42°N
40°N
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36°N
34°N
32°N
30°N
28°N
26°N
24°N
The titanic route represents a systematic attempt to link and organize cities and regions in the Americas through the mobility of people, information, and goods. But its wildly varied moments of urban density dotting an otherwise empty incision through miles and miles of diffuse landscape highlight the disjunction between the countries and their people rather than a linkage.
10000 8000
19°N Ciudad de México, México
6000 4000 2000
Prudhoe Bay Site Plan
490 mi 789 km
Ec os 505 mi ys tem 813 km 395 mi s 16°N Colonia Cruz Azul, 635 km México 14°N Guatemala, 475 mi Guatemala Choluteca, 764 km 13°N Honduras CA1 620 mi 997 km Darién 9°N San José, Costa Rica Gap Canal de Panamá, 9°N Medellin, Panamá 6°N Colombia
3°N Cali, Columbia
Equator
580 mi 933 km 435 mi
Quito, Ecuador 0°
506 mi E35 814 km Macara, Ecuador
3°S
Chimbote, Peru 9°S
1S 550 mi 885 km
Chincha Alta, 13°S Peru
Artic Circle
Fairbanks
a St
Prudhoe Bay Area Map
500 mi 804 km
te H
wy
2
Located on a jetty adjacent to an oil refinery, the tambo’s composition reflects the icy shards that make up the fragmented edge of the coast of the Arctic Sea. Its slow emergence from the water marks the beginning (and end) of the site.
Antofagasta, Chile Copiapó, Chile
25
(
Truth or Consequences
Moquegua, 17°S Peru
490 mi 788 km
23°S 27°S
450 mi 5 724 km La Serena, Chile 29°S Vicuna McKenna, 33°S Santiago, 33°S Argentina 427 mi Chile 60 7 687 km Buenos Aires, 34°S 463 mi 500 mi 745 km 804 km Argentina
PRUDHOE BAY The tambo at Prudhoe Bay marks the terminus of the Pan-American Highway and the closest American city to the Arctic Circle. The town llargely exists to support the population working at the largest oil field in North America, urban legend has it that only one family officially lives there.
A
630 mi 1013 km
Ciudad Juarez
aztec stepped temple
) native american tipi
incan trapazoid
(
)
289
159 12 31 v. 1/4
colu
mbu s
mile marker
incan tambo
pony express stations
california mission church
john muir trail hut
18°S
20°S
22°S
Concrete form with latitudes showing Tambo location and also a sister location across the hemisphere.
Variable inner and bottom members to be designed individually and specifically based on local decisions.
24°S
26°S
28°S
30°S
32°S
34°S
36°S
38°S
40°S
42°S
44°S
46°S
A’
We highlight four possibilities at four very different conditions on the site as a way of starting the project: Santiago, the Panama Canal, and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. These four designs are not meant to be prescriptive, but rather a way to begin thinking about the project. 10m
HIGHWAY
SANTIAGO The Tambo Santiago is situated in the longest country in the Americas and the world. It celebrates the intersection between the main longitudinal highway and the Andes-Pacific axis. It is located on a dense and congested part of the Pan-American Highway where it crosses one of the busiest streets in dowtown Santiago.
The proportions and outline of the Tambo must remain constant, but a large degree of freedom is available to the local designers with regards to the performance, materiality, number, and configuration.
Comodoro Rivadavia, 45°S Argentina
San Antonio
496 mi 3 798 km
PROGRAM/ORGANIZATION There is a long history of architecture along roads that serves as a marker, relay station, or navigation device. Along the Inca Trail are ruins of what are called tambos, stations that were a day’s journey apart and served as interchange nodes for messengers on foot called chasquis.
Built with a rough board concrete relief, it is directly paying homage to the original tambos of the Incas. Its second story allows people to connect directly to the landscape by framing the Andes mountains that surround the city.
2m
John Muir Trail in the High Sierras all provided travelers with a way to experience vast landscapes. The simple mile marker is also a precedent, enumerating past stops and promising future ones.
Rio Gallegos, Argentina 51°S
Truth or Consequences Area Map Ushuaia, Argentina 54°S
Truth or Consequences Section A-A’
Panama Canal Section A-A’
5
San Jose, Costa Rica
tambo panamericano
Canal de Panamá
Panama Canal Area Map Much later, the Pony Express, served as a calibrated system that allowed for messages to be communicated across the expanding North American territory. The distance between way stations was ten miles, the distance a horse could travel at full speed without getting tired. California Missions and also the cabins along the
SAMPLES OF DESIGN OF TAMBOS BASED ON LOCATION:
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REFLECTION
PERFORATION
CONNECTION
INTERACTION
To reflect is to refuse attention, directing it instead to the surroundings or perhaps back to the viewer. Reflections could be static, emphasizing the environment, or variable, created by hundreds of movable mirrors in constant flux as each traveler creates a pattern with light and rearranges the environment around themselves.
Perforation can create a sense of dissolution and transparency; it interacts with light to create shadows, or it can form pockets to be filled by humans or animals, and these effects all vary with scale. A regular layout allows a Tambo to be almost transparent, while irregular perforations allow it to send a message, one that can be determined and cast into the structure, or one controlled by those inside selectively filling voids.
The highway itself does not just link places, but travelers. Someone arriving at a Tambo might take a minute to examine a map, plan an itinerary with the help of those who came before, leaving their own knowledge of the area they came from. The Tambo becomes not just a celebration of the area it inhabits, but of surrounding areas and the shared experiences of travelers and locals.
The desire to leave evidence of having been there is common throughout cultures, and demonstrates a desire for permanence when language can seem so fleeting. The Tambo could be a place to leave messages, items, and memories and to share what others have left. It could be anonymous and free, or a way to find find others and connect with them.
50°S
52°S
54°S
Question: How do you work with the potential of scale without falling prey to the seduction of size?
A
10m
48°S
00 LITTLE, BIG
1
2
FORM/STRUCTURE The form of the new tambo is reminiscent of indigenous American architecture, from the pyramidal constructs of the aztecs and mayas to the trapezoidal geometries of the Incas that provided both structural stability and an understanding of how to frame views.
Viedma, Argentina 40°S
397 mi 639 km
NI
10
554 mi 891 km
Prudhoe Bay Section A-A’
16°S
N
IDENTITY Folding at the vertical and horizontal axes of the letters ‘N’ and ‘S’ creates an image that synthesizes the identity of the Pan-American Highway. The letters are each symmetrically mirrored over both axes. This identity, used to both promote the project to those participating and perhaps later as route signs demarcating the highway, emphasizes many of the themes that we are attempting to address. The blending of the letters represents a breakdown in the border between north and south, while the mirroring over an axis highlights the similarities and contrasts between countries that are linked by culture and infrastructure, creating a sense of unity, and quantifying an incredibly vast site.
Santiago Site Plan
25 700 km
459 mi 1N 738 km
A primary feature of this project is that the forms are built based on a minimal set of dimensional and performative parameters that are then customized by the inhabitants of each location. The formal parameters outline dimension (10m x 10m x 2m) and base material (concrete), while the performative criteria are more open-ended and allow for interpretation. Each marker will play the role of a navigational device, with clear information outlining specific location along the connector. Beyond that the form performs in two ways; one, it frames a specific point, acting as a foil for the ceaselessness of the road and highlighting its context. Secondly, it acts as a communication device disseminating information or reassurance at a variety of scales, whether through materiality, reflection, light, or interchange. Each group working on the forms at their location will be responsible for addressing these criteria through positioning, materiality, and performance of the marker.
The Panama Tambo celebrates the element water. By capturing water in small pools at high tide, the Tambo makes reference to the locks in the Panama Canal which regulate water levels. The orthogonal shapes of the pools and straight passage through draw attention to human intervention cutting through nature. The metallic mesh bridges which connect each element of the Tambo refer to the history of this same route across the isthmus being used as a portage route by Spanish colonials, carrying gold and silver from Peru back to ships en route to Spain.
Panama Canal Site Plan
Truth or Consequences Site Plan
580 mi 933 km
11
Tropic of Cancer
= Co ngr uen t
14°S
1
Dawson Creek, BC Canada 55°N
Latitude Pairin g
na rica
12°S
03 FORM
PANAMA CANAL At the Panama Canal, a strong East/West maritime ‘super highway’ intersects the North/South Pan-American super highway. On the southern side of the canal lies in an impenetrable jungle, the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, that few dare to traverse. This jungle forms the one physical break in the Pan-American Highway. Because of the alleged drug trade and paramilitary presence, those following the Pan-American Highway generally proceed by boat toward ports in Colombia. As the physical link between North and South America and the maritime link between the Atlantic and Pacific this point has been one of the most strategic points to control in the New World.
C
Smith River Falls, BC Canada 59°N
Whitehorse, YK Canada 61°N
Fairbanks, AK USA 64°N
Prudhoe Bay
Tambo: One-A-Day The trapezoidal forms, named tambos after the Incan message stations, are reminscent of American indigenous structures throughout the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. They are placed on average 800km apart. In one month, if you saw one marker a day, you would travel the entire length of the highway.
ra rete C ar
ame Pan
10°S
60
68
Santiago
7 Buenos Aires
3
Santiago Section A-A’
Santiago Area Map
When Rem Koolhaas wrote Bigness in 1994, Dubai had not even happened. In that manifesto he states that sheer size in architecture has itself become an ideology, that scale has its own logic that surpasses the traditional logic of architecture. Although the practice of Bigness in architecture is as prevalent now as when he wrote originally, the scale has inflated even further, so that now instead of architecture inserting itself into a site within the city, the site has become the entire city. Architecture’s tendency has been to scale itself by a larger and larger factor, inflating its physical and environmental footprint and failing to affect or be affected by issues of politics and sustainability. A common reaction to this failure, especially in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, has been architecture with a tiny ‘a’, an architecture of activism that is hyper local, taking over sites as small as parking spaces, aspiring to generate a series of micro-utopias within an urban context. But can architecture do more? Can it unite across political borders? What is the maximum architecture can do without being maximum sized? Before asking whether it’s relevant to do this, we ask if it is even possible. A global site by its nature would have to be huge. How can architecture affect change at a transnational scale without falling prey to the extra-large single-container architecture that typically occupies such huge sites? And if there is a political, economic, or environmental agenda, how is that agenda unified and made clear? Lastly, can there be no agenda beyond trying to generate a collective good will? In the social sciences, “framing” is how we each interpret and understand the world. Based on our cultural or biological influences, we create a set of filters or frames, and it is through these that we see the world. By co-opting this concept, we propose an architecture that acts as a series of frames – moments within a bigger context through which we make sense of the world. This pamphlet comes out of a need to search for an architecture that can make visible a collective identity across these bigger contexts. The proposal shown here is the beginning of that search – by focusing on a huge piece of transnational infrastructure, in this case the Pan-American Highway, we are able to propose an architecture that provides opportunities for the creation of linkages, densities, and formal and informal structures to engender connectivity and communication.
Estrecho de Magallanes
Prudhoe Bay,AK USA 70°N
sea level
The Truth of Consequences Tambo marks a long stretch of no man’s land along the Pan-American Highway. Named after a popular 1950’s game show, it embodies the type of location frequented by fugitives, serial killers, and innocents in road films that celebrate the allure and uncanniness of the American West. The Tambo here acts simply as a beacon. The perforations, here cast in Pueblo Native American patterns, are made by casting hollow metal tubes into the concrete. These allow for light to filter through while reflecting the headlights of passing cars.
625 mi
85 1005 km
A’
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
8°S
45°S
25°N Monterrey, México
The project starts with an attempt to document the site by cutting a section through the entire Pan-American Highway. The section is shown in black.
Markers inserted along the Pan-American highway from Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic Circle do exactly this: they quantify the incredible length and highlight the extreme contrasts but unite the disparate zones into one integrated passageway. Unlike the Continuous Monument project by Superstudio, which envisioned a monolithic and never ending monument covering the globe, highlighting the “negative utopia” of big, single-container architecture of the future, these markers can be viewed as tiny monuments that intend to splice together a sense of common purpose and collective identity. Besides literally marking the road and therefore diminishing its unfathomable length, the markers serve as a unifying gesture, signifying commonality through vast and disparate conditions.
6°S
Comodoro Rivadavia, Chubut, Argentina
12000
525 mi 844 km
4°S
Viedma, Rio Negro, Argentina 40°S
35
2°S
Buenos Aires, Argentina 34°S
10
14000
0°
Santiago, Chile 33°S
30°N Sonora, TX USA
2°N
Copiapo, Chile 27°S
16000
550 mi 885 km
4°N
A
Monterrey Mexico 25°N
18000 ft
880 km
6°N
Antofagasta, Chile 23°S
25 547 mi 33°N Truth or Consequences, NM USA
8°N
Moquegua, Peru 17°S
38°N Colorado Springs, CO USA
10°N
Chincha Alta, Peru 13°S
345 mi 555 km
12°N
Chimbote, Peru 9°S
42°N Caspar, MT USA
14°N
Macara, Ecuador 3°S
483 mi 777 km mi 90 503 809 km
16°N
Pacific Ocean
Sonara, TX USA 30°N
45°N Butte, MT USA
A’
Albuquerque, NM USA 35°N
15
18°N
Quito, Ecuador 0°
565 mi 909 km
Markers along an open road exist in every culture, from stone columns counting down the road left to ancient Rome to the relay stations that marked the ten mile outposts for the Pony Express mail system. They attest to a persistent human need to quantify, to reassure, to communicate. These devices serve as a navigation device, positioning us in a greater context, and often allowing us to reach beyond that context to connect further along the path.
Colorado Springs, CO USA 38°N
52°N Red Deer, AB Canada
2
The Pan-American Highway is a 15,000 mile long road that travels from the southernmost point of South America to the Arctic Circle. Varying between smooth, precise, incomplete, unnavigable, and non-existent, the road is nonetheless the longest one in the world. Its origins are romantic; the delegates at early Pan-American conferences intended to build a connector not just to stimulate commerce, but to show that the Americas were united in good will against the colonialist tendencies of the Old World. More recently, the lack of organization, the fall from grace of the automobile, and the vast economic differences that exist along its path make it less of a grand connector than an infrastructural conceit, an idea whose significance has emerged only in pieces.
488 mi 785 km
Caspar, WY USA 42°N
55°N Dawson Creek, BC Canada
A
97
Butte, MT USA 45°N
58°N Smith River, BC Canada
02 DISCONTINUOUS MONUMENT
385 mi 619 km
Red Deer, AB Canada 52°N
61°N Whitehorse, Yukon Canada
Prudhoe Bay
A’
01 ROAD (PAN AMERICAN)
1
20°N
Equador
REDEFINING CONNECTIONS TRANSMISSIONS ALONG A LOST HIGHWAY
589 mi 947 km
Español
64°N Fairbanks, AK USA
English
495 mi 796 km
22°N
Ushuaia, Argentina 54°S
44°N
Rio Gallegos, Santa Cruz, Argentina 51°S
46°N
NORTH
48°N
SOUTH
50°N
Equator
52°N
Cali, Colombia 3°N
54°N
Macara, Ecuador 4°N
70°N Prudhoe Bay, AK USA
Medellin, Colombia 6°N
56°N
Canal de Panamá, Panama 8°N
58°N
San Jose, Costa Rica 9°N
60°N
Choluteca, Honduras 13°N
62°N
Guatemala, Guatemala 14°N
64°N
Colonial Cruz Azul, Mexico 16°N
66°N
Ciudad de Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico 19°N
68°N
Trópico de Capricornio
70°N