Architect, Artist and researcher, is a principal at LabProFab a laboratory of experimental art an applied science and The Public Machinery a plattform for Social Ecology and Cooperative Urban Reengineering. He received a Masters in science in Architectural Design, Honorable Mention at the Central University of Venezuela where he is also a professor and member of the postgraduate academic committee of design at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. He has served as guest Professor and conference speaker in National Rosario University_ Argentina, Monash University_ Australia, UFMG and Portoalegre University_Brazil, Catholic University_Chile, Shanghai University_China, Javeriana Unniversity_Colombia, Technologic Institute_Costa Rica, Catholic University_Ecuador, Back Stage Architecture_ Italy, Colima, Aguas Calientes and Monterrey Technologic University, Queretaro Mexico, Applied Science University_ Peru, University of Puerto Rico, International University of Catalunya_Spain, the University of Minnesota, the FIU University and The New School_ USA, Central University and Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela. Invited Artist at Tokyo University of the Arts Japan 2013, Shibaura House In Japan, Artist in Residence at Jaca Art and Technology Center Bello Horizonte Brasil, Elam School of Fine Arts and International Artist in Residence for 2014 at University of Auckland, invited proffesor at Shanghai University College of Fine Arts 2015. He’s works its frame into social and anthropic emergency Architecture focusing on post catastrophe and postconflict scenarios deveploping protocols and survival tactics to trigger the renewal and resuscitation of inactive landscapes and postindustrial cities. His project activity is closer to the design of a logistic chain of social events than to the massive construction, improving and promoting the importance of citizen participation among the political and cultural dynamics covering art, social science and local intelligence. Honors include: Nominated by Martino Stierli New Talent in Metropolis Magazine 2015, “1st PRIZE AT THE JINAN WEST CITY FORUM” Public Art Competition Green Emerging, in partnership with Fine Arts College of Shanghai University, China 2015. First Prize at the International Award for Public Art, University of Shanghai, China, 2013. First Prize in the International Festival of Architecture of Barcelona EME3 2011 sponsored by Fundación Jesús Serra, Honorable mentions at Quito Biennial 2012 world competition in habit and deveploment Maracaibo Biennial 2010 - 2012, and Malaussena Biennial National Culture Award 2010.
ARCH. MSC. ALEJANDRO HAIEK COLL With diverse arts groups, urban activism and grassroots movements he created The Public Machinery project: a series of social artifacts and cultural infrastructures conceived as participatory, political and economic reengineering focused on the democratization of the urban soil and the renewal and resuscitation of inactive and non-regulated landscapes with a bottom-up approach in Caracas favelas. Co founder and Director of Lab.Pro.Fab The Public Machinery
He exhibited at the 50th Venice Biennale 2003 curated by Carlos Basualdo. Pratt Institute - Breaking Borders: New Latin American Architecture 2011, The Ideal Home - Antwerp, New International Cultural Center, The Cervantes Institute FreshLatino 2002, curated by Ariadna Cantis y Andres Jaque. Quito Biennial, Buenos Aires Biennial, Santiago Biennial. Invited Juror at Possible Futures Competition/ Bienal Miami + Beach 2003 curated by Alfredo Andia and Congreso Sigradi 2001: Exploring the Future of Architecture and Design. Most outstanding publications include a review in Latin American emerging Studios at Harvard Design Magazine, review in Domus Magazine. Architecture in Development, AAJ press, Public Art Review / USA, Public Art Review / China, Suma+, Design like you give a damn 2 published by Architecture for Humanity, Backstage Architecture, Entrerayas and Once in a Lifetime: City-building after Disaster in Christchurch. CONFERENCES AND INTERVIEWS
Architects New Role URBAN NEXT / ACTAR / BARCELONA Ideas for the City. TEDx / VENEZUELA Participatory Citizenship / LIGA / D.F / MEXICO Territory Reengineering / ESCOLA DE CIDADE / SAN PAOLO / BRASIL
EXHIBITIONS ahaiek@labprofab.com
Multiprogram Ship / Is Architecture working for you? / EME3 Paperwork / LIGA / D.F / MEXICO Intersticial Park / International Award for Public Art 2013 / China - 1st Award for Public Art Backstage Architecture / Venezia - Italy / 2012 Bienal de Quito BAQ 2010 / Ecuador - Mencion Honorifica Habitad Social y Desarrollo Latin Pratt Breaking Borders: New Latin American Arch 2001 / USA The public school / Beta-Local / Pto. Rico
INDEPENDENT PUBLICATIONS:
Second Life Pavilion_T.FAB.USB 02_2013 Rethinking Modularity in Modern Skins _T.FAB.USB 01_2010 A Social Factory: Integration Protocols _ APPLIED SCIENCE ARTS
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CULTURAL MICRO-ECONOMIES AND CULTURAL CAPITAL
Understanding diversity is one of the keys to acquiring, producing and transferring new knowledge. It is through diverse societies, ecologies and manifestations that contemporary culture finds its greatest splendor. New lines of exploration and experimentation in citizen practice can mature if, and only if, they are derived in open, flexible, adaptable and upgradable systems. The production of diverse new knowledge and values that counteract the shortcomings of the dominant systems of capital is the principle tactic for emergent practices, engaging in urban activation and regeneration. Many of these practices have developed financial models based on horizontal micro-economies, which are capable of treating participants equally, and operate with a system of exchange based on common benefits. They can be evaluated by considering a developmental balance rather than models that emphasise excessive enrichment. This doesn’t mean they oppose the forces of capital, but rather that these diverse practices reorganize protocols to favor collective demands, which tend to prioritize infrastructural and operational needs. It is through the street, the building and urban fabric that these new economic modes can progressively transform into scaffolding for collective learning. At best these new models don’t operate as objects and systems of economic value, but as a cooperative construction that reveals its processes, like an open book; ready to be consulted and to instigate new relational experiences. From this perspective, architecture, urbanism and design can serve purely and simply as a foundation for a collective and participatory democracy in a city in constant consultation and permanent evolution.
SELF MANAGEMENT PROTOCOLS: CROSS INTELLIGENCE AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFERENCE To consolidate self-management systems with social, cultural and
Derived from the understanding of these pathologies and new urban philosophy which understands the participatory protocols, collective energy and popular power as new ways to construct the city not only from the material perspective but through the social network. The research its focused on three basic points, centring their aim into amalgamate different social entities to engage community manifestation nets and to establish new crossed strategies based on shared intelligences.
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environmental development
Self-management systems will initiate concretizing the events through the formation of a covering: recovery, relocation, reorganization or rehabilitation of affected areas and its reprogrammation. Furthermore, Architecture, Landscapes and Objects will serve as a support of this chain of events; the city and its people will no more wait for the opinion of intellectuals and specialists, the urban land will have an autonomous management system.
To promote an urban policy with the involvement of the people Contemporary emergency cities arWe no longer a problem to be treated just by experts; it is now a public concern that involves negotiation, agreements and collective understanding; simultaneously with the agitation, the claim and the confrontation of ideas. Consequently, these ideas can evolve into a new urban development policy. The emergent and transitory, the causal, the instantaneous and the obsolescent are now tragedies, but also the keys to the redefinition of contemporary urbanism.
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To develop strategies to work on the conflict and absorb the disaster Through urban phenomena like integration, mutations and hybridization the city evolves incorporating survival strategies based on specific responses to the needs of the people. Nearest to chaos than to stability to produce possible resolutions to the problems amalgamate the efforts and reprogram territorial logistics in these unstable situations.
An Artifact in between design and architecture installed in complex situations. Making with small pieces that can transform big spaces.
A ground that is a support for cultural and sports activities. It’s an Operative Surface intervention between social effervescence, networked governability and arts. A spontaneous organization.
Artefacts that give back civic rights. Objects that generate a system of public space collectively managed.
An Artifact in between design antd architecture installed in complex situations. Making with small pieces that can transform big spaces.
MULTI PROGRAM SHIP S P O R T
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CARACAS / VENEZUELA / 2007_2015 on going project Self iniciated and self sufficient compact multicomplex promoted by the community with the support of the local government, combines autonomous programs and facilities
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MULTIPORPUSE UNIT
REPROGRAMMED OBSOLESCENCE COMMUNITY OPEN CLASSROOM
CARACAS / VENEZUELA / 2011_2015 on going project Self iniciated cultural hub and community multiporpuse room sopported by local goverment
A ground that is a support for cultural and sports activities. It’s an Operative Surface intervention between social effervescence, networked governability and arts. A spontaneous organization.
INTERSTICIAL PARK
TERRITORY OF COLECTIVITY AND ARTISTIC PRODUCTION
CARACAS / VENEZUELA / 2005_2015 on going project A social SELF-SUFFICIENT enviroment with participatory protocols and self-manage community organization
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BOTANIC SQUARE U
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CARACAS / VENEZUELA / 2007_ 2015 on going project Reprogramation of the urban street trough the replication of constructive components providing the city with public space
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INDUSTRIAL PARK S O C I O P R O D U C T I V E
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CARACAS / VENEZUELA BARQUISIMETO / VENEZUELA / 2015 on going project Socioproductive cultural deveplopment center promoted by the state goverment managed through colective and participatory protocols with the local community
NON PAVILION TOKYO / JAPAN 2013
The project was ejecuted along with 5 emerging japanese artists. The Non Pavilion is the product of a derived technologies workshop, led by the invited artist as part of the program promoted by the Ministry of Culture and impulsed by Tokyo Geidai. The pavilion explores the merging of the arts, design and architecture establishing handcrafted techniques and traditional japanese constructive techniques of contemporary fabrication. With the involvement of conceptual artists and wood, metal, glass and stone crafters; the intervention develops components that move from aestheticism to functionalism. Operated as grounds, furniture and covers. The pavilion takes part on the installations of the Gedai Campus and it is also a space open for graduate students to experiment. The pavilion undraws its limits turning them into thresholds that explore more the areas of ambiance and environment than space. This atmospheric condition is achieved blurring the basic spatial building elements; soils, roofs; and transforming them into operative systems. Walls disappear announcing the death of the box as an exposition space and lets art unleash along the components in a dynamic way.The pavilion does not aspire to estatize the installations or artistic interventions, serving just as a support but as a joint effort to explore said atmospheric condition, where there are no disciplinary limits. The fabrication techniques applied, derive from the traditional japanese constructive system Itakura, developing an intermediate technique that updates the methods, materials, tools; and through hybrid digital fabrication protocoles and hand assembling, it finds a technology that moves through time, shifting through traditions, knowledge, local culture, and the advances on Japanese cultural engineering.
EARTH LANDER
BELO HORIZONTE / BRASIL 2014
Under the irony of technological development in the construction industry, Earth Lander its a compact, repeatable, stackable and repicable module which questions the logics of the global economy based on the international market of goods, imports of foreign and decontextualized materials and the tools of packaging. The Project begins as an installation and then becomes a piece of intervention when it leaves the expositive spaces of JACA center to be part of a campaing to formalize occupationd and to reclaim land rights in areas of Belo Horizonte. This is when the piece changes its name and transforms into WrapHome using diverse materials from the packaging industry: plastics, bubble wrap, fabrics and wood palettes from the marble industry. The WrapHome then has the ironic stamp of being produced in different countries with the paradox of being built without any cost. The Project was executed upon 3 main bases: act as an occupant, usage of selfmanage and selflocated materials, gradual access to tools to test its repercussion on the systems and construction protocols for it to be produced without sofisticated plannimetric support, only with a pencil, paper and mathematics for the economy of resources. It takes collaboration of voluntier students from UFMG in the phases of dismantling and material categorization and it was elaborated with the help of the workshop of the Art and Technology center in charge of Matheus Mezquita. Some of the estimated budget of the project was used to equip the workshop which dictates educational programs to the local communities. The critic also tries to formulate other protocols of relationship between the artist, the gallery, the museum and the street installations rethinking the formats of artistic deveplopment and the true part of Art in the society.
PAPERWORK
MEXICO DF / MEXICO 2014
From a critical eye upon everyday practices of architecture and construction. Here, it is the bureaucratic processes, regulations, paperwork, permits and the arsenal of copies generated through this administrative window that become the focus of investigation for the installation. The reconstruction of the gallery using complex paper surfaces serves to denounce the hypocrisy and opportunism of “greenwashing,” the wastage of paper and the legislative logic that simply converts a raw material into a “dead” archive. The geometries of calculator paper that wrap the space in a matrix of folds display a professional practice driven above all by the rationale of billing, payment and finances. The paper patterns are stretched between wooden frames and activated by the lighting and ventilation, which is controlled by interactive sensors. These are manufacturing tests, experiments and prototypes where local knowledge, craftwork and traditional assemblages are linked with automatization, interactive systems and digital design processes. In this way, Haiek relates local skills with the global ecosystem, combining obsolete resources with applied technology. The installation subverts the universe of the professional architect and transforms its everyday components—rolls of calculator paper, binder clips, paperclips or computer fans—into tools for poetry, criticism and resistance.
POP UP URBANISM
CHRISTCHURCH / NEW ZEALAND 2014
The aim is to create a complex object with the ability to be reprogrammed according to citizens consensus, a building in constant consultation, and by repeating this kind of infrastructure in the existing voids generating a system of public space collectively managed, conforming transitional and contingency action plans for territorial reorganization. Identifying and reforming the usage dynamics of contemporary cities induced by such extreme situations. It includes mutations, hybrids, and other adaptation processes as occupational strategies that will develop displacement patterns, mobility and social behavior. It will center upon proposing programmatic and operative mechanisms that enable the reactivation of segments, landscapes, and urban infrastructures, and counteract deterioration and degeneration of metropolitan territories. The project is build on a 5 years plan based on instant actions, through public devices deployed in the city to activate the voids left by the catastrophe, this configures the 1st phase of the plan; 2nd phase consist on he reorganization of these devices into HUBS, infrastructure; which will conform cooperative working nets of permanent consultation, reflecting the demands of a post catastrophe society. The 3rd phase consist on the evolution of these HUBS generating a proposal for a new urban cartography for the democratization of the urban soil. This conception of an urban plan establish and alternative for the cultural activities and production of formative pedagogies which provide the active life of every city and implements new protocols of citizen participation.
SECOND LIFE PAVILION
SIMON BOLIVAR UNIVERSITY / CARACAS 2010
In the last few years, an imbalance in the market has increased, and the desynchronization between demand and offer of these operational materials and components in the industry, which ends in unstable manufacturing processes in terms of diversity, time and financial planning. The object of all Smart Manufacturing technic or system is focused in its capacity to produce pieces of different levels of complexity and industrialized scale. Meaning, in a serial and systematized way. Traditional systems work with limits like pierced systems; a logic based in wet murals, armed mainly by heavy and massive components that must be pierced later to establish a interior-exterior relation. These inoperative and immovable limits, carry incapacity to solve the conjunction between technical systems and the enclosure line, being regularly demolished to find failures or to do technical or material related updates. The tendency to the versatility of the current constructive systems is clear, which reappear in substitution of the constructed mass. Walls made from twinned elements are now displaced by multi-layered operative skins, that manage to conjugate the enclosure, technical systems and structural elements The proposal goes through project methodologies and fabrication from a thorough reexamination, reformulation and reprogramming of constitutive elements (structure, skin, enclosure, technical systems); exploring in the digital field and the industry, techniques, mechanisms, instruments, tools, procedures and operations that the production world brings to the design disciplines (architectural, industrial graphic and multimedia). To reach this in the manufacturing workshop, students must develop a constructive component as an operational gene in the configuration of an Architectonic object. The workshop begun through reformulation and reprogramming of the traditional constitutive elements (structure, skin, enclosure, technical and structural systems), which were re-thought from the design of a self-replicating cellular unit. These theme territories are the context on which a set of project operations are displayed, instrumented and conceptualized to generate versatile architectonic configurations, assembled from the constructive components fabrication.
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REPLICANT UNITS
SIMON BOLIVAR UNIVERSITY / CARACAS 2014
Architecture and industrial design are professional practices that imply to work over matter. This commitment with the material world is intrinsic to its constructive mean. The emergence of new systematic production materials and machinery, motivates substantial transformations in constructive processes; however buildings are dressed with a wide range of options, and in many of cases, skin is subordinated to market’s offers in construction components. In the last few years, an imbalance in the market has increased, and the desynchronization between demand and offer of these operational materials and components in the industry, which ends in unstable manufacturing processes in terms of diversity, time and financial planning. These days, most of the manufacturing industry is assisted by quick prototyping machinery that minimizes human incidents and injects more precision, efficiency and performance to the productivity, however, not being yet completely available in a local context. This makes the manufacturing methods difficult, but brings experimentality, resistance and subjectivity to analogue or craft processes. Merging manufacture and mechanization advanced techniques with a deep approach of craft knowledge and the assembly process, developed models accomplish to bond the production industry with the construction industry, confronting professional practice as a construction innovation action. These polls or analysis in the core of the material industry and the constructive components market has progressively identified an applied research ground, that for a decade now is being explored by the laboratory through fabrication workshops as an alternative to the Latin-American problem. The last two experimental exercises done in the USB’s vertical workshops have had as north the research of constructive components, introducing fabrication processes to students, having a closer look to an academic exercise on the gene that configures the building and that allows its assemble.
ORIgINal MIx aNalySIS With the assessment of the Manufacture Processes Laboratory “E� Technician, Keysler Aponte, compression mechanical resistance trials were made. We took a sample from the piece, cut it in cubes with a diamond point cutter, and calculated the area of each surface. Once we obtained these areas, each cube was compressed, to know the highest charge, the necessary for it to break.
When working out the average compression resistance of the 4 samples, we obtain an approximate average figure of compression resistance, developed in the original mix. Average: P.1 + P.2 + P.3 +P.4 4 Average: 34,5675 N/mm2. Lastly, the original piece was observed under the microscope, where we took different close up samples. In this samples we could notice a cement matrix where there were silica grains, as well as undefined particles, possible being different from the translucent ones, which are minerals that pollute the sand. We also observed that the average size of the components was closer to 1mm.
The reason we needed 4 samples us that the mix doesn’t have the same resistance properties in all its setting, which means that there can be cubic meters that have more sand, or more cement, highlighting the properties of each material y varying its resistance in different sectors. Before the piece collapses, it is fractured once or twice, depending on the properties of the mix. Up next, the charts from each sample of the original piece A: Surface area obtained in the laboratory. B: Force R: Compression resistance R: P/A
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PIeCe’S MIx TeSTINg
Test 1: Washed sand (sifted under 1mm of thickness) + gray cement. 80% sand + 20% cement with a 1 alpha. Time taking off the formwork: 3 hours. Results: A mix with a good fluidity and easy setting that generated a not so homogeneous piece with some porosity in the finish, it didn’t break during the formwork and it dried completely. Test 2: Marble dust + gray cement + white cement + yellow oxide. 70% dust + 30% cement, in which 50% was gray and 50% was white. Alpha= 0.75 Time taking off the formwork: 2 hours. Result: a mixture with a low fluidity that had to be compacted when set and generated a piece that broke, ending up in dust.
Test 3: Marble dust + White cement + wellow oxide. 50% dust + 50% cement with an alpha of 1 + 10% (of the amount of dust) of oxide. Time taking off the formwork: 3 hours.
Test 5: Silica sand + gray cement. 55% sand, 45% cement, alpha= 0.6. Result: A mix with good fluidity for the setting that can be taken out of the formwork in 3 hours. It generated a piece that didn’t break while taken out of the formwork, but it had some little holes due to a bad vibration. However, the finish was not very porous and very appropriated for the final piece. Test 6: 80% sand + 20% white cement with an alpha of 0.6 + 2% of lemon yellow oxide. Result: A mix with very little fluidity where is noticeable that there is a lack of cement to join the sand grains and that had a highly porous finish and a very different color from the piece.
Test 7: 65% sand + 35% cement, with an alpha= 0.6 + 2% of brick dust + 2& of lemon wellow oxide + 2% of dark yellow oxide.
Result: a mixture with a low fluidity that had to be compacted when set and generated a piece that broke, ending up mostly in dust.
Result: A mix with more fluidity, more than needed, due to the high water content, presenting, however, color and finish similar to the piece.
Test 4: Maracay sand + gray cement. 50% Maracay sand, 59% cement, alpha= 1.
Test 8: 65% sand + 35% cement, with an alfa of 0.5 + 3% clay dust + 2% of lemon yellow oxide.
Result: A fluid mix, easy to set, but that it took longer to be taken out of the formwork. It generated a very thin piece, with borders that broke easily, due to having a sand grain lower than 0.5mm, which makes the Maracay sand to be out of the piece’s materials list.
Result: A mix with the ideal fluidity to do a setting and to take out of the formwork in 3 hours; the final finish is similar to the piece, but the color is not similar.
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students works / LAUBURU / Ainara Arambarri
students works / CONICAL WAVES / Andrea Arenas
students works / COLLAPSIBLE FINS / Liliana Amundarain
students works / TENSEGRITY / Yabeth Bautista
Only partial conclusions It is clear that there are not absolute truths regarding urbanism; there is not a long-lastly and unique theory to solve the problems given the changing state of the system. In addition, the recurrent transformations will not allow the city to have any rules, regulations and legislation; in this way, the city would have to work to put in evidence its social demands. What is true is that its inhabitants have the power in their hands, and they will determine their lifestyle and living conditions. According to our plans, the public management will be obliged to have interaction mechanisms with the people, and to give a quick response to their demands; there will progressively join a higher number of fields of study and disciplines to build the city as a collective project; the multi-hand drawn territory will be configured and disfigured, misconfigured and reconfigured; the set of events will conform instant urbanism and emerging scenarios in transition periods. Moreover, the reprogramming of urban lands, and the reactivation of territories will prepare the system to future occupy vacant lands, areas, spaces or environments that will be part of the choreography logistics to amplify the place. Besides, we will have a critical an analytical thinking of the environment and of the reprogramming of the lands. The city will not cease to be a provocative text and pretext for inquiry: if it would not lead to disorder, it would lead to the agitation; and finally, at least the street is still ours.