural world?

When a bird builds and chooses a place for its nest, it does not do so as a genetically pre-designed machine. It makes decisions about this twig or that twig, “measures without mathematics”, makes mistakes and gets it right, solves problems, stresses over the conquest of a mate or despairs if its chicks are in danger. The bird develops an attachment to its place and may return the following year. No two nests are alike, just as no two birds are alike, even if they are of the same species. Just as we visualise the place, the bird, for example, does so with its body. The sophistication of its behaviour does not require “human thinking” or equivalent for its nest to be an inhabited place.

Attending to non-human ways of dwelling puts us on an equal footing with all other living things, and more importantly, confronts us with the problem of how to shape inhabiting together, “cohabiting”.

THE CABINET

A proposal to live together.

We have all found in our house an insect, a spider, or a bat coming out of an opening in the ceiling. Our architecture sometimes results in spaces for other organisms. These encounters can even be problematic.

But... what if from the beginning we also think of architecture from the needs of these others? An architecture that is an invitation to cohabitation, where humans and non-humans do not avoid each other, but collaborate in mutual well-being.

We thought of the cabinet after observing the “rocky reefs” that appear on the coasts of central Chile. Between Los Molles and Valparaíso, these rocky elevations are home to plants, birds, mammals and arthropods, like real biological islands. The cabinet shows the structures for the different organisms.

The Place

The cabinet is situated on the dunes of Ritoque, in the Open City of Amereida, Quintero.

Its placement does not interrupt the movement of the sands coming from the sea, and it rises to the horizon with its gaze towards the Mantagua Wetland, a priority site for the conservation of birds and coastal fauna.

The Destination

The project is based on the idea of proposing and creating an interior to receive the naturalist’s work, in which a couple of researchers will be able to live for a few days.

It will be a space destined to receive botanists, entomologists, ornithologists, geologists and artists whose work is to deepen the knowledge of the natural phenomena of the Mediterranean coast of central Chile.

It will contain the “Open City Herbarium” which preserves botanical samples of all the plant species of the Ritoque Coast and cartographic archives of the area.