Edited by Marc Angélil Cary Siress Julián Varas
Perhaps the most tangible evidence left in the wake of globalization has been the blurring of the boundaries that used to define both urban and rural identities. Through a series of dramatic technocultural developments, their gradual erosion gave rise to one of the most characteristic phenomena of the second half of the XXth century: the proliferation of suburbia. In Buenos Aires—the second largest spanish-speaking metropolitan region in the world—this phenomenon took on an unprecedented momentum with the advent of economic reforms since the early 1990s. In the years that followed, the periphery of Buenos Aires underwent radical transformations: from a vaguely rural space cemented by infrastructures and fragments of nature, to an increasingly continuous carpet of inhabitation organized through what could be called the rule of jump-cut urbanism—the sudden adjacency of built fragments with no pretense of formal articulation. What new typologies and figurations have emerged from this period of intense transformation? What are its rules and its dynamics, and, above all, where lie its potentials? Combining maps, diagrams, drawings, texts, and photography, this book documents a research project in urbanism that attempts to portray this reconfigured scenario while providing a set of provisional protocols—an operating manual—with which to confront its challenges. Its aim is not to propose univocal solutions or remedial perspectives on the city, but to open up new fields of research, enriching the urbanistic and political imagination.
With contributions by Marc Angélil, Fernando Diez, Adrián Gorelik, Gaspar Libedinsky, Nora Libertún, Ciro Najle, Natalia Penacini, Cary Siress, and Julián Varas. Projects and diagrams by students of the Department of Architecture, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich, and the School of Architecture of the University of Palermo in Buenos Aires. Design concept by Soulellis Studio, New York.
Archipelagos—A Manual for Peripheral Buenos Aires
Archipelagos—A Manual for Peripheral Buenos Aires
Archipelagos—A Manual for Peripheral Buenos Aires
Edited by
Marc Angélil Cary Siress Julián Varas