Copyright 2013 by Mariana Botero All rights reserved Printed in the USA First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to: mbotero@risd.edu Manufacturing by Concept Link Composition by Mariana Botero Book Design by Mariana Botero Production Manager by Mariana Botero Botero, Mariana A Story to be Walked / Mariana Botero Providence, RI
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A Story to be Walked... A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelors of Architecture in the Department of Architecture of The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. By Mariana Botero 2013 Approved by The Thesis Examination Committee:
Kyna Leski, Head of the Department of Architecture
Gabriel Feld, Professor, Department of Architecture, Thesis Advisor
Tulay Atak, Professor, Department of Architecture, Thesis Advisor
Pari Riahi, Professor, Department of Architecture, Thesis Chair
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To my family My team, my support, my anchor, my inspiration, my strength. Thank you for joining me in this roller coaster ride. To RISD Thank you for granting me the privilege of living in this world of fantasy that allowed me to dream and make dreams come true. To George Thank you for being the first person that truly believed in me. To Gabriel Thank you for allowing me to explore realms of representation that I had always dreamt of. Thank you for pushing my limits and forcing me to leave my comfort zone. Thank you for your wise advises. To Marie Thank you for allowing me to have the real conversation. To MedellĂn For teaching me through out my life the profound values of Hope, Peace and Camaraderie
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There is a city in the South built of words. Built one on top of each other, piled up and silencing one another. Only very few words can be deciphered from the huge pile of nouns, adjectives and verbs that with time became a blurry, thick stai
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of a time where they could read.
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A Story to be Walked 5. Acknowledgements 11. Architecture As A Tool 13. Medellín: From Fear to Hope 15. Introduction
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16. Reading Medellín
17. The Voyeur 18. Process 19. Medellín: My View 23. Alternative Mapping
24. Writing Medellín
25. Writing The City 27. Stories of Stories About Medellín 30. Grounded & Utopian: Magical & Real 31. Conditions & Possibilities 33. Three Places: Three Conditions: Three Parameters 35. Three Places: Three Conditions: Three Parameters = 1 Path
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36. Walking MedellĂn
37. Proposal 39. Manifesto 40. I Believe 41. Urban Analysis 44. Plans 45. Sections 44. Mental Map 47. Conclusion 49. Bibliography 51. ResumĂŠ
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Initially, architecture in Medellín, would have been considered detached for the most part in the consideration of social change. Specially, since the fast and abundant money that came with the decades of drug dealing and drug war from 1980 to early 2000, incented the ‘nouvae-riche’ to break all the rules of aesthetics, and architecture principles that Vitruvius and others had established two thousand years ago, and began to impose marble and Corinthian columns in a place were adobe and clay were the only known construction supplies. In a city only a couple centuries old, the lack of identity became the only identity. Nevertheless, the self-involved nature of the paisas inherently lead to a political movement by non-politicians wishing to materialize the ideas of the uncorrupted citizens. Simple and straightforward it worked for about 5-7 years before it was no longer uncorrupted by politics. As a matter of fact it was highly successful. Medellin’s annual crime rates dropped from 3,721 on 2002 to 804 in 2007, making it no longer one of the most violent cities in the world. The non-political political party lead by mathematician Sergio Fajardo went from 2002-2006. Fajardo’s approach to fight crime used architecture as its main tool. This Plan integrated urban projects that invested in previously state-forgotten neighborhoods spread thought the valley that Medellin inhabits. This changed the story of Medellin as the headlines of the world’s media no longer referred to it on regards to crime, death and terrorism, but on regards to architecture, design, and social intervention. Providing distracting and socially active spaces distracted the interests in crime. People’s behavior changed. Hiring the best architects to design ‘beautiful architecture’ in marginalized and ‘under-privileged’, violent neighborhoods modified the way people behaved around these places. A sense of ownership and pride was given to people who believed had been forgotten by the state. As Aristotle said, “Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.”
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Medellin’s history is one that although present in most front-page newspapers, can truly only be perceived by those who lived it. It is hard to explain how one of the most socially threatening cities in the world could have the highest rates of happiness and sense of ownership as well. A dichotomy of feelings and realities best described through magical realism, or as someone once called ‘Magical Terrorism’. Its eternal spring weather and mountainous geography offers a variety of climates and landscapes to choose from that accentuate the passion locals feel for this land and its people. Some people attribute the camaraderie of its citizens due to the geographical condition of the valley that keeps everyone looking at each other; In contact with each other. It is impossible to ignore, forget or avoid the clashing social differences because you see them every day no matter where in the city you stand. The ultimate beauty of this story is that instead of deciding to close our eyes and hide behind the hills to escape an awful truth, we have, as a city, decided to come together and look deeply how we can help each other. Nervertheless, as much as we are or can always be in visual contact with each other, there are enourmous social barriers that fragment the city into hundreds of impenetrable lands. These invisible barriers are not only the usual barriers that drastic economic differences cause within areas of cities. These are deeper and taller and thicker barriers built from the piling of tragic stories one on top of the other. To disentangle them would be impossible. Where to start? The civil war at the beginning of the century for absurd differences between political parties, and how this might have been the birth of a 60 year old guerrilla war, or the war on drugs that Nixon proclaimed in 1971 that created an avalanche of terrorism for the whole country but with its epicenter in Medellin? The place were Pablo Escobar was born and created an army of hit men that made bombs, kidnaps, murders, prostitution, corruption, dead police men, etc., words that were part of daily conversations and fears. Words that kids say before they could understand. 2,743,049 Million stories piled up together. Not one single person in Medellin was exempt from these words being written permanently in their souls. Violenece was what we were best known for, and what we were, apparently best at, when we were named the most violent city in the world between 1989 and 1993 with crime rates only reached in Baghdad in 2006. Although the human being has an incredible capacity to adapt, the citizens of Medellin became familiar with feelings that most people in the world might never experience, but we refused to let these identify ourselves. We decided to make it stop. Traditional methods of fighting crime had not been successful in any way, hence, when Sergio Fajardo proposed architecture for cultural educational purposes we believed...
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“There is a city to be built rising above the geography of our current models of education, a city built upon the many promises of education without barriers. A new city elevating mankind through the transformative forces of: Knowledge, Imagination and Ideas.” —David Gersten Fajardo’s idea of Social Urbanism was not a new one and might have even seemed ridiculously obvious to someone from the outside. However, for Medellin it was the first time that an approach to the city was made in an utterly interdisciplinary manner in which the fisrt layer of barriers were eliminated. These were the barriers of political hierarchy. Suddenly architects, psychologists, graphic designers, hip- hop singers, film makers, writers and convicts were all conversing spontaneously about the same subjects and interests. The first time people experienced a social change through an imposed infrastructure was when the elevated rail metro line was built in 1994. Despite the fact that it crossed above the city right through its center going above highly complex and socially disorganized areas, the metro system came with a change in culture. Behind the technical infrastructure there was an even more complex social infrastructure that “built positive relationships with residents residing neighboring Metro stations in order to impart a sense of belonging and a caring attitude; a response that would naturally arise from the benefits afforded to the community by the improved living standards ensuing from the services and civil works provided by Metro de Medellin.” Almost two decades after this was imposed, the ‘cultura-metro’ is still as present as it was in the beginning. It is hard to find a more harmonious, clean, and friendly environment as in the Medellin Metro. What happens when people get off the train and leave the station? That is another story… Hereby, with the optimism and pride that ‘cultura-metro’ brought to the city and the country as it was the first metro in Colombia and was then followed by globally-known-innovative public systems as the Transmilenio bus system in Bogota, the governing period of Fajardo proposed an extension of this system to other areas in the city and a comprehensive portfolio of public library-parks, schools and others. These interventions challenged the previously given tittles of ‘best’ and ‘worst’ neighborhoods. A new layer of barriers demolished. Today, neighborhoods with the poorest residential conditions have the best public spaces and the most beautiful library-parks with the best and most practical transportation methods. As a matter of fact, the ‘good’ neighborhoods envy the resources that these neighborhoods have and when tourists come, it is to the ‘bad’ places that they take them to brag about the city.
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.� Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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Medellin has a story. A story I want to tell and learn from. It is of great interest to me to tell this story not only because I lived it but because it has great architectural value. Medellin went from having more than 185 homicides per 100, 000 inhabitants to 30 within 7 years. This is strongly related to architecture and an urban intervention guided by the Mayor Sergio Fajardo and the architect Alejandro Echeverri. It was called Urbanismo Social. This story, as a citizen and as an architecture student has shapped the way I think about design and architecture. I want to know what my role as an architect can really be in transforming or changing the way a person performs individually or within a community. How will I do this? I will write the story of my city and I will learn from it as I write it. Architects learn about their projects by sketching. Hereby my translation of the story of Medellin will be a visual (and sometimes written) story as seen through my eyes... as perceived through my senses. The final purpose of this story is to be a Manifesto that will propose something for the city, derived from the morals learned by writing:drawing the story. In order to tell the story from a more objective point of view and communicate the reader that the whole city is working towards an understanding of our history and present to propose a new version of Medellin no longer globaly linked to drugs and terrorism I will begin by reading other sources. I will read 3 novels, 2 movies and 1 painting. I will also read a series of interviews to people in the city ranging from politicians, to artists and inhabitants. I will then translate these into drawings and work from them.
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A story of stories and a city. By an Architect.
“The voyeur-god created by this fiction, who, like Schreiber’s God, knows only cadavers, must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviors and make himself alien to them.” —Michel de Certeau
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Reading Medellín
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Architects are often known to be egocentric, narcissistic, and petulant. Often, they describe themselves as Godlike beings that can create inhabitable worlds out of intangible ideas. The concept of being able to have other people move through a space that originally only existed in one’s imagination, can easily lead to an egocentric belief that at least there is a closer relation to the divine. This idea has been present for centuries when artists were considered ‘gifted’ people among regular citizens. Sometimes annoying, sometimes confusing and many times inspiring, one can’t deny that architects do play an important role in the lives of other people. In most cases, people they will never know and generations they will never see. As an architect-to-be I question these roles and what my performance, given my background, will be. What will my legacy be? Will I leave this place better than I found it? A bit existentialist, and overly optimistic, as I am, I must confess an utter feeling of responsibility ‘to give back’. ‘To give back” to the world, because my childhood was always lead by hope of a better world and a better society. “To give back” to my country, because I have had education opportunities that most people in my country have not. “To give back” to my city because through its recent history it has taught me the meaning of citizenship, and human rights despite the constant proximity to violence, terrorism and death; A harsh history that has affected permanently the lives of all involved. I have the urge “to give back” to a city that has suffered much, but is still strong and willing to forgive and give back to the world because it is tired of being isolated due to the actions of a few. “To give back” because I believe it is everyone’s duty to try to leave this world better than we found it.
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I decided to take 5 sources (3 novels, 2 films, 1 painting) to reinterpret them in a visual response. These stories explained one way or another the same ideas I wanted to share from 5 different points of views. By reinterpreting them in the drawing of a conceptual space I re-appropriated the authorship of the story, but covered my back with a few famous authors, a worldly known painter and a few writers, one of them who happened to be one of the Mayor leading the social transformation through urban planning. Talking about Medellin is easy for me. I grew up there, I studied architecture for three years and my teachers and colleagues were leaders and participants in the urban transformation. However, it seemed impossible to describe these realities and feelings without being overly personal and attached to my discourse. I found through Alternative Mapping a way to communicate through a language created by myself. A new way of telling a shared story allowed me to discover new things along the way. Conceptual abstractions of a story turned into a single space drawing and then into a model that explained my memories, some realities and a new created space. By permanently dancing with the real and utopian the reading of the city becomes propositional and analytical for a magical realist world.
“Medieval as seen
or Renaissance in a perspective
—Michel de Certeau
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painters that no
presented the city eye had yet enjoyed�.
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Los Reyes de Este Mundo. Mixed Media 22 x 30
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La Baraja Mixed Media 22 x 15
Check-point Mixed Media 22 x 30
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The story of Medellin and its social metamorphosis is the story I lived as a citizen and as an architecture student in Medellin. It was ‘logical’ then, that for my undergraduate thesis I would like to speak about the City. To tell the story about my city and to learn from its moral. However, the only way a story about a city can be told by one of its citizens is by memory, but “memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories” . It is necessary to stand aside because outside as an observer the city becomes “ a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a God… making the complexity of the city readable… in a transparent text”. As a voyeur, then I stand to read the city and read about the city. As an artist then I paint a fiction of a reality only present in my memory. As an architect, then I turn this painting into a path, a space that speaks the language of the viewer, the reader and the passerby.
No Nacimos Pa´Semillas 1990 Alonso Salazar J. Journalist, writer, and politician Mayor of Medellín from 2008-2011
Jugadores de cartas II” 1989 Fernando Botero Artist Born in Medellín
Barrio La Esperanza
Barrio Santo Domingo 2
Estación Santo Domingo
Comuna 1
Estación Popular
Estación Andalucía
Barrio Moscú ú Barrio La Francia
Barrio Villa del Socorro
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Angosta 2004 Héctor Abad Facionlince Novelist, essayist, journalist, and editor Born in Medellín
La Parábola de Pablo 2001 Alonso Salazar J. Journalist, writer, and politician Mayor of Medellín from 2008-2011
La Vendedora de Rosas 1998 Rodrigo D No Futturo 1990 Directed by Victor Gaviria Film Director Specialized in Street Life in Medellín
No Nacimos Pa’ Semilla could be translated to something like, We’re not born to Procreate, or more contextually, Not born for seeding/sowing. This novel serves as a tool to understand the process from which violence breeds in Colombia. Using real stories of a group of people mostly located in the neighborhood Popular of Medellin, it clearly depicts the motivation, causes, and criminal methodology that lead a generation that was born to kill or die. With a life expectancy below 40, kids that grew up in these neighborhoods had two possible ways out: jail at the overpopulated and even more dangerous prison Bellavista, or the cemetery with a potential pit-stop at the Hospital San Vicente de Paul where most of the city’s war effects are still witnessed. The drug war that climaxed in the 90’s intrinsically brewed a culture of peculiar religious beliefs, a language of its own (‘Parlache’) and a paved road to death.
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La Baraja. The Shuffle. In a game of lies, manipulation, and hidden interests life is always at stake. Women, specially, gamble their lives to prevail. Weather for drugs, alcohol or a line of kids that were conceived not by semen but by false promises of an improbable future, these women are the guinea pigs of the game, the joker that is played only to trick someone else and is apparently charming but could also cease to exist without further repercussion. They are willing to stand up for their delinquent sons and daughters or to actually be one themselves to fight the “porqueria” that permanently rains on them. They possess the tenderness of a mother, the impeccable ability to lie of women and the courage of a lion to take on tragedies and their karmatic lives. They are vulnerable and delicate when their heart is touched and for this reason sometimes end up as kamikazes dying to save the last cent of dignity the possess. They are the greatest trophies of the worst rascals and then also the biggest asset for them to gamble. They live their lives shuffling the few, bad cards they got to play with in life. In the end, they are never the Queen of Hearts they were promised to be, but the knight fighting without armor or sword.
Garcia Marquez said that Magical Realism was simply the description of a continent that allows, tolerates and considers the most absurd and irrational circumstances. It is a place where the limits of imagination exceed for both criminals and crime fighters; a place where the unseen has been seen by all. Angosta is a city of three levels, three climates and three social groups. It is located in one of the narrow valleys of the Andes Mountains in which two opposing yet perpetual friends, the cast and the west, confront visually and socially. Divided by the turbid river, this fictional world is the story of one city or all cities in which everybody has to go through a checkpoint before entering or leaving one of the 3 frontiers. Seven powers determine the laws of the city and what happens inside is as tragic as any real fairy tale can be and as magical as life can only be. The wather is the only perfect constant of the city... In other words, rifying fiction
an of
intriguing the
and terhyperreal.
Sometimes the shelter of corrupted streets is more comforting than the illusory home were violence nests. Bullets of lack of love are shot daily in the interior of many houses where abusive, violent and indifferent families become the greatest of all terrors. The pursuit of death, a bloody violent one becomes the best way to a better life; another life. Like the Little Match Girl (La Vendedora de Rosas), pity over the death shouldn’t always be greater than pity for those that are still alive. With real actors, some who are paying 20-30 years in prison for murder and other crimes, this film challenges the definition of reality and fiction with its brutal truth. Christmas lights, hallucinogenic visions, memories and street life build a whirlwind of images that serve as infinite petals for a beautiful rose; a beautiful but painful-to-hold rose filled with spikes. “… yo soy una guerrera de la calle”. (13 year old prostitute pleading the cops not to take her to the shelter because she was more afraid of what could happen inside than outside. I was a spoiled 12 year old when I saw this in downtown Medellin at 2am in a visit with the Director del Centro -‘Downtown Mayor’. Marked in my soul.
Pablo Escobar was a man feared by all and loved by many. As threatening as Hitler, Pinochet or other brilliant terrorists that become leaders Pablo Escobar built an army of sicarios (hired gun) that still make anyone tremble when a bike passes next to your car on the streets. Killings on the streets and bombs were as common as rain in the city of eternal spring. As one of the richest men on the planet at the time, he was the father of contemporary drug dealing. This book shows the Bin Laden of a small, unknown city like Medellin, the social and philanthropic leader, and the loving family man. All in one, Pablo Escobar defined an economy, a way of living and an era were terrorism powered everything.
Comuna 13
Reading Natural Boundaries
Social Urbanism
Socio-Economical Boundaries
Three Projects + Transportation + Water
Three Projects + Transportation Innovation
[Three Projects]
Biblioteca España
Biblioteca España
Pasaje Carabobo
Comuna 13
Socio-Economical Boundaries
[Three Projects]
Biblioteca España
Comuna 13
Writing & Re-Writing
Three Projects + Metro System
Three Projects + Transportation Innovation
Social Urbanism
Biblioteca España
Pasaje Carabobo
Comuna 13
Pasaje Carabobo
City Section Pasaje Carabobo
Comuna 13
Barrio La Esperanza Medellin
Social Urbanism
Barrio Santo Domingo 2
[Three Projects]
Biblioteca España
Biblioteca España Pasaje Carabobo
Site Section
Three Projects + Transportation + Water
Three Projects + Metro System
Three Projects + Transportation Innovation
Biblioteca España
Pasaje Carabobo
Pasaje Carabobo
Estación Santo Domingo
Comuna 1
Comuna 13
Comuna 13
Comuna 13
Estación Popular
Three Projects + Transportation Innovation Biblioteca España
Estación Andalucía
Pasaje Carabobo
Barrio La Francia
Three Projects + Metro System Barrio Moscú ú
Biblioteca España
Writing & Re-Writing
Three Projects + Transportation + Water Biblioteca España Pasaje Carabobo
Industry under Re-zoning Plan Moravia
City Section Pasaje Carabobo
Barrio Villa del Socorro
Comuna 13 Comuna 13
Comuna 13
Three Projects + Metro System Biblioteca España
Writing & Re-Writing
Three Projects + Transportation + Water Pasaje Carabobo
Biblioteca España
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Medellin
Site Section
City Section Pasaje Carabobo
Comuna 13 Comuna 13
Writing & Re-Writing
Three Projects + Transportation + Water Biblioteca España
Pasaje Carabobo
Industry under Re-zoning Plan
Medellin
Site Section
Moravia
City Section
Comuna 13
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Writing & Re-Writing
Industry under Re-zoning Plan Medellin
Site Section
Moravia
Cerro El Volador
Cerro El Volador
Cerro El Volador
A l t e r n a t i v e M a p p i n g
A Story About
MedellĂn...
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Walking
Reading
Writing
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To read the complexities of a city with the intention of proving/showing them visually is a highly complicated task from any perspective. Cartography was an endeavor that selected people were trained to do. Always generalizing but aiming for precision this became a labor that only cartographers were believed to be able to do. However, the inherent individualistic approach of each cartographer was unavoidable and it became an art. The 20th century, technology and the use of satellites challenged this mĂŠtier and opened the doors for a new approach in mapping. Artists, in a way, overtook this field and began to use it as means to express the complexity of social geographies. Alternative Mapping bridged factual data with perception and intuition in the form of art. It became a language that could say more about reality in an abstracted way. It reached more people as it communicated through the language of intuition. The individualistic approach ceased to be a problem for communication and transportation and became a potential language spoken by many that, on the contraire, strengthened these. As a visual language, Alternative Mapping is a tool to visually write wordless stories.
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Writing MedellĂn
W r i t i n g T h e C i t y Cities are like paragraphs composed of long and short sentences, of commas and periods that determine when inhabitants stop, pause or interact. Like the writer, the architect must define a language enjoyable even to those who can’t read it because “citizens are walkers, whose
bodies follow the thicks and thins of urban ‘text’ without being able to read it.” Moreover, the architect must write
the spaces that can’t be read or seen. The architect must deal with those silent layers only read in between the lines by those who speak the language of an experienced place and understand where the unconstructed walls that divide one neighborhood from another of one group of people from another. Those places that a visitor could never see or might never understand. The architect, in other words, is the translator between the local and the foreigner and it is his or her duty to write the story.
* Michel De Certau. The Practice of Everyday Life
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S t o r i e s O f S t o r i e s A b o u t M e d e l l i n Walking down through the hills of Carabobo, Panris, the local, tells me, the foreigner from the same city, that we have to deviate two blocks because that street, only fifty feet away from us, is not ‘nice’. “We want to avoid problems”, he says. We deviate. What would have happened if I had been on my own, unable to read the invisible texts? Who knows? But as an architect, I am intrigued about that path. A path that performs as wall. A wall that only some can see. As an architect, I want to write that text that tells both the local and the foreigner that in that place there is a pedestrian wall that holds a current or a past story. I want to tell a story written in architecture. Hereby, I am interested in the path, not necessarily the destination. Sometimes the commas and periods of a sentence speak more than the thesis and subject of it. I want to create a new language through which people move, that reminds them of its geographical history in relation to its sociological story. I want to create a path that approaches the urban scale with its God-like pretention, but I want to treat it as a city scale sculpture that reminds us of the artist that leaves a brush mark to be reinterpreted and experienced differently by each viewer. The urban scale speaks to the individual body and the way it performs in it. The artistic approach speaks to the mind and the awareness of a greater world, of other stories that remind us that we are not alone. We are not the only ones. Most people in these stories about Medellin are violent for lack of activity, of sense of being, of purpose in life. They lack a path to walk through once they leave their chaotic house. They are barely aware of a global reality and need to be distracted and informed while providing them a space to be. They need to be able to inhabit the streets, not just be in the streets. They need space, they need a journey with or without a destination, but a journey, nonetheless. In the Nolli map this space is not in the black or in the white, it is in the gray that we can’t see. It is the gray where they spend their days waiting for a school and a job that might never come and an early death that they will try to catch before it catches them . It is a gray avoided in all maps, but they feel like only there, for their space, there was no ink left. They don’t know about the Holocaust, or the Civil Rights, Ghandi or Mandela. They don’t know that they are not the only ones. If perhaps, they knew this, they might take a bucket and paint the missing gray.
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Rhythm. Pace. Pause. Transition. Period. Comma. Gap. Bridge. Beat. Tempo. Semi-colon. Transition
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Word. Connector. Space. Emotional Rhythm. Tempo of the Senses. Pause. Comma. Transition.
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G ro u n d e d & U to p i a n : M a g i c a l A n d Re a l In the 1970’s a law enforced all new buildings to include an urban sculpture adjacent to the property. Believing in art as an urban language and in the architect as an artist painting the city, I would like to see the city as a whole; a single sentence with the right pauses. Like Doris Salcedo and the Tate museum´s fracture that didn’t hold a collection of work, but a permanent, single everlasting footprint of a concept. A fracture in the city. Sometimes insinuated. Sometimes spatial. “A pedestrian unfolding of the stories accumulated in a place (moving about the city and traveling).” Reminding the passerby of the voyeur, and the renaissance painter. Understanding the geography of the space and inhabiting the space underneath the ‘crust’ that we only see, to, instead, inhabit the real face of the city. Building the un-inhabited. Inhabiting the un-inhabited. Understanding the in-understandable. Reading the unreadable. Spatializing the non-space, the un-space. Dealing with urban scale at the scale of the body. Controlling the views, the shared and private spaces. Making the weather, rain and soil evident to remind us that because we don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. To read about a city’s history in relation to a world’s story. To inhabit the unbuilt walls in a un-wall space.
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Conditions & Possibilities
Visual Connection
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Opportunity for furniture, water-collecting, green spaces? New {Side}Walks?
Opportunity for open-air galleries, markets, rain-viewing?
Opportunity for educational spaces, city oasis, markets, playgrounds, scenarios?
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Three Places : Three Conditions : Three Parameters
A Story About
MedellĂn...
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Walking
Reading
Writing
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Through : Along : Through
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Three Places : Three Conditions : Three Parameters = 1 Path
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Walking MedellĂn
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My project is not about a specific space, building, material or street. It is about memory, imagination, stories, and some facts. Every space is triggered by a specific memory in relation to a specific place in Medellin, but what really happens beyond what my eyes saw and my brain remembers is a combination of fantasy and symbolism. They are stories told from intuition, abstraction and the factual information that distance and media can provide.
Hereby, it is not about aggregation but subtraction, possibly, and it is not about a building, a wall or a sidewalk but all of them and none of them. It is a path that holds the un-building, the un-wall, the un-street. It is the negative: positive of an urban landmark experienced at the scale of floor, furniture and wall. Sometimes even shelter.
A metaphor for a particular city engaging a question about architecture: what role do architects really play in molding societies?
It is a cityscape sculpture that deals with the ground line instead of the skyline. It is grounded and utopian. It is metaphorical and it is inhabitable. It is a memorial of a city’s past, a global history and a human nature.
Initially, I thought the project was about aggregation and spontaneous participation because this is what the city screams at first sight: aggregation. But the question about the black or white in the nolli clarified that I am interested in the in-between. The invisible space that is both public and private. The invisible component that divides one area from another. The invisible frontiers only seen by locals. The stories that build a space: a city.
It is a space that connects the city, for this has proven to be a successful tool in the city. It is a communal space, for only in these we learn to share... and because there is no other way. It is participatory in nature for this has proven to commit the people to take care and care. It is eyelevel architecture, for it speaks to the body scale of moving and sharing‌ expanded at a city scale.
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I propose a city scale sculpture of a fracture that represents the invisible and visible barriers of our society to remind us of their imminent presence despite our accumulated immunity to violence. This fracture shall represent the eternal presence of these barriers built through time and piled stories, as much as it shall represent the inexistent space between the door and the street in which anxiety, indignity and overwhelming lack of purpose build an aggressive behavior in the whirlwind of youth in our cities. This fracture varies in program as it cuts through the city; sometimes through the city fabric, sometimes along the city fabric, sometimes through the slope of our steep valley. I propose a path that connects to the worldly awarded innovative transportation system of the city, but in this case, one that is cost less. A path that moves through the city despite its limitations, whether social or physical. A path that glides sometimes through the city fabric, sometimes along the city fabric, sometimes through the slope of our steep valley. I propose a connection between Moravia, the landfill that was inhabited and then evacuated to be then abandoned, the river, the ultimate barrier that we can see at all times, but never identified as the utter divisor, and Cerro el Volador, a scaled down version of the hills of our city in representation of our topography. History + Reality + Topography Water will be the guiding thread for this path for it is one of the main physical barriers that as a society we are only beginning to understand its richness and geographical implications. Until today, these fluid elements have been hidden, buried or treated as dead ends. They shape our city grid and bring us to the one element that connects us all: The River. The water. Revealing buried creeks in Moravia and Cerro el Volador will be the threshold to a path that inhabits the river as the fracturer of social geographies. Revealing will be a reminder of our unrevealed essence and will evoke new, prosperous ways of inhabiting a city that believes in a better future. A city where connectivity, at all scales, all prices, and all speeds weaves us together in a joint pursuit for a dignified, educated city that will never forget its past but will move forward to write a new present.
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I
Believe
Architecture can change the way a person behaves. Whether it is due to the ‘broken window theory’ or the idea that wall paper is the solution to world peace? That is for each designer to decide. Architecture can and must aim to affect positively deep levels in the psychology of the inhabitant.
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Zoning
Urban Analysis
N
Resident Mixed Us Industria
Small Stream Medium to Large Streams
Cable Car: Santo Domingo Library-Park España
Public Transportation
Botanical Garden
Orquideorama
Flat Land Hill
Amusement Park
‘Explora’
Residential; Low Income
Path
Carabobo Pedestrian Street Planetarium
Me
Amusement Park
‘Parque Norte’
Moravia
Historical Icon
Antioquia Public University Industrial; Re-Zoning Plan
Residential Mixed Use Industrial
Urban Streets
River
Physical Boundary
Primary Seconda Terciary Metro
Cerro ‘El Volador’
Topographical Icon Public Transportation
Residential; Low Income
Stadium - Sports Area
Primary Streets Secondary Streets Terciary Streets
N
Proposed Path Supporting Areas to Connect
1: 400 ft
Areas of Interest to Connect
Metro
Mechanical Escalators: Comuna 13
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N
Metro
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Plans
N
1: 50 ft
N
1: 150 ft
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Path Plan
N
1: 50 ft
Path Through City Fabric & Extension Top View
Path Along River Top View
N
1: 50 ft
Path Through Ground & Slope Top View
Sections
E
Section B1’-B1’’
E
Section B2’-B2’
E
Section B3’-B3’’
1: 15 ft
E
1: 25 ft
Section A’-A’’
1: 15 ft
E
1: 25 ft
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Section C’-C’’
1: 15 ft
“Inteligencias Colectivas”
2009
Workshop Izaskun Chinchilla
2012
RISD DP Board
2013
Thesis’ Path
A manifesto is a published verbal declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government. A manifesto usually accepts a previously published opinion or public consensus and/or promotes a new idea with prescriptive notions for carrying out changes the author believes should be made. It often is political or artistic in nature, but may present an individual's life stance.
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To be Continued...
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Analysing the History and Present of a City to Propose a better Future is an impossible task considering the complexities and intricacies that many times can’t even be explained. Nevertheless I found this Thesis experience to surpass my expectations of aiming to read a city and learn from it. Given the limited amount of time I found that Art and Literature are tools that grasp most of these wordless thoughts and when combined with Architecture and its tools of representation magical connections occur. These should not be limited to academic purposes and, on the contraire, shall begin to gain exponential power and relevance in the ‘real world’ to speak the silent language of perception and intuition that we all share.
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A Story to be Walked...
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Abad Faciolince, Héctor. Angosta. Editorial Planeta. 2003 Akerman, James R. and W. Karrow Jr. Robert. Maps, Finding Our Place in The World. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago and London 2007 Architecture for Humanity website: http://architectureforhumanity.org/
Google Maps Mania: http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. Zone Books, New York. 1991
Harley, J.B. 1988. “Maps, knowledge, and power.” In The Iconography of Landscape, eds. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 277-312.
Calvino, Italo. 1972. Invisible Cities (Le Città Invisibili). Giulio Einaudi Editore. Cieri, Marie. 2003. “Between being and looking: An investigation of queer tourism promotion and lesbian social space in greater Philadelphia.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (www.acme-journal.org). 2(2),147-166 ( + midway through the reading, make sure to look at the visual/textual project that goes with the paper). Cloke, Paul, et al. 2004. “Changing practices of human geography: an introduction” and Part 1 introduction, “Constructing geographical data,” in Practising Human Geography. London: Sage, pp. 1-39. Conrads Ulrich. Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1986 Crampton, J.W. and Krygier, John. 2006. “An Introduction to Critical Cartography.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4(1), 11-33. Davis, J.S. 2005. “Representing place: ‘deserted isles’ and the reproduction of Bikini Atoll.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95(3), 607-625. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984 Del Casino, Vincent J. Jr., 2009. “Social Geography? What’s That?”. In Social Geography: A Critical Introduction. Chichester, UK, and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 11-28. Dowler, L. 2001. “Fieldwork in the trenches: participant observation in a conflict area.” In Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers: Issues and Debates, eds. M. Limb and C. Dwyer. London: Arnold, 153-164.
Harmon, Katherine. 2009. The Map As Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Kearns, Robin A. 2000. “Being There: Research through Observing and Participating,” in Iain Hay, ed., Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography. South Melbourne and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.103-121. Kenzari, Bechir. Architecture and Violence. Actar. Barcelona 2009 McSweeney, Kendra. n.d. “Portrait, landscape, mirror: reflections on return fieldwork.” Peter H. Herlihy, et. al., eds. Ethno- and Historical Geographic Studies in Latin America: Essays Honoring William V. Davidson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 145-160. Meinig, D. 1979. “The beholding eye.” The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 33-48. Nold, C. 2008. http://www.softhook.com/ Explore this website especially the section that features Nold’s Biomapping and Emotion Map projects. Routledge, Paul. 2004. “Relational Ethics of Struggle.” In Radical Theory, Critical Praxis: Making a Difference Beyond the Academy?, eds. D. Fuller and R. Kitchin. Praxis (e)Press, 79-91. Salazar J. Alzonso. No Nacimos Pa´Semilla. Editorial Planeta 2002 Salazar J, Alonso. Pablo Escobar el Patron del Mal. Santillana USA Publishing Company 2012 Saltmarsh, R. 2001. “A journey into autobiography: a coal miner’s daughter.” In Placing Autobiography in Geography, ed. P. Moss. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 138-148.
Fainstein, Susan S. and Dennis R. Judd. 1999. “Global Forces, Local Strategies, and Urban Tourism,” in Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein, eds., The Tourist City. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 1-17.
Valentine, Gill. “The city,” in Social Geographies: Space and Society. pp. 205-241.
Gaviria, Victor. Pelicula La Vendedora de Rosas 1998.
Wood, Denis. 2010. Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas. Los Angeles: Siglio.
Gaviria, Victor. Pelicula Rodrigo D No Futturo 1990
Young, L. and Barrett, H. 2001. “Adapting visual methods: action research with Kampala street
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children.” Area 33(2), 141-152.
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Mariana Botero marianabotero.com mbotero@risd.edu EDUCATION RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN | Providence, RI |Department of Architecture | 2010-Present Bachelor of Fine Arts | Bachelor of Architecture EUROPEAN HONORS PROGRAM | Rome, IT | 2012 Independent Studies at Rhode Island School of Design Developed a Jewelry Collection of sculptural pieces inspired by architecture buildings and places in Italy YURUPARI | Medellin, COL | Photography | 2009-2010 Four trimesters of Undergraduate Photographic Studies UNIVERSIDAD PONTIFICIA BOLIVARIANA | Medellín, COL | Facultad de Arquitectura | 2006-09 Six semesters of Undergraduate Architectural Studies
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AND GRAPHICS Model making, full scale construction, installation design Rhino, AutoCAD, 3DMax, Google SketchUp, ArchiCAD, Revit | V-ray Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign Digital fabrication – laser cutting, 3d printing Woodshop and woodworking training
RELEVANT STUDIOS
LANGUAGES Fluent in English and Spanish | Italian Level Intermediate C1 | French Level Intermediate C1
DESIGN BUILD STUDIO | Pawtucket, RI | Blossom Community Garden | 2011 Elected by faculty to serve as one of six Project Managers of a studio in which 70 RISD students cooperatively designed and built a permanent raised garden and two pavilions for the Pawtucket Community.
ORGANIZATIONAL Ability to thoroughly research, develop, organize and manage projects from concept to production. Strong public relations and experience in asking for donations, client communication and meeting deadlines.
INTERFAITH ADVANCED STUDIO | Department of Architecture | 2012 Developed an interfaith chapel, archive and study room for Brown Campus Area departing from the concept of a secret garden and a single conceptual drawing.
EXHIBITIONS & AWARDS
EXPERIENCE Intern | Urbam | Medellin, COL | Summer 2012 Collaborating in urban-architectural project for Urabá, Colombia using Auto Cad, GIS, Photoshop and Illustrator Artist Assistant | Dan Clayman’s Studio | Providence, RI | Summer 2011 Glass Sculptor Assistant Intern | Renaissance Press; Fine Arts Atelier | Paul Taylor | Ashuelot, NH | Summer 2011 Studio and Photogravure Workshop Assistant
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SKILLS
RISD Show | Mostra Finale | Pizza Cenci 56 Roma, IT | May 31, 2012 Architectural Jewelry WI-FI Art | Circolo degli Artisti | Roma, IT | April 1, 2012 Laurel Leaf Installation Passage Between Lines | Rhode Island School of Design at Carr House | Fall 2010 Selected Drawing; Manual Representation Honorable Mention | Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana | Housing Studio | Spring 2009 Best Housing Project