STAND GROUND: The manifesto on how to create places by Rozana Montiel at the Biennale Architettura di Venezia 2018

Description of project by Rozana Montiel Estudio de Arquitectura

MANIFIESTO

To CREATE PLACES you have to:

1. Search content in context. Before starting the design, the resources, specific potential, and assets of a community, as well as the essential needs of a site, should be thoroughly investigated. Architectural solutions capable of generating new social situations transform a place into a place. Design strategies that involve people, not as consumers of the space, but as creators of the city, return citizens to the city. You have to contract locally, stock up regionally; work with the community, not just for her.

2. Convert barriers into horizons. A permeable membrane that generates horizontality and parity between the private and public space fosters social interaction and exchange. People will feel more secure and at home in places of open communication than in spaces of fears. You work with people to help them express their expectations, needs and aspirations.

3. Transform the perception of space. The assets and skills of a community should be used and combined with professional specialization to achieve innovative results. Interventions in the public domain designed to engage users with space in a creative way and free of preconceived ideas reveal resources and restore a sense of community to disjointed social groups. Do not be afraid to move from ephemeral to permanent strategies to prototype solutions.

4. Approach the landscape as if it were the program. The abandoned, underused or disused urban space, when approached as topography, reveals its natural potential. The reappropriation of urban spaces without recognition can transform them into places of resilience, inclusive and rich in diversity of functions. By recycling and resignifying the existing infrastructure, an urban scar or a hostile edge of the landscape is transformed into an attractive horizon.

5. Re-signify the materials. Textures and atmospheres are essential to create a sense of place. The readings of vernacular or industrial materials that are sensitive to the notions of habitability through patterns, rhythms, colors, surfaces and shapes, are an invitation not only to look closer but to approach. Printing new meaning to the expression "brick and cement" means providing texture to life. Make the most of each material.

6. Work with temporality. The spatial design that considers the aging of construction materials, the transformation of user needs over time, and that accommodates the use of space by different segments of the population throughout the day, and the hazardous event It allows people to live in a resilient present.

7. Believe in beauty as a basic right. The elegant design provides dignity. Regardless of budgetary constraints, beauty is attainable through a virtuous allocation of resources. Smart solutions are intrinsic to the program. Aesthetic decisions can change people's lives. We must approach the design of each space with the same respect we have for the venerated places.

STAND GROUND

The intervention transforms the wall into a floor, thus connecting the exterior with the interior and converting the barriers into horizons.

We liberate space through a change of perception: the wall is resignified as a connective infrastructure. The barriers, transmuted into a horizontal structure, allow horizons.

A 1: 1 reproduction of the Venetian brick wall of the exhibition space, paves the floor of the Arsenale to create a new edge. By removing the wall, the public space is integrated into the private sphere.

The installation is a symbolic gesture that is implemented to turn a barrier into an experience of common ground. Walls are not flexible barriers, but if they establish their limits under principles of equity and resilience, they base the way to draw limits in community.

To emphasize the symbolic absence of a vertical dividing structure, a real-time view of the Venice Canal and the exterior street is projected on a screen placed in front of the rear wall of the exhibition space: putting the exterior inside the space of the Arsenale; visitors get involved with a different understanding of space through the fictional, poetic and oneiric.

The installation is complemented with tables that exhibit in the assemblies of curio cabinets the study design process, its methodology and research and the interventions of the public space in housing units related to the installation.

The UH book: Common Spaces in Residential Units of Rozana Montiel Architecture Study published by Arquine (Mexico City, 2018) compiles the research and the three public space recovery projects: Comun Unity, Cancha and Fresnillo, which are presented in the Display tables and can be consulted at the Stirling Book Pavilion.