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The Sea Room is an architectural manifestation of the hidden stories along the Malecón. It forms a new public space, a pause along the nightly promenade of the Malecón. Through tidal energy, the Defensive Seawall which acts as an extension of the Malecón wall, while paying homage to late Lebbeus Wood, creating a primary protective barrier against the severe weather conditions during hurricane season. Acting as a porous landscape, the underwater Stepping-Terrain allows smooth transition between water and land. The water levels within the Sea Room is controlled through the sets of Seagates and Channels and can allow rapid water drainage. A set of Gatehouses are proposed around the hospital above the flood line guarding the surgetanks underneath, they act as safehouses during flood and archival spaces in normal weather condition.The Sea Room is charged with productive energy by the proposed fields for the growth of seaweeds for manufacture, the growth of ritual related flowers for ceremonies, and the growth of herbs for the production of medicine.
Lock: Doll Maker’s Workshop
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The Malecon Sea Room Construct
Micro-island: Oceanic Archive
Flood Control Mechanism: Stage I
Micro-island: Registry of Names
The Malecon Sea Room
Flood Control Mechanism: Stage II
Lock: Elevator Operation Space
Flood Control Mechanism: Stage III
Lock: Photographer’s Tomb
Mapping at Havana Scale
Flood Control Mechanism: Stage IV
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The nineteenth century boulevard of the Malecón is an extraordinary resource of stories. The buildings that formed the city edge were once home to a privileged elite who fled the Revolution. Now, within its potted, weathered and eroded walls, live the descendants of artists, writers and politicians - favoured figures of the early Revolution. Out of the walls, shipwrecked by the sea and blasted by hurricanes, emerge curious, sometimes tragic, often fantastical narratives of Habaneros. The programmatic drive of the collective voice of the Sea Room seeks to protect the Malecón by proposing environmental defences and medicinal resources in the face of weather extremes and political embargoes. Individual voices speak to other narratives, seams of architectural investigation and invention that traverse the Sea Room as singular entities bridging and overlapping when programme and collective agenda require.
Micro-island: Oceanographic Archive
Within its protective frame, the interior public landscape is a littoral condition – a tidal topography upon which a field of vessels and seams gather in the shadow of Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital, an edifice diverted by Revolution from capitalist bank to a tower of social care. In response, the Sea Room choreographs new seams of care, aquaculture to develop alternative forms of medicines denied by embargo, care for infirm, care for the dead, care for exiles, care for names.
Lock: Bath Treatment Space
Ritual Landscape: The Seam of Funeral March and Flower Field
Micro-island: Medical Record Archive
The Malecon Sea Room Plan View
Ritual Landscape: The Mortuary and Funeral Hall
Theraputic Bathhouse
Micro-island: Pharmaceutical Medical Archive
Ritual Landscape: The Registry of Names
Pharmaceutical Landscape: The Medical Archive
Theraputic Landscape: The Bath House
Oceanographic Landscape: The Sea Product Manufacture Tower