5 Stories, 1 City Mariana Botero Thesis Part 1 Wintersession 2013
Purpose and Process of my thesis. Storytelling of a ctiy. “Anything you’ve experienced, you can get others to experience the same. Or at least, get their brain areas that you’ve activated that way, active too.” One thing is to be part of the story and another is to be the listener to the story being told. In order to better understand the story of my city and to further explain/share/depict for others I have chosen 5 literary sources that for one reason or another have been representative to the city: 3 books, 2 films, 1 painting. From an intuitive response to each one of these, I have used Architectural language and mixed media to represent them as 2d visual responses that tell the stories in my own created language to others and to myself. This has been done from three different points of view: conceptual, abstracted and mapped. These will then be ‘merged’ as an overall ‘map’ of the city and a combination of 2d and 3d models to understand the architectural meaning in them. Basic Scheme: Part A: 5 weeks. Research through literary sources= 2d responses. 1 week. Visit to Medellin. Interviews. Visits to the sites. Part B: Merging of Conceptual understandings of Part A and potential Part C through 2d drawings and models. Part C: Design and propose
I believe Medellin has been socially transformed through (and specifically) architectural means. My approach is to observe, analyze and learn what are the real elements in architecture that can actually bring people from disrupted backgrounds together. How can architecture blur the fine line where one social layer begins and another one ends by means of design and constructed space? Acknowledging that this is an interdisciplinary task of great urban planning and highly linked to transportation systems, in the few months I have in the spring semester I would simply like to take the conceptual, abstracted process of winter session and find a way to apply it to a real or potential site in the city. Always aiming to keep the process both representative and objective. For this reason whatever the final result is shouldn’t be larger than 20-30 sq. feet in order to achieve the greatest amount of detail possible.
Wintersession Through the reading and analysis- as a research method- of different literary sources I have begun to write my own story. I have created my own language to compile a visual story of Medellin. A Medellin written in my own words: Visual words that remind me of feelings, characteristics, abstracted concepts and anecdotes that together begin to thread a humble architectural approach to a highly complicated and complex social environment. Ultimately, they rely on each other to see the ‘greater picture’, but they can also stand on their own as independent chapters or points of view in the ongoing story. Novel
Painting
Fiction Novel
Film & Book
Historic Novel
Week 1. Text 1 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.
Esquisse A. 22 x 30. Mixed Media
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
8°
14-2
There is a Landscape filled with crime and lack of oportunity and hope. There is an Urgency to find what they want their worlds to be. An urgency to change the Landscape... Harry Belafonte
Map A 20 x 30 Digital and Analogue Drawing
Space A. Los Reyes del Mundo. 22x16. Mixed Media over Chipboard.
Week 2. Text 2 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.
Esquisse B. 22 x 30. Mixed Media
Space B. Jaque-Mate. 22x16. Mixed Media over Chipboard.
Text 3. Week 3. On Angosta 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 east 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. 7 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 weather is the only constant perfect of the city... In other words, an intriguing and terrifying fiction of the hyperreal. Space C. Check-point. 22x16. Mixed Media over Chipboard.
Esquisse C. 22 x 30. Mixed Media
Text 4. Week 4. La Vendedora de Rosas 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, 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-tohold rose filled with spikes.
unfinished. Space D. Cuando las pĂşas son mĂĄs bellas que las rosas. 22x16. Mixed Media over Chipboard.
Esquisse D. 22 x 30. Mixed Media
Text 5. Week 5. La Parabola de Pablo 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 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.
unfinished. Space E. Explosi贸n: Implosi贸n. 22x16. Mixed Media over Chipboard.
Esquisse E. 22 x 30. Mixed Media
One story and all stories, tell a different perspective to the same story. This one is one that as “paisas” we well know, but to share and extend the feelings and desires to someone else is a different story. Hereby, a new story is beginning to be told with architectural visual terms and the hope of writting a better ending.
“The novelist must be characterized not by his function but by his vision, and we must remember that his vision has to be transmitted and that the limitations and blind spots of his audience will very definitely affect the way he is able to show what he sees.”
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... and the story continues. I would first like to complete a set of 9 esquisse drawings as I now think they could work better as a single piece of 60 in x 90 in (3x3 drawings instead of 3x2). This week I will be interviewing different people involved in the story of Medellin in a visit to the city and specific neighborhoods (Some related to the read stories, some not). As architects, politicians, writers, artists, ex-sicarios (hired gun) or citizens, I would like to hear their point of views about architecture as a social tool in the renewing of the city. New Maps and complementary, smaller esquisses will be done to add and better inform this winter session set of abstracted research. The spring semester will be focused into the transcription of these 2D representations into 3D drawings and models that could end in a proposal for the city or a development of an architectural design derived from these processes.