Project entry 2020 for Latin America
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Creative Space in Mexico
The art village represents a new community space where the inhabitants of Canalejas can meet, work, learn and create art in a safe and creative environment. The architecture and the landscape make the place an attractive space for the young locals, creating a synergy between the vernacular architecture reinterpreted in a contemporary way with the natural landscaped environment, and the artistic work.
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Creative Space in Mexico
Different elements accompany the transitions between the workshops and the open garden spaces. Leisure, transition, pause and meeting spaces generate the possibility of interaction between the members of the Canalejas community, enabling the creation of new quality productive relationships. The search for a safe space is also reflected in the activities that are carried out day by day, for which the architecture serves as the background scenario while allowing the possibility of learning from it.
Last updated: November 13, 2021 Mexico City, Mexico
Opportunities - Empowerment tools for the local youth
This is not an architectural project - but an educational one. The creation of spaces where kids can grow in contact with art and creation remains fundamental for the NGO behind the project. Canalejas stands in the center of a municipality that has lost its youth due to migration and drug trafficking and has lost its possibility to be sustained by a magnificent handcraft tradition (stone sculpture). Providing diffusion of their artistic creations could be a way to recover through local, ancient knowledge. This artistic and educational congregation site arises from the sum of efforts of both architects and the foundation who owns the land. The program was not pre-conceived but was the conclusion of a territorial approach focused on looking at how to help and positively impact the region as a whole.
Material Matters - Design communicates thinking
Vernacular architecture should not be forced to look like vernacular. While keeping all the positive traits of the traditional constructions and recognizing the material and spatial strategies that are born from the site, contemporary rural architecture has the fundamental task to take the spatial narrative into another plateau - One in which space can communicate novel alternatives and more suitable futures for the people that experience these spaces - The use of traditional materials and construction methods and systems allows circular economies and can function as the recognizable constituent parts of new living conditions. The existing and new vegetation areas are one of the main material components for the blurring and integration of the vernacular into the rural.
Time - It takes time for architecture to become “real"
An ambitious project like this has to incorporate time necessarily. The general proposal considers steps that respond to the foundation's capacity to gather the financial resources and the operational costs but, more importantly, the chance to test, gradually, the implementation of both architecture and the program of spaces that allow maximum flexibility in order to achieve transformation and growth. The proposal explores time in operational terms: the privilege of any resource should be always acknowledged through intelligent strategies that focus on the longevity and self-sufficiency of the built environment. Lasting structures that are thought for intensive and communal uses minimize the negative impact of construction while maximizing the positive benefits of the architecture.