LIGA, espacio para arquitectura

OPAQUE SOUND

TEXT LIGA 09:

'Behind the wooden curtain' by Patricio Mardones

This is a consequence of the precarious agrarian economies over which the nation was built in the 19th century –those that saved sticks and timber to make stables, henhouses and farms– and it is most certainly linked to the constant threat of earthquakes. The deeply rooted appraisal for solidity produced a consistent development of construction models where weight communicates the idea of both permanence and endurance. In time, stone fronts and earthy walls naturally turned into brick and reinforced concrete.

In a way, just like the rocky façades of the modest manors of the Chilean colony, which were merely masks hiding a system of adobe walls (it was impossible to afford a full body of stone), the walls and concrete slabs displayed today throughout the Internet also mask a reality supported by sticks, pieces of wire and planks of wood. The heavy existence of the concrete is possible because of the thick structural frame, which in modernity has almost always been intricately built in wood.

Wooden formworks, which in Chile we call moldajes –since they are made to mold something that has not yet been shaped– have two things in common with industrial reticulated structures: precision and low-cost. Like them, these are also subjected to the significant efforts that its apparent fragility tries to escape. However, unlike them, their existence is by definition brief and determined by the tension between the rock waiting to set and the wood that will support it only until the execution is finished.

This moldaje has the same characteristics as a quickly drawn sketch. Even during the construction process, we are already thinking about how it will be taken down, piece by piece. It is merely the anticipation of a different solidness, of another materiality. It is not purist, but appropriate; it can endure the violence of construction and execution, as well as its patches, wedges, posts and imperfections. Also, it is not necessarily systematic, like scaffolding, nor does it aspire to be professional. Moldaje lives within the field of old trades and understands how it should adapt to the circumstances in each case.

Behind the curtains, this world of actual construction backrooms and drop scenes nourishes Eduardo Castillo's work. Most of the time, he builds using the same resources that skilled craftsmen use to make formworks. It is reminiscent of the austere corrals, sheds and henhouses of South America, and at the same time of a bridge's or a silo's structure –exact and tight–, both light and prepared to face the weight of life and the adjustments that may come over the years. A weight perhaps more demanding than that of the rock that would constitute the desired "material architecture", so longed for in every Chilean corner.

Eduardo Castillo

Born in 1972 in Chile, he is formed as a carpenter by his father, before becoming an architect. He studied architecture at the Universidad Católica de Chile, where he graduated in  1996 and obtained his title in 2000. He realized his PHD in Architecture and Urban Studies in 2005.

His works have been published and exposed in Germany, China, Spain, England, Italy, Japan and Mexico, amongst others. He widely participated in events and international conferences organized by Universities and Architectural Leagues. He is actually working together with the architect Smiljan Radic, and he is teaching a studio on Construction Technology at the Architectural School of the University of Talca.

www.arqecastillo.blogspot.mx

Luis Aldrete is an architect from Guadalajara, Jalisco, with a degree in architecture from the ITESO and a degree in advanced studies of the Universidad Politecnica de Cataluña. He currently teaches at the ITESO, where he has established his architectural practice as a space of reflection on spatial atmospheres, urban transformations, experiments with materials, and artisanal production methods. His work has been presented in Mexico, Peru, Hungary, and Spain, and is published in national and international magazines.

www.luisaldrete.com

PERMEABILITY

Permeability is closely linked to plan:b's recent (January 2013) publication, a book by the same name. The exhibit aims to expand on the book's content by focusing its three main themes, Angles, Phenomena and Permeable Projects. Through the use of purpose-recorded audiovisual material, the installation is therefore an autonomous yet complementary record of their investigation on the subject.

Plan:b asserts that permeability, in addition to being a material, social and organic quality, becomes a condition that allows for an architecture of relationships, an architecture that is subject to influence, brought to accords and delays, an architecture that is inserted in the flux of interactions within our very concrete and daily reality.

In this particular case, the record of luminous and sonic phenomena projected through reflective filters suggests that architecture's consistency emerges through an uneven encounter between the faintest fluxes and the heavy movement of matter. Architecture is then permeability itself.

TEXT LIGA 08

'The art of permeability' by Uriel Fogué

plan:b is an architectural office that defines the work through a practice in which equal status is given to dialogue, drawing, travel, layout, construction, etc. and which are handled continuously, professional or academic situations, publication of books, college classes or construction of buildings. Plan: b trust in working collaborative, to make of it a statement on the architecture and understands the practice and the architectural project as open situations, interim agreements, not imposed phenomena embedded in eco-social networks, either local or worldwide.

Since 2000 to 2005, this working group was led by architects Felipe Mesa and Alejandro Bernal, from 2006 until 2010 was led by Felipe Mesa, and is currently led by Felipe Mesa in partnership with Federico Mesa. Plan:b's work is generated primarily through participation in architectural competitions, and collaborating with other professionals in those projects is constant and diverse. Over the years work has been shared with people like Miguel Mesa (Mesa Publishers), Juan David Diez (Taller Standard), Federico Mesa, Camilo Restrepo, Giancarlo Mazzanti, Felipe Uribe, Ana Elvira Velez, Izaskun Chinchilla, and Hernando Barragan Maria Jose Sanin.

www.planbarquitectura.com

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SPLIT SUBJECT:

The installation that the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo presents for the space of LIGA, reaches the materialization of the façade as a creation of an identity and cultural representation within the urban composition. The installation composes itself of mirrors and light boxes, where the modernist facade of an anonymous building in Mexico City becomes symbolically in the facade of LIGA´s space, establishing a game inside and outside through the reflection.

The modern architectural object established a standardized production method which aims towards neutrality. In Mexico, Modern Architecture became a vision of a future that was never accomplished. Its because of its incomplete state, Modern Architecture allows a new understanding of mexican identity.

In this proposal is suggested to review the symbolic potential within the apparent “neutrality” of Modern Architecture and acknowledge the facade as an threshold for exchange. Escobedo wants to show through her project,  how a rigid modern structure can provide the conditions for the appropriation, exchange and agency.

LIGA 06 - Text by Annie Ochmanek

SPLIT SUBJECT

“Language phraseology speech tongue lingo vernacular mother tongue king’s English dialect brogue patois idiom slang…” Robert Smithson piles these terms on top of each other in A Heap of Language (1966)—at once a literal accretion of words, a diagramming of their shape and material properties, and a depiction of the natural evolution of speech. Like a geological landform, Smithson seems to suggest, language itself grows via deposition and erosion, as it gets inhabited and personalized, transferred and translated over time.

This rendering of language as a site of cultural sedimentation came to mind when thinking about Frida Escobedo’s Split Subject project, along with Smithson’s conception of modernist Park Avenue high-rises as monuments to “evolution in reverse.” In the façade of a commercial building in Colonia Juárez, Frida discovered a strain of this narrative—one specific to Mexican national identity. Pressed between the building’s glass shell and the interior it encloses is a record of an unregulated development and accumulation at odds with the façade’s projected vacancy. The face of modern Mexican character, or what grew in the empty recess left by Modernism’s failure to deliver what it bespoke, is legible here. The logic of this structure has been populated with the disorder of reality—clarity is met with the scraps of necessity. Looming over the street like a hulking ship of Theseus, this building clearly has a story to unravel. It’s fitting, then, that Frida has treated its surface as a text to be closely read, or a stanza to be deconstructed. 

Frida has used the written word as an architectural directive before: For the pavilion in El Eco Museum, she approached the space like the spread of a blank page, using only cinder blocks as her structural alphabet: Literal concrete poetry. Whether creating an office space on the roof of a suburban home, erecting an elevated house over an ordinary hillside, or revitalizing a rundown tourist site in Caletilla Beach, Frida makes use of disuse and finds significance in the interstices of our lived environment. This seems to come from an equal attention to craft and to practicality, and an ability to compartmentalize needs and desires, all of which she builds into her designs. Frida’s winning model for an Affordable Housing competition was a unit that could be extended to create porch-like areas, or contracted to form an indoor living room, giving the residents the luxury of modification with the most basic of means. With minimal and modular constructions, Frida subtly creates room for leisure. The resourcefulness in her designs is essentially like that of a poem—lyrically efficient, elegantly spare, and carefully complex.

The windowpanes of Florencia 72, as shown in Frida’s photographs—some opened at oblique angles, some locked into the grid—act like two-way mirrors. Making up an exterior that reflects and deflects, they remind us that, as Frida notes, the formation of a collective, cultural self involves isolating our conceptions of the other: In order to self-identify, we self-differentiate. In their masked transparency, the building’s windows recall a work that Frida has referenced in past presentations—Marcel Broodthaers’ blocked-out “Un Coup de Dés.” With this simple gesture, Broodthaers isolated the graphic aspect of Mallarmé’s piece, literalizing its visual thesis and illustrating the concept therein: “Rien…n’aura eu lieu…que le lieu.” Here, in a similar act of elucidation, Frida has taken a pre-existing work and broken down its tiers of content, physically representing each one, word for word. If Florencia 72 seems to materialize a complex history, Frida advances this reification further. In so doing, she draws out a certain social legacy hidden in plain view, in order to take a detailed look at what has “taken place.”

Annie Ochmanek is an art critic, New York.

FRIDA ESCOBEDO

Frida Escobedo (1979) has a degree in architecture and urbanism from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.  Recently she finished her Master in Art, Design and the Public Domain at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2003 she founded with Alejandro Alarcón the studio ‘Perro Rojo’. Since 2006 she works as an independent architect. In 2004 she received the Scholarship for Young Creators in Mexico and in 2008 was a winner of the Young Architects Forum by the Architectural League in Nueva York. From 2007 to 2010 she was teaching at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. This year (2012) her work was represented in the Mexican Pavilion at the Biennale in Venice and at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, in San Francisco. Also this year she was invited to participate in a collective exhibition in Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York.

www.fridaescobedo.net

AN ENVIRONMENT:

For the exhibition at LIGA the Argentinian studio Adamo-Faiden focused on a recurrent design method in their work: the creation of interstitial spaces that mediate between two different conditions. These environments are directly presented at the gallery space, without mediations or representations, through a spatial installation with three video projectors and a smoke machine. Hence an atmosphere is created that puts forward the working methods, fantasies and ambitions of the studio, as fragments dissolved in space and combined into a volume of air, which we cannot call a void anymore. The air is charged with information, creating an unstable but specific environment related to their built work.

LIGA 05 - Text by Ciro Najle

UNTITLED

Proposing ‘an environment’ for the exhibition of a series of architectural works in a single space appears, at least, a contradiction of terms (an environment within an environment), if not a redundancy (an environment that is already an environment) or an openly rhetorical proposition (an environment that is reiterated as ‘an environment’). It is like painting white on (a) white (canvas), in this case ‘within’ the spatial canvas of the white box of an architectural gallery, precisely the condition in which the architecture of the cultural event transcends insofar as it represents the architecture of the material fact. Such proposal, as well as the larger project that it both embodies and reproduces, would seem, at first glance, to be embedded with a paradoxical will: that of producing a ´thing´ unassumed as such at the very moment of it being assumed as such, and using the place where it is being situated as if it where its material, and therefore getting confused with it. Moreover, this is not just ´some place´, but a particularly objectified space, charged with an active institutional will, and characterized by an extremely reduced size, to the extent that it is not completely clear whether it is in fact inhabitable. The space has a high but mediated exposure to the exterior, a corner of a busy avenue to which its disproportionate windows, objectified as well, serve as framework for the views as much as they condition them. And it is next to the open hall of an architecturally well-known building, in respect to which one of its three sides visually exposes it, only to make it appear hermetic.

In such a paradoxical, ambivalent context, and with the agenda of simultaneously constituting, replacing, emphasizing, and containing ´an environment´ as a premise, Sebastián Adamo and Marcelo Faiden propose in LIGA a project that rehearses a subtle but intensely distorted sense of the classical ideas of unity, identity, irreducibility, and singularity in architecture, ideas that manifest themselves here congested in the construction on an ´intense interiority´, which reveals itself as the ´inscrutable exposure´ of a pure exteriority to the outside. Pure exteriority, explicitly offered as a built atmosphere, and intense interiority, tacitly exclusive of any form of atmospheric intrusiveness. It is as if it were a capsule, not in the objectual meaning of the word, but in its double condition of being perceptible but impenetrable, or to be more accurate, an incubation space, a test tube, where any physical access of ´real´ human beings would turn out to be, if not something unwanted, at least something unusual, strange, or unthinkable. Or as if that environment had ended up being there after a series of failed tests, surviving the man himself, or as if it were a post-human record, a register of what long ago was known as architecture, now a foolish and blurred idea. To those who, decades ago, used to celebrate the death of architecture, and those who still do so, an architectural celebration of the death of mankind is here (perhaps melancholically) offered, a sample of an imprudent, improbable, diffuse, and yet still preserved memory of the idea of habitat.

´An environment´ unifies object and subject(s) into a specifically abstract subject of architecture, inert and post-human. ´An environment´ is an environment of the whatsoever, in the sense of the monumentalization of the idea of space as an entelechy. It is selected from a catalog of one single possibility. It is a whatever-singularity. ´An environment´ builds a form of emptiness and releases from it a sense of the architectural that is both figuratively indefinite and materially precise, a generic embodiment of the incorporeal. ´An environment´ makes of everything, space, objects, images, enclosure, ground, light, energy, machines, and technology, a diffuse and vague medium. It even attempts to do the same with the thought on its concept. ´An environment´ happens as a mental space characterized by the uncertainty of its own being, uncertainty that does not contain doubt. It is a space of indiscernibility, a region of undecidability and banal ubiquity. ´An environment´ is, obviously, an atmosphere, a constructed climate in the literal sense, and a manifest climax in the figurative sense. Allegory of a perpetual but variable state, its same variability, its relativity as a presence, makes it both absolute and extensive. Its formlessness exceeds the mere lack of shape and takes the form of an abstract form of affect. Is it not actually a manifesto on affect as a constructible fact? Its architecture (and that which it exhibits) dissolves at the same time as it manifests itself strictly as a material medium. It embraces vagueness and attempts to build it as an object-medium, an environment with an outline.

Precisely because of its ability to manifest itself hermetically, we find ourselves at the same time in front and virtually inside of an architecture that assumes itself as the medium of the contemporary void, as the spatiality of the ´whatever´, a disturbing ecosystem where culture has sublimated into vapor and yearns to become (once again) pure life, experience of the pure immediacy. The architectural work, tenuously exhibited inside is, just like these cryptic construction details, its obverse.

Ciro Najle, is Architect of the UBA FADU, MsAAD Columbia, Director GDB General Design Bureau, Visiting Professor Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.

ADAMO-FAIDEN:

Sebastián Adamo (1977) and Marcelo Faiden (1977) are architects, graduated from the Buenos Aires University’s School of Architecture, Design and urbanism (FADU-UBA) and are currently doctorating at School of Architecture of Barcelona. Since 2005 they are associated, simultaneously working as architects and professors. They have exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum of New York and at the Architecture Biennale of Venice. Their work has recently been published in a monograph book edited by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (ARQ editions) and awarded a gold medal at the XII International Architecture Biennale of Buenos Aires.

The exhibition of Adamo Faiden at LIGA will open its doors on May 24, 2012 and will be complemented with a text by Ciro Najle. On the 23rd of May Sebastián Adamo and Marcelo Faiden will give a lecture on their work and the installation developed for LIGA.

www.adamo-faiden.com.ar

ISOSTASY

Isostasy, project Carla Juaçaba presents for LIGA 04, is an installation consisting of magnets, golden guitar strings, marbles and brass profiles, which create a composition of elements referring to common syntactic schemes, attempting to obtain a balance similar to the one generated by the phenomena of isostasy (or hydrostatic equilibrium). Back in 1889, geologist Dutton named isostasy the ideal condition of gravitatory balance that regulates the heights of continents and the depth of oceans, according to the density of rocks. This means that depending on the material, such material will emerge over any surface that allows it to in proportion with its respective weight. In this case, the gravitational interplay of materials takes place in the void generated between the positive and negative poles of the magnets.

LIGA04 - Text by Pedro Duarte

THE WILL OF THINGS

What are these things doing here? They are not projects of others, but projects in and of themselves. They are not models themselves, but what is projected and what is made. They are things that, by means of their contrasts and affinities, look for a situation in which they themselves can be sustained as a whole. From this point of view, magnets are metonymic objects: the concept that states the procedure that organizes everything - attractions and repulsions, distances and proximities. It is in the composition of that rythm, using the musical sense of the term, that each element gets its position in space. For the eyes’ delight, things combine, achieve a balance, a very delicate balance, by which they can remain as they are.

Any minimal slip, and everything may come down. In art, in architecture, in thought. In life. It is always about finding that point where diversity holds itself and produces itself: the golden thread, the magnets, the bar, the marble. The fine, the coarse, the hard, the small. In interacting with each other, the differences, rather than cancelling themselves out, produce a new world that, in addition of being of signs, is, above all, things. Thus the colors - if they even exist – are discrete. Hence the absence of meaningful cultural objects. There are no doors or windows, chairs or tables, nor floors or pillars. There is barely things, in their nearly crude materiality, in an existance that, were it not for their arrangement, might be called inhuman.

Who supports whom in this sieve of unconspicuous materials? The question is not only physical, but poetic. Therefore, sustenance is never simply a matter of science, but of our whole existence, that places itself between earth and sky, seeking a home in these constructions we make, which at the same time, make us. Poetic constructions. The most intrinsic material properties are therefore patiently researched to discover, in themselves, their real potential, which should indicate what can and should be built, as well as what cannot and should not be. What gives, gives. What does not give, does not give, and is unadvisable to force into giving, for it is necessary to meet the things’ demand.

Things, while frustrating positivists claims, have their own will. They are "full of wills," as are the children of those parents who complain because they do not behave well. But every being is what it is, and wants what it wants. People or things. A poet father, rather than impose on his children and things what they should be, must discover what they want, and free himself from this desire so he can express himself in the real. With docility before matter, it states what form should prevail. That is, to create is to listen and not just to talk, it is to welcome and not only to project – better put, it is to speak after listening, to project through embrace, and finally to make out of knowledge.

In its Greek origin, the word "technique" relates not to doing, but to knowing, furthermore, to knowing-how. That is why both craftsmen and artists were called technicians. Both share a knowledge through which something can go from nothing into being. But such a passage is not arbitrary, that is, it is not hostage to  man’s will and his plans. When an object of use or a piece of art is produced, something emerges out of the absence of nothing to the presence of being; however, this operation produced by man has Nature as its guiding example, since it goes, at any time, through such passage, making the world, at every moment, emerge in front of us, around us and in us.

It is this very world, in one of its many facets that we have here, with its balance, its voids and its proportions placed in a relationship of extreme accuracy to establish a space that is a place, not a priori, but built for this presence which, in architectural vocabulary is known as tectonics. That spatial composition, endowed with geometric elegance which emphasizes the interplay between weight and lightness, is still dictated by the magnetic and gravitational forces in action, that explore, beyond the readily visible relationships between things, the invisible relationships that also determine them.

Here we have  a possible  and beautiful world  because things’ wills have been tended to. It is a poetry in which the artist must be a craftsman, or, as was once said, in which the architect is also an engineer. One can not exist without the other. Because creation is never solely of man. It is half his and half Nature’s. It is up to man to discover and release, through technique, what a matter yields. It is in man to dream, but a dream of Nature that he dreams himself in.

Pedro Duarte is Associate Professor of Philosophy UniRio.

CARLA JUACABA: (no translation available)

Carla Juaçaba (Río de Janeiro, Brasil) es licenciada en Arquitectura y Urbanismo por la Universidad de Santa Úrsula (1999), Brasil. En el 2002 obtuvo Mención de Honor por la IAB-RJ Instituto de Arquitectos de Brasil; el primer premio CSN en Construcción Civil en el 2000. Actualmente trabaja como arquitecta independiente desarrollando proyectos residenciales y escenografía para exposiciones. Es también profesora de la de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Río de Janeiro.

PROJECTS:

Exposición Panorama de la Arquitectura Contemporánea Brasileña SAC – Staedelschule Architecture Class, Frankfurt, Alemania 2010; Construir, Habitar, Pensar en el Institut Valencià de Arte Moderno, España 2008; MDC Exposición Digital de arquitectura brasileña (mínimo denominador Comum), 2006; Panorama Emergente Iberoamericano – Fundación COAM, Madrid, España 2006; Panorama Emergente Iberoamericano – VI Bienal de Arquitectura de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil 2005; Encore moderne? Architecture Brésilienne en IFA Institut Français d’architecture, París, Francia 2006; Panorama de la Arquitectura Brasileña, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia 2004; IV Bienal Iberoamericana, Panorama Emergente, Colegio de arquitectos del Perú, Lima, Perú 2004. / Proyectos residenciales: Casa Río Bonito, 2001; Casa Mínima, 2008; Casa Varanda, 2007; Casa Atelier, 2011.

www.carlajuacaba.com

ADDITION SUBTRACTION

Addition Subtraction is a display about the work of Jorge Ambrosi, synthesized in five of his latest projects in Mexico City. The exhibition consists of 3 main pieces, where the representation of space is abstractly set through stacked pine planks, that exalt the vain-solid and interior-exterior relations. Projects: Cuernavaca 89 - Condesa, 2004 / Alfonso Reyes 200 - Condesa, 2011 / Reynosa 69 - Roma, 2009 / Casa Búhos- Las Águilas, 2010 / Campeche 415- Condesa, 2010

LIGA 03 - text by Humberto Ricalde

“Nothing that is not clearly built should be edified.” [1]

Mies stated that the idea of ​​an essential edification arose from the work of Hendrik P. Berlage and that whoever exercises the craft of architecture must assume it as fundamental; because although talking about construction is easy, it is not easy to stick to its principles. Edification as an intellectual construct that conceptually bases the primitive expression of all architecture in its materiality and provides a careful distance from the arbitrary imagination of architectural form. Therefore construction, structure, edified architecture; the art of constructing and construction as an art. Construction as primary action that fills up the craft of an architect with strength and meaning. The work of Jorge Ambrosi anchors its expressivity to a meditated edification, where structure and materials, rigorously selected, interact by giving it a balanced tectonic presence. Their habitable scopes speak with their explicit constructive processes that load them with resonances by leaving on them the imprint of a virtual carving, by which they were collected within the tectonic solid that contains them. Concretes of lignant evocative matrices,  visible masonry, white leveled finishes, quarries, marbles, sturdy wood grains in contrast to the transparency of glass or liquid surfaces in spaces that invite us to stay clothed in their lightness, darkness, shadows and multiple reflections conjugated in serene and intimate atmospheres. Not forgetting the forcefulness of these buildings in their place of location as essential tectonic bodies that underline with their dense materiality, even in their vitreous or ligneous condition, the changing atmosphere in which they contemplate undisturbed the passing of time. Let us challenge the architect and our imagination, wonder how will time pass them by, how will these gravid constructs will grow old by the weight of their concretes, glasses, porphyries, polished metals and hard woods.

[1] Mies van der Rohe interview by Peter Carter, 1916.

Architect Humberto Ricalde, Professor of the Max Cetto Workshop at the Faculty of Architecture Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM)

JORGE AMBROSI:

The work of Jorge Ambrosi finds its presence in the panorama of contemporary Latin American architecture in a quiet and direct way. The emphasis on tectonics, materialization and the deep interest in how things are build, make his projects look like a wonderful game of mechanics in which each piece finds its place and nothing seems to be missing or out of place: an architectural grammar in which building blocks are joined with the logic and precision of mechanical engineering.

The seriousness with which he approaches his practice, the pursuit of balanced proportions and mathematical modulations, recalls the work of the Dutch architect-monk Dom Hans van der Laan, who developed his theory of the plastic number in the middle of last century: a numerical system that, unlike the golden section, could define proportions of spaces, furniture and materials in both a two-dimensional as a three-dimensional way. In the work of Ambrosi we find similar spaces where modules are developed both in plan as in section with the same definition and clarity. The thickness or depth of the materials (mainly concrete, stone, wood, metal and glass) becomes a protagonist dimension in the spatial experience he creates. The character of the built environment is established through the texture and quality the material used while nature is integrated into the interiors as if it were just another casual inhabitant: an organic shape that contrasts with the orthogonality of his volumetric proposal.

The work of Jorge Ambrosi presents itself seriously and without any make-up. The visibility of the constructive components used, turn the building inside out and show the unfolded architecture in its most intimate and unguarded way. A serene architecture that questions its own relevance in every line drawn.

BIOGRAPHY:

Jorge Ambrosi obtained a degree in Architecture with honors from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). He founded his office, AMBROSI ARCHITECTS, in 2008 dedicated to the design of projects, where the emphasis of architectural work lies in exploring the relationships between indoor and outdoor space, being architecture the boundary that defines them. In 2010 he won two Honorable Mentions at the XI Biennial of Mexican Architecture: one for the project "Dance Academy" and another for the "Center for Yoga and Spa" in Querétaro. That same year he was a finalist in the National Competition for the Pavilion of the World Expo in Shanghai in partnership with Mauricio Rocha. In 2006 he was selected as one of the architects to present their work at the V Bienal Iberoamericana in Montevideo. In the same year he won the silver medal at the IX Biennial of Mexican Architecture for the project "Jiva Spa and Bodywork Center" and received an Honorable Mention for the "Building departments Tlacotalpan 30". From 2003 to 2008 he was founding partner of Fabric-office dedicated to architecture and property development, where he led the field of architecture. From 2001 to 2008 served as Professor of Projects at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the Max Cetto Workshop at UNAM.

www.ambrosiarquitectos.com

FLOODINGS:

In ‘Floodings’, the gallery space becomes a temporary flooded garden in which Paisajes Emergentes presents five projects designed for five different cities. Although each one responds to a specific geographical and sociopolitical context with dissimilar conditions, these cities have in common a series of natural hydrological issues. Whether these are cyclical or unpredictable phenomena, the proposals establish thought-provoking architectural concepts concerning the way people live in relation to waterscapes. Medellín and Ituango (Colombia), Venice (Italy), Temuco (Chile) and Quito (Ecuador) are the five cities where the selected projects are located. The interventions show a renewed interest in the study of these phenomena as well as the strategies and techniques necessary to intensify them - for example, to make the tide differential clearer (Venice), to flood a tract of land in order to generate an active hydrological park (Quito), or simply, to decontextualize tropical wetlands by inserting them in the middle of the city (Medellín). The interventions show the cross practice between architecture and landscape design that characterizes Paisajes Emergentes, producing projects that blur boundaries and where the atmospheric components gain equal or greater relevance to the material constitution normally prioritized in architecture.

The intervention by Paisajes Emergentes in the space of LIGA, does not only showcases several projects of the Colombian studio related to the theme of ‘water’, but also exemplifies their interest in creating intangible atmospheres and environments based on water, temperature, air , humidity, moisture, etc…  As title of the exhibition suggests, the space of the gallery is ‘flooded’ with water retained in substance called hidrogel: these are miniscule spherical particles of a a polymer, mostly used in agriculture, greenhouses and hydroponic farming, which can absorb up to 150 times their own weight in water. This material allowed Paisajes Emergentes to create a set of scale models immerged into a landscape that consists mainly of water. The punctual lightning from below, illuminates these models and simultaneously heats up the installation, condensing the water in the particles and creating a greenhouse effect of almost total humidity in the exhibition space. The windows that allow passerby to look into the gallery are therefore always steamed up, suggesting a temporal misty eco-system around the drowned landscape. The plants inserted by Paisajes Emergentes, activate the installation with live elements, introducing continuous and slow change of scenery over the duration of the exhibition. 

LIGA 02 - text by Charles Waldheim 

AN ARCHITECTURE OF ATMOSPHERICS: 

In the postmodern era architectural culture has come to emulate the culture of fashion. This culture is one predicated on a regularly scheduled production of novelty, carefully timed to the cycles of the attendant media. This culture and its cult of celebrity are now firmly established globally. As a result, the shelf-life of any particular architectural discourse has grown shorter and shorter. In part because of this relentless demand for regularly reproduced newness, actual architectural innovation is harder to come by. It occurs occasionally, in the unlikeliest of places, and of its own organic accord. This work is often difficult to recognize and harder to disseminate.

Among the dangers of the architecture-fashion industry has been its anesthetizing effects on our collective cultural sensitivity to original thought and genuine architectural innovation. When the shock of the new is felt, it is often in obscure and marginalized contexts, and often resists easy categorization. In spite of this cultural condition, and the difficulty that it poses for the dissemination of deserving work from a range of emerging talents, architecture does emerge in new and stimulating varieties. And architecture persists as a vibrant cultural form through which actual innovation is still possible. No contemporary practice represents this perennial potential for the shock of the new through architectural innovation better than the trio of young Colombian architects practicing under the collective description “Paisajes Emergentes.”

The work of Paisajes Emergentes is embodied through an astonishing array of recent projects exhibiting fluency with a range of scales and subject matter. Their provocative appropriation of the culturally loaded term ‘paisajes’ to describe their practice signals their ambivalence regarding traditional professional role of the architect. It also points toward their literacy with international architectural culture and the recent recovery of landscape as a medium of design. Combined with the adjectival modifier ‘emergentes,’ their appropriation of landscape as a frame for their diverse body of work illustrates an appetite for addressing the ecological imperatives of contemporary design culture as well as the diverse array of international environments in which they find their work projected. As such, Paisajes Emergentes serves as an apt appellation for both the medium and message of the collective’s architectural aspirations that have as much to do with curating atmospheres as with constructing buildings.

Many of the young practice’s projects exhibit specifically horticultural or botanical strategies in the service of complex public realms. These projects typically resist easy identification with the traditional typological categories of landscape, urban design, or architecture. Rather, these projects more often conflate various aspects of these diverse disciplinary practices, in favor of a new hybrid form of work. This confluence of disciplinary commitments often reveals itself through robust representational strategies hacked from various architectural and landscape precedents. More often, it is revealed through the very subject matter and operating assumptions driving the particular design response on a given site. At its best this work simultaneously reveals aspects of a particular site and subject, while conjuring remote and fleeting environments and emotions.

The architectonic language and design sensibility of Paisajes Emergentes reveal a deep literacy with contemporary architectural culture, they are equally informed by the rising importance of environment as a category of architectural thought. In this sense the recent work of Paisajes Emergentes transcends Iberoamerican architectural precedents from late 90’s and early 00’s by pushing the limits of the architectural object to its extreme end conditions, into environments, experiences, or even atmospheres. Many of the projects of Paisajes Emergentes accomplish this through a close reading of the particular ecological or phenomenal contexts in which they are sited. While these effects can reveal themselves through architectural artifice, they are best described through that dated term landscape. While much of Iberian architectural culture (and its international diaspora) has been actively engaged in resisting the rise of landscape as a professional and cultural practice in recent years, Paisajes Emergentes have firmly declared their commitments to the messy and productive potentials of landscape in relation to architectural production. In so doing, they have not only offered us an example of genuine innovation and a whiff of the new, they have also made a generational and geographic stake in the ongoing cultural struggle to open architecture to its multiform and various ecological and urban associations.  

Many of the projects of Paisajes Emergentes depend upon deep horticultural and botanical knowledge. Yet it would be a misreading of their work to take these projects for traditional landscape architecture with a focus on plant material as a medium of design. Rather these projects often illustrate an ambidextrous quality, equally fluent with landform and ecological process on the one hand as with architectonic language and spatial composition on the other. What these various methodological approaches often share is an interest in the specific media of atmosphere itself, water and air. In a diverse range of projects including the Jardin Botanico and their recently completed Piscinas complex both in Medellin, Colombia, Paisajes Emergentes build complex public realms through an obsession with the material and phenomenal properties of water. In this project the hydraulic logics, and experiential potential of liquid water as well as their ephemeral effects on light and air offer the primary operating systems of a complex refined public realm. Further afield, their recent competition entries for the Parque del Lago in Quito, Ecuador and the Venice Lagoon reveal an ongoing commitment to the various potentials of a hydrological urbanism. In Quito their proposal juxtaposes the reflectivity and endlessness of pools stretching to the horizon of an abandoned airfield with the reflective metallic surfaces of the airplanes that once occupied them. In contrast with the bright light, and clear blue of Quito, their Venice Lagoon project plumbs the murky impenetrable depths of a dark, dank, Venice. In both examples, the particular phenomenal and experiential qualities of the site are revealed through the most fundamental of elements, water. Equally these projects explore the associated experiential conditions of fecund humidity of luminous aridity, while constructing complex public venues through the ambient and atmospheric conditions attendant to water in its various states.

An equally significant line of investigation pursued by Paisajes Emergentes might be described by the term atmospherics. In pushing their architecture to the limits of the object, beyond the question of ground, into the realm of climate and humidity, the collaborative has developed an approach to pneumatics and aerial suspension. In a range of projects including their proposals for monumental totemic structures in New York or other North American cities, for Heathrow airport’s guerrilla decommissioning through balloons, and for the commemoration of communities impacted by a Ituango hydroelectric plant in their native Colombia, Paisajes Emergentes have proposed a new age of inflatables.

 Through their projects, and the pursuit of an architecture beyond weight and mass, Paisajes Emergentes propose an architecture of atmospherics. In this realm, liquid water, water vapor, and ice emerge as primary representational media for a new form of public life. In this work the fleeting experiential qualities of air and water as seen through light are orchestrated much in the way that the sequential experience of space was orchestrated by traditional typologies and subjectivities of landscape architecture. In pursuing the ends of architecture, the work of Paisajes Emergentes exhibited here simultaneously transcend the limits of the architectural object, while renewing the cultural potential of architecture as a medium of genuine innovation. While this body of work is still emerging, the energy, ambition, and optimism of these projects suggest that an architecture of atmospherics may very well be an important way forward for Paisajes Emergentes  and for design culture internationally.

Charles Waldheim, FAAR, John E. Irving Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

LIGA 02 - poster 'Floodings - Paisajes Emergentes'

PAISAJES EMERGENTES:

Paisajes Emergentes operates from Medellín, Colombia and was founded in 2007 by the Colombian architects Edgar Mazo, Sebastián Mejia and Luis Callejas. The practice establishes a constant and reciprocal dialogue between art , landscape and architecture trough environmental operations.

Rather then stone, concrete or brick it is water, air and energy that constitute the raw material of the architectonic imaginary of this Colombian office. The weightlessness of their proposals, generate poetic solutions in which the natural and the artificial intertwine into new reflections on life and death of the surroundings we inhabit.

The dreamy graphical work of the studio shows a great evocative power and establishes open narratives in which the actual building process only becomes a pragmatic outcome of larger natural forces.  Their proposals express a scientific optimism as the one visible in the visionary projects from the ’60.  The ideas projected on the intervened territories, are radical and provocative and even get us to question the historic task of our profession: the possibility of creating a better world.

LIGA 02 was organized in collaboration with Polyforum Siquieros.

www.paisajesemergentes.com

"NOR MORE, NOR LESS"

A selection of twelve built or under construction works summarizes the ten first years of the Chilean-Argentinean studio Pezo von Ellrichshausen. The display of the work occupies a circular sequence of rooms organized around a central courtyard. Each work is presented in a single room by means of a 1:20 scale model and a series of drawings and large format photographs. The selection of works tries to explain the spatial structure that crosses the studio’s research. On the square plan of the Museum, the two opposite corner rooms contain two typological experiments that are in between art and architecture: on the one hand, the MXYZ pavilions, a small series of cubic spaces for exhibition purposes; on the other hand, the 120P pavilion, a horizontal sequence of perimeter walls merely defined by doors. In the two contrary corners there are two monolithic concrete pieces with mix programs: the POLI house, an hollowed cube facing the Pacific Ocean; and the CIEN house, Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s own residence and office. The exhibition has been thought as an opportunity to review principles on character, abstraction and formal integrity, themes which are insistently present throughout the author’s works.

LIGA 01 poster 'Ni más ni menos - Pezo von Ellrichshausen'

PEZO VON ELLRICHSHAUSEN

Pezo von Ellrichshausen Architects was established in Concepcion (Chile) in 2001 by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen. With a cross production between art and architecture, the studio has built a series of singular houses, art pavilions and residential buildings. The office has been awarded at the V Iberoamerican Biennial, at the XV Chilean Architecture Biennial and at the AR Awards for Emerging Architecture and has been nominated for the Swiss Architectural Award (Mendrisio, 2010) and the Iakov Chernikov Prize (Moscú, 2010). The studio has been selected for the official exhibition at the 12h International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Their work has been extensively published in specialized media and compiled in two monographic books: Private Project (Libria, Italy 2010) and Serie Obras (ARQ, Santiago de Chile, 2007). Mauricio Pezo completed a Masters in Architecture in the Catholic University of Chile and graduated from the University of Bio-Bio with a degree in Architecture. He has been awarded the Best Young Chilean Architect Prize by the Chilean Architects Association. Sofia von Ellrichshausen holds a degree in Architecture from the University of Buenos Aires where she was awarded the FADU-UBA Honors Diploma. They teach regularly in Chile and have been Visiting Professors at The University of Texas at Austin and at Cornell University in New York.

LIGA 01 was organized in colaboration with 'Museo Experimental El Eco' and counted with the support of the Embassy of Chile.

www.pezo.cl

On the occasion of the Triennial, LIGA will move temporary to Lisbon, where the small space is 'copied' in MUDE through an installation by the Mexican office MMX. By copying the space they reflect on the physical qualities of the exhibition space as a generator for curatorial content. Simultaneously the Portuguese studio RCJV is invited to Mexico City where they will inaugurate their site-specific installation at 'LIGA, Mexico City' and present their work to the Mexican public. The sum of both creates an active interchange between local cultures, questions the idea of exhibition space and its location and will bring the idea of the 'double' to the foreground. A special double issue of LIGA that occurs simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic!

Other invited institutions to take part in the "The Institute Effect" are: CASCO - Office for Art Design and Theory (NL), Centre for Research Architecture (UK), Centre for Urban Pedagogy (US), Design as Politics (NL), Fabrica (IT), Institut fur Raumexperimente (DE), Jornal Arquitectos (PT), SALT (TR), Spatial Agency (UK), Storefront for Art and Architecture (US), Strelka Institute (RU), Z33 (BE)

The Institute Effect: "Institutions of architecture including, but not limited to, magazines, journals, websites, galleries, project spaces, archives, libraries and museums are arguably as influential on the contemporary landscape of architecture as the credited authors. The critical minds gathering, researching, exhibiting, analyzing, commending, awarding and commissioning are amongst the most influential and productive practitioners today. This exhibition will become a living, changing homage to the contemporary institution as a spatial practitioner. The host institution, MUDE, a museum devoted to contemporary design in Lisbon, will create a stage set to invite 10 institutions from around the world that will consecutively inhabit the space, forming a rotating curatorship."

www.close-closer.com

The 'The Institutional Act' brings together five directors of influential contemporary architectural institutions: Eva Franch i Gilabert from Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York, US), Jan Boelen from Z33 House for contemporary Art (Hasselt, BE), Indy Johar of 00:/ (London, UK) and Marielsa Castro of LIGA - Space for Architecture (Mexico City, MEX)

From the website:

Institutions are power. They channel directions, focus attention. They are, without want of explanation, important. They are vessels that collect, exhibit, examine, support and critique. They are arbiters of taste, formers of knowledge. They are the dreamweavers of our cultural imagination. But more than capturing and captivating, and as part of their economic and intellectual capacity, many contemporary institutions of architecture are producers. Those that don't simply process and filter but are participating in a critical form of space-shaping. In the expanded field of architecture where architectural acts are beyond buildings, contemporary institutions are more at home amongst practitioners than critics.

Some of the strongest and most influential acts of institutions have lead to real political and social change. In complex political globalised times when cultural direction and investment is lacking from governments, and city's become more autonomous and culture more lucrative, institutions are becoming more significant and their role more potent. The conference attempts to negotiate these terrains and discuss the definition and role and remit of the contemporary architectural institution.

More information at:

Wednesday May 8th, 2013 the Chilean architect Eduardo Castillo will give a lecture on his work at ARCHIVO, Diseño y Arquitectura (Gral. Francisco Ramírez 4, Col. Ampliación Daniel Garza), at 07:30 pm. Free entrance. / Thursday May 9th, his exhibition at LIGA entitled 'Opaque Sound' will open its doors at 07:00 pm, invitation required.

LIGA in collaboration with Arquine and Gustavo Gili organized Interludes 09, on March 7th. Kersten Geers and Wonne Ickx discussed about the architecture drawing, photography and representation in relation to the recently released monograph of OFFICE KGDVS edited by 2G.

On February 14th, LIGA 08: Permeability was inaugurated, in this edition, plan:b, a young Colombian studio led by Felipe and Federico Mesa were invited to participate. Their piece consists of a 15 minute long looped video projected over three different layers of vertical lamella, each reflecting light in a distinct manner. This last installment of our recurring program will be open till May.

Wednesday February 13th, 2013 the Colombian architects Felipe and Federico Mesa will give a lecture on their work at Centro Cultural Vladimir Kaspé in Universidad La Salle (Benjamin Franklin 47, Col. Hipódromo Condesa), at 07:30 pm. Free entrance. / Thursday February 14th, their exhibition at LIGA entitled 'Permeability' will open its doors at 07:00 pm, invitation required.

On January 30th in LIGA we had a conference with Alberto Kalach, who shared his ideas about Mexico City and he explained  the power of tools like Google Earth to visualize and design our cities. With the participation of Javier Toscano curator and theorist, it opened to the public a discussion about the ideas presented in ATLAS of projects for Mexico City.

After its premiere at the XIII Architecture Biennale in Venice, LIGA and Cine Tonalá proudly present for the first time in Mexico: 'RUTA'. The movie takes us to the mountains of Jalisco to introduce us nine architectonical pieces that form part of the project, The Pilgrim Route.

LIGA and Cine Tonalá are furthermore organizing a special screening in presence of the architects Tatiana Bilbao, Derek Dellekamp and Rozana Montiel on Friday November, 30. The movie will show at 8 pm and afterwards there will be time to dialogue with the architects.

Free Entrance. For the special screening it is necessary to confirm your attendance at

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The tickets can be picked up at Cine Tonala before the screening.

Cine Tonalá

estudio de producción

Last thursday november 15, LIGA took part within the framework of Nicolas Paris´s exhibition, “Exercises of Resistance” at MUAC. Trough the talk LIGA's team explained to the public, their works methodologies and curatorial process. Also the public performed an exercise in which each person submitted a proposal for LIGA´s space.

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The installation will be open to the public for the next three months and it will be accompanied with an original text from Colombian critic and editor Miguel Mesa entitled 'Live Load', together with a poster designed by Izaskun Chinchilla that illustrates the project in a graphic way.