In contemporary Latin America, a new generation of architects is facing the challenging mission of re-tying connections between architecture and its social mandate.
Modern utopias may have undoubtedly left their mark across the 20th Century, mostly through massive social housing operations, but this is just a part of a multilayered history, characterized in its last phases by the worsening of social exclusion and the expansion of favelas, where an increasingly large deprived community sets its strategies for survival. The general social background remains a system born on métissages and successively ravaged by colonialisms and dictatorships enhancing an infamous imbalance between metropolises and a mass of less and less independent local communities.
On its tenth anniversary, the CA’ ASI project, created by Architecture Studio, has launched an international competition for young architects from Latin America, to emphasize the vital power of this scene, and the relevance of the response given by this scene to such a major mission.
A scientific committee has selected — out of 201 projects from 18 countries — 3 winners ex aequo and 15 honorable mentions, successively shown in Venice as a side event of las 16th Architecture Biennale.
The exhibition is currently on show in Bordeaux at Arc en Rêve Centre d'architecture.
The selection includes public buildings, housing with different vocations, services, programs combining experiments in space and material solutions. Positive signals comes out of the landscape outlined: a drive for research, favoring uniqueness and character in living solutions, as well as a relationship between shape and program as a sign of social impact from spatial solutions, of the power of everyday experience to shape the space, without leaving it to naïve narratives of spontaneous construction.
For this reason, the committee has identified 10 thematic paths to explore the competition proposals, as well as a possible debate on an evolving architecture in Latin America: Generosity; Empowerment; Sweetness of severity; House and territory; Re-enhancement; the Commons; Co-inhabiting; Material/Immaterial; Responses to emergency.
- Exhibition:
- Young Architects in Latin America — la nouvelle architecture en Amérique latine
- Curated by:
- Architecture-Studio; adattamento per Arc en rêve: Michel Jacques, Eric Dordan, Cyrille Brisou
- Venue:
- Arc en rêve Centre d'architecture
- Address:
- Entrepôt, 7 Rue Ferrere, 33000 Bordeaux
- Opening dates:
- until February 17, 2019