(Re)Claim: Framing Place in a Post-Crisis Space

maria gabriela carucci ALVAREZ RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN 2018

(RE)CLAIM:

FRAMING PLACE IN a post-crisis space

(Re)Claim: Framing Place in a Post-Crisis Space A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Bachelors in Architecture in the Department of Architecture of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island by Maria Gabriela Carucci 2018 Approved by Master’s Examination Committee:

Para Paty, Andrea, Kristina y Ana. Por que nos encontremos todas juntas en Caracas pronto.

RECLAIMING CARACAS

MARIA GABRIELA CARUCCI

Table of Contents

Part I 1 page 10

2 page 12

3 page 14

What is a thesis for me?

THesis statement

PROGRAM

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5

6

page 16

Site

7 page 22

page 18

page 20

PERCEPTION

DIVIDE

OBJECT: one

OBJECT: TWO

8

9

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page 26

entropy

CONNECT

MEMORY

OBJECT: three

OBJECT: five

OBJECT: SIX

10 page 28

PROBE OBJECT: seven

Part II 1 page 34

2 page 35

3 page 38

INTERVIEW TO A STUDENT

UNDERSTANDING RECLAMATION

TENSION

4

5

6

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THE STREET

7 page 46

REFLECTION

on protest, PRECEDENTS and representation

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COUNTER ACTION

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BARRICADES

Part III 1

2

3

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Reconfiguring the immediate environment

compositions for collective memory

a military airport as site

Part IV 1

2

3

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INTERJECTION

A PLACE THAT HEALS 4 page 90

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PHASED RECLAMATION

Part I Loss of Resolution

(RE)CLAIM: FRAMING PLACE IN A POST-CRISIS SPACE

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“It is, at its very root, a way of acknowledging the very uncomfortable feeling of not really knowing the city I grew up in, but being very closely acquainted with the issues that caused this.”

Casona Lopez Contreras / ex-presidential house in ruins.

Etching on copper plate and chine colle, 2018.

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What is a thesis for me?

A thesis for me is a theoretical stance that will take many forms, and probably never a final one. It is as objective it could be within my subjective understanding of the world.

Because of this, a thesis will confuse me and push me outside my comfort zone. It will make me read and write and draw and build and stare blankly at the ceiling (but hopefully not for too long) and translate and get frustrated until I remember why what I am doing matters to me and I repeat the entire process all over again.

A thesis for me is the disentanglement of a web of problems that are related. It is a mapping out of the connections between these problems while understanding how small stories represent the grander scheme of issues that trouble the society I grew up in.

It is the way I am choosing to speak up, point and call out the repercussions of the choices of an illegitimate government, and of the rest of a country for normalizing them, while acknowledging the indispensable essence that is the landscape for the people of Caracas, and the almost surreal quality that comes with not understanding how to live on a flat city. A thesis for me is a form of fighting the impotence of not being able to do enough while singing an ode to the city that saw me grow up, but that remains, in many ways, a mystery to me.

It is, at its very root, a way of acknowledging the very uncomfortable feeling of not really knowing the city I grew up in, but being very closely acquainted with the issues that caused this, and accepting this vulnerability rather that ignoring it in order to seek the answers I’m looking for.

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Caracas has lived two peaks during two different dictatorial regimes.

The first, during the 1950’s and 1960’s centered it as one of the world’s fastest expanding cities. The second one has seen its decay into one of the world’s most dangerous and economically indebted cities.

This is the Caracas I grew up in and know, or if we are being technically correct, don’t really know. It is not lack of geographical knowledge, it goes beyond that, into an internal displacement in which the caraqueños cannot find themselves anymore.

I find displacement in the amount of privacy and layers of disconnection that the people of the city have put up between ourselves and our surroundings, both physically and internally. The city is not there anymore, it is the shell of a place that is not to be trusted. It was taken from us twenty years ago by a power-hungry regime. Their colonization was not abrupt; it was so progressive that

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THESIS STATEMENT

(dis)placement people began to normalize the small degenerative changes that layered until now; where Caracas is so deep into chaos that the sense of place has been removed from it. Caracas agonizes in a non-geographical exile, in which the city was taken out of the people.

What are the spatial conditions that reveal the sense of internal displacement within the caraqueĂąos?

Can these moments be recorded and catalogued in order to discover local spaces of reconciliation that reconnect to an identity and a sense of place?

Taking barricades as spatial conditions were people make a place out of a space, and reconcile, if briefly, with the streets, I analyzed these planned but spontaneous moments of reclamation.

In a foreseeable future, when a change in government occurs, how can this concept begin to help the city to heal and protect it from repeating the cycle?

Parts of the past are gathered, and now they exist supported by each other. Construction, Deconstruction, Reconstruction. The harsh grid of systematic oppression and the preconceived framework of massive housing blocks is broken, and from the remains, a new space for Collective Memory stands.

The wall is dissected, reassembled and its now porous and habitable to the human scale, in the same way a barricade may keep a car out, but is considerate of pedestrians. I will attempt to reconstruct a space for the people, rethinking the idea of memory, market, and environment to fit a post-crisis 21st century nation and the generation that grew up in it.

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Torre David, Caracas. 1994 - 2017

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PROGRAM

A program is a suspicion. And the supposition that comes tied to acting on it. It is how we, as architects, decide what is “needed” for the space at the moment. How an abstract exploration comes to life in a way that is relevant to the human scale. And how it can surround it and transform the space it is placed in. Even if another entity assigns it, we have the license and responsibility to analyze it in terms of the environment it is going to be placed into.

A program in this case will be that which will allow for the caraqueños to gain resolution of the city once, even if at a temporary or smaller scale than that of the entire fabric of the city.

Much like the “Torre David”, how can we set a framework for people to gain agency the more it is inhabited?

The barricade as Market, Farm, Urban Space, Framework.

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SITE

The site is the physical and metaphysical condition which gives meaning and relevance to that which is built. It is that which exists before and after an architectural intervention.

That which surrounds and exists within the site is considered the context. It is bound by time and ever changing. Yet site and context cannot be viewed without each other much like space and time are in many ways inseparable.

A military airport. La Carlota. It exists in the center of the city and it is surrounded by its two main highways, which connects Caracas with the rest of the country.

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OBJECT: ONE

Perception

The image seen is a copy of the Rotival plan, an urban project that was never fully realized and depicted the idealization of a specific area in the city. It is a subjective view of the city. The thread is there to demarcate the mountain, the only thing that remains an apparent anchor while the city fluctuates.

But, doesn’t it also change under everybody’s perception of the city?

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OBJECT: two

DIVIDE/DISCONNECT

What has broken up this landscape? Was it a river? Is it the mountain that is damaged, or is it representing a larger divide?

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OBJECT: tHREE

ENTROPY

en·tro·py 1. A thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.

2. Lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.

The Helicoide. The downward spiral. What would have been the world’s first “drive through” mall. An unfinished futurist commercial building project from the 1950’s that got invaded by the communities around it and later turned into a jail by the government.

When did this project’s gradual decline into disorder start?

Was it when it stopped functioning as it was planned, or was it even before that, when the mountain that serves as its foundation began to be carved?

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OBJECT: FOUR

CONNECT

Three surges of urban growths demarcate the city of Caracas. The sprawling city follows an unpredicted pattern: all of the turning moments in the city’s urban fabric and architectural developments happened under the rule of a dictatorial leadership. The first urban grid, laid out after the Spanish colonization, set out the initial order the city was to follow. Fast forward a couple hundred years, and the oil industry boom steadily expanding city became a modernist experimental ground under the projects of dictator Marco Perez Jimenez. These projects came to a halt and began to steadily deteriorate with the fall of the economy and the rise of Hugo Chavez to power. Unplanned, the city and its people began to find ways to informally settle and grow outwards from the skirts of the city and its mountains.

What has the people’s relationship to the city been in all these instances? What is place? What defines it? How can memories and stories become an objectively logical way to recreate a space and create spatial connections?

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OBJECT: five

MEMORY

There are certain paths or trajectories that fit into one’s everyday routines.

Throughout my childhood, I must’ve gone through this tunnel about twice a day, five or six times a week, every week of the year. going through the tunnel, what I remember most is the plastic factory that was right beside the entrance, and the burnt smell that always announced its presence, even before you could see it.

Crossing the tunnel usually meant my day was not nearly over, often with a five-hour swimming training session ahead. The ride through it always felt incredibly short, it seemed like I blinked, and we were suddenly on the other side, where the tunnel opened to a scene of the entire city. The transition of space seemed to enhance the magnitude of the valley.

Crossing back through it, however, usually meant my day was coming to an end. The tunnel seemed longer, like the mountain above it was suddenly 10 times bigger and more noticeable. The ride through was usually darker and stretched on for miles, but in a way that put me to sleep rather than being gloomy or macabre. It opened up to reveal a much more hazy and smaller view of a part of the city, and a lot less daunting than the other side.

How does memory and feeling change the physical way we inhabit a space?

Or one that we used to inhabit?

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OBJECT: six

PROBE

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continuing ahead

The loss of resolution within the city is not limited by one specific type of lens or density. Even though the reading of these layers of issues at an isolated level doesn’t create the disconnect that the overlap of these do, each one still has a different opacity and character that coats the city in its own specific way.

Changes within the city don’t happen in the same manner, they are waves that stagnate in some neighborhoods and areas more than others. Some remain afloat while others drown under the weight of the problems. If this solidifies, how can I see the process of understanding the layers as an excavation?

out areas of conflict or of reclaimed and modified infrastructure?

The condition of the edge of the collapsed fabric, and the way it frames moments within the urban fabric, begins to raise a different set of questions; what is the condition that I am after, and how will this be framed inside the city through a developed process. All of this should try to find moments in which recovery is likely to happen first, and then understanding what is the role of architecture within this.

Moving on, I should be careful of a process that could become too personal, and rather switch my lens to look at case studies in different cities The hole in the fabric with the that have undergone a similar process sewn edges represents the moments of regime shifts, and trace their reconciliation in which the people of the evolution in terms of fabric recovery. city take back the city and gain resolution How have countries like Puerto Rico of it, if only for a little while. In this and cities like Havana undergone case, the intersection represented, La changes in times of crisis?

Avenida Bolivar, is one of the main points of congregation of people during One possible line of inquiry that arises protests, and one of the most known from this is how can informal changes spots of the city by international media. in the infrastructure affect underlying How can this condition of digital systems like food supplies and hack placement within the city begin to map into them to revitalize them?

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“Any power, no matter how supreme, totalitarian, ubiquitous, high-tech, democratic, and evasive, at the end has to land on the actual ground of the city and leave traces that are difficult to efface. This is why, unlike the web, the city as the actual space of our primary perception remains a very strategic site of action and counter-action. For any power the city is the most vital place to conquer and, at the same time, it is power’s most vulnerable form.

But in order to critically frame the network, we would need to propose a radical reification of it.

This would mean its transformation into a finite ‘thing’ among other finite things and not always see the network and its derivatives like something immaterial and invisible, without a form we can trace and change.”

Pier Vittorio Aureli, in “Form” a conversation in Uncorporate Identity.

Part II Network of Repossession

“Apartments� in Torre David. Aquatint on copper plate, 2018.

(RE)CLAIM: FRAMING PLACE IN A POST-CRISIS SPACE

INTERVIEW TO A STUDENT/ VOLUNTEER

22 year old female student that is still living in Caracas and currently attending the Universidad Central de Venezuela.

She has worked for four different organizations, most of them working with kids and finding resources for children’s hospitals. Among the things the she gave me feedback on, there are two that stuck with me the most: First, I had to always remember that I was trying to work in “un pais que es la excepcion a la regla.” A country that is the exception to all rules and economic/ social projections. Anything that could happen would happen.

Second, most organizations didn’t have a specific meeting space because architecture had become a virtual space, they organized all their meetings and donation drop-off points in different spaces through Twitter, Facebook, and text messages. It was this way not only because of lack of resources or money, but mainly because there is no sense of respect for private property by the government. There had been already too many cases of stablished donation dropoff points being found out, pillaged and robbed by the militia that they didn’t want to take the risks anymore. This applies as well to protest and political activist movements.

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UNDERSTANDING RECLAMATION

The investigation led me to redefine and rethink what reconnecting to the city meant in times of difficult political climate. If placed on a map, these moments of reconciliation, specially in times of turmoil, begin to appear in the sites where the street gives way to an architecture that serves as protection to the people, usually in two ways: open spaces of conglomeration, which in turn become strategic spaces (this is seen in plazas, squares, airports and other large open areas, to name a few), and what I think of as “background” spaces.

These are the ones in which the fighters become doctors and volunteers that set up impromptu spaces to heal and care for those who are on the “front lines” or “primary spaces”, if you will.

Stories like this are repeated in crisisborne nations around the globe. In Caracas, the well known saying that architecture is inherently political applies specially well to the city.

Moments of reconciliation become a series of events that are all connected thorugh scales of architecture within the city.

In a demonstration, protesters walk from A to B and either get to their final destination, or are intercepted by the military forces. In these cases, surrounding buildings become protecting devices for tear gas grenades and other aggressions. reconciliation with the streets and political counteraction are in constant dialogue.

These spaces become one of the most targeted by the militia, for they are important supply chambers, places where people fight through strategy rather than force, and the easiest way to destroy the morale of those who protest.

In 2014, in Kiev, a series of peaceful protests turned into the starts of a civil war. Several spaces were claimed by the resistance, and their headquarters became the Trade Union Building, in front of the Maidan. In February 19, the government, through the military forces, targeted the building (which doubled as hospital for dozens of wounded people) and set it on fire.

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TENSION

Due to Caracas’ economic collapse the local inhabitants have resorted to crime, making the city an unsafe space. This has created a disconnect between caraqueños and the streets in the city center. The already existing tension between the people of the city is being magnified by corruption and the current government’s survival depends on this animosity between social classes.

This, and the repression of military forces on a growing opposition, began to create the internal displacement of the people within the city.

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THE STREET

Knowing this, and very aware that this displacement doesn’t discriminate between sides, I began to understand that the spaces of reconciliation happen when the tension between citizens themselves diminishes, both mentally and physically within the streets.

There are two main moments, manifested in different smaller spatial conditions throughout the city, in which this happens: protests and barricades.

These affect directly the way the people understand their place within the city, and it has ramifications into the built environment. One example of this are the raids from the government in building basements during the count of election votes.

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COUNTER-ACTION

This is the story of how my mom was involved in a military raid in 2004.

“I began working on a Nation-wide legal referendum that was looking to impeach Chavez’s government on a Monday.

There were a lot of us, counting signatures day and night in the rooms of the basement of an old building next to one of the man highways in the city, the Francisco Fajardo.

The room I was working in, one of the main storage spaces for the boxes that held all the signatures and votes that had already been accounted for, was occupied by three other women, and me. We worked for an entire week in the cramped space, sleeping only a little but not feeling too tired; the amount of people that were unhappy with the government was increasing, and by Thursday we had enough votes to make a case against the president.

On Friday, we all showed up to finish our work, wary since we heard the military forces had been mobilized through the city under government orders. Around noon, they had located the building we were in as the main base for the operation, and they raided the entire place, forcing us to leave and destroying any evidence that could compromise the current political leaders.”

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JUNE 2017. BARRICADES IN CARACAS JUNE 2017. BARRICADES IN CARACAS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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22 10 17

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REFLECTION on protest, PRECEDENTS and representation

The focus in my final presentation was to explain the disconnect and how it was the string that connected all the elements in my investigation so far. My next step was to materialize it through specific spatial and social conditions, proposing that the city’s counteraction to this was seen in protests and barricades. I explained how mapping all these conditions was only the first step, to which the critics seemed to concur.

During the conversation, Amy Kulper gave insights into a similar type of line of work from one of her previous students, who was trying to understand the morphology of protest.

He studied key precedent examples, like France and the widening of the streets as an urban strategy to clear out revolutionary action. He then looked into the morphology of protest and crowd control, and how the police try to limit the spatial consequences of protests in the city. This produced the counter-dialogue of citizens who began to understand military strategies.

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There’s a back and forth dialogue not only in the demonstrations themselves, but in any type of intervention that aims to control or help them in any way. This is why anything I design will always be dialogical and responsive, so systematic thinking and projecting into the future will aid me in understanding how this will work. We can also understand that the dialectic nature of these demonstrations between the concrete non-digital spaces and the online networks where vital information is disseminated.

The specific character of protests in Caracas wouldn’t exist without one another, and yet they are their biggest weaknesses. Information in the web can be easily traced or falsely disseminated, changed, and blocked, but not so easily destroyed.

Infrastructure, on the other hand, is less likely to be subject to immediate change, unless destroyed, and it is where most action and counter-action materializes.

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Another series of suggestions came from Aaron Forrest. “How do you design a barricade? In the 18th century, they were known more for the movements they represented than by the actual architecture of them. There is something very utopian, a romantic dimension to the barricades as an architecture that is worth exploring and measuring. What is your agency as an architect in informal eruptions of architecture?

At the other end of the spectrum, I think it might be worth looking into architectures of recent pasts that have been affected by harsh political climates. Lina Bo Bardi and the clash of left and right in brazil and the architecture that came out of this. These are architectures that are radically trying to absorb the streets into them, not to tame them in any way, but to take them as something that might radicalize the architecture.”

We know what a working city is like, so what is the representation to the outsider of this time and place? “The representation of the basement and your mom counting ballots, and that in itself is architecture. I’m curious to understand the urbanization that comes from your connection to the area.”

From this, could I begin to create a series of archetypes or interventions that begin to understand his condition of alternative understanding of the city. What is the architecture of the next Caracas? If I were to reconstruct the city, what are its elements?

The next step in my investigation could happen in two main different ways, not exactly disconnected from each other: A psycho geographic mapping, based on my declared view of the city, and the twitter version of the city based on that.

Trying to conceptualize Venezuela, the image of it today, and exploring the representational aspect of the area, and the places that people would take for granted, like the supermarket, but in these moments of crisis, where you get the food kind of moves on the priority list of the structures to the people who live there.

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A chair, a bed, toilet paper and the toilet as barricade. Watercolor, 2018.

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Part III Agency?

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Reconfiguring the immediate environment

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COMPOSITIONS FOR COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Construct, deconstruct, reconstruct.

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Reconfigure.

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Inhabit.

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A MILITARY AIRPORT AS SITE

Reclaiming/Repurposing “La Carlota”.

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REFLECTION on BARRICADES, WALLS, AND WARS

The critique revolved mostly on how an intervention on the lading runway itself would be more beneficial to my political stance than the mere act of removing material from it. A lot of different examples on rubble reuse in Warsaw and memorials and museums (like the WWII Museum), where helpful in understanding different scales of projects that had a similar aim.

Kina Leski emphasized on the creation of a project that was based on small dissected moments and episodes through which the larger scale of things could be seen through, even if this were to be a building in the end. She also suggested that I find creative release in literary freedom and began to write in order to create the spaces I was speaking of, since they were so charged with backstories and research.

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Chris Bardt pointed out the difference between remembering the past and envisioning the future, and asked me where I stood, because without a clear definition of this my project could shift into working only out of “hope”, which can’t drive the entire project only by itself.

What is the point between embalming and pulverization? For me, I found it in sticking with the idea of gradually deconstructing the landing strip to build the new addition that would live on it.

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Even though, placing a wall in the middle of the landing strip would be enough to initially disable it, for me, the project needs to do more for the city. It will start as a pierced wall that lies within the framework laid out on the site, and it will gradually become a market that is sustained by the urban farm that will exist on the rest of the site, where people can gather, sell food, connect with the community and learn new things.

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Part IV A Barricade on the Airstrip

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INTERJECTION

Barriers stood around the city to condemn a crisis caused by a government that chose to be blind.

Sight was regained and the barriers were put to rest they will come back one day if needed.

For now One stands in the middle of a landing strip where the militia has no legitimacy anymore.

Construct. Deconstruct. Reconstruct.

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A PLACE THAT HEALS

They took our city man after man addicted to grandeur addicted to demolition.

“The past is bad, shouldn’t be remembered,”they said.

My generation should’ve been acquainted with the city, made it their own.

An economic predicament that led to Corruption to Crisis.

A divided population that comes together, builds barricades, takes the streets, makes a place out of a space.

When they are victorious, how will the city begin to heal?

The future that learns from the past and remembers it.

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PHASED RECLAMATION

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Gracias a mis padres, que me dieron su apoyo incondicional incluso cuando se dieron cuenta que mi proyecto de tesis de arquitectura no iba a tener ventanas. Son lo mejor.

To my second family at RISD and the BEB. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without all of you.

And a final thanks to my advisors, Hansy Better and Silvia Acosta, and to all my teachers.

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Film & Video Urban Think Tank. Torre David: Inside the World’s Tallest Slum. Caracas, 2012.

Documentary.

Schroder, Rob. Caracas: The Informal City. 2008. Documentary.

Internet Resources Jackowski, N; Ostos, R. Ambiguous Spaces: Naja & Deostos. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Internet Resource.

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MARIA GABRIELA CARUCCI ALVAREZ

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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