by Mariano Arias Diez
Contemporary Urban Space
Architect, a10studio
Feed back: info@a10studio.net

BAJA CALIFORNIA SUR (BCS), the youngest state of Mexico (37 years), has been acknowledged as one of the most beautiful places in Mexico, and due to its proximity to the United States, often referred to as a second home retreat for baby boomers. With the growth and development of Baja the interest and migration of young professionals to this unique place have grown as well. Young professionals are good for BCS, not only because we’ll have a generation that will continue the legacy of the land, but mostly because they are the ones who will be able to promote it, build it and make it grow with new creative and quality ideas. Today, we need strategic urban planning, development of walking areas, functional drainage systems, traffic re-direction, sustainable, efficient and cost effective ideas and implementation, which will improve the future of the towns and of people who live here.

Due to several reasons, it wasn’t always possible to find the best quality for things we would like to do in this region. Slowly, this has changed, and the once popular demand for caricaturized “Mexican” homes often seen in some western movies, has started to be replaced with contemporary design, sustainable living and a preservation of local nature.

Young professionals in BCS have been often under-appreciated. Good news is that young architects with academic and professional international experience have started coming here, recognizing its development potential and a challenge they want to be part of. In this occasion, I’d like to talk about four young architectural offices established in BCS, which have recently received national and international recognition for their work in the area:

Colectivo MX is an architectural office with Los Cabos and Mexico City offices, guided by Arch. Javier Gutierrez. They received a Silver Medal in the X Mexican Biennale of Architecture in 2008 for their project Casa Shelly, an ecological home located on the East Cape, which uses solar energy to generate electricity, has pool with salted water, a system for re-use of treated water and other ecological techniques.

Another example of young talent is fabriKG, guided by Arch. Gonzalo Elizarrarás, in Los Cabos, and Arch. Benjamin Scharf in Berlin, Germany, who were nominated in the category of Future Residential Projects at the World Architecture Festival Awards 09 in Barcelona, for their project Knit Atelier House.

From La Paz, collective TALCO, leaded by Mauricio Sanchez Torres and Adriaan Schalkwijk, who, in cooperation with Alejandro Dacosta, developed the project Aquatic Park Coromuel, which received 1st place in urban development on national category at the CEMEX 2009 awards.

Lastly we’d like to mention a10studio, with presence in Los Cabos and Mexico City, whose project Re.evolution lounge+bar has been extensively published in acknowledged and specialized design and architectural media, and is nominated for the international award “Restaurant and Bar Design Awards” in the U.K.

These four young architectural offices are a small example of talent that we have in the region today, and we’ll be surely hearing about them in the future. Hopefully, planning and urban authorities, developers and clients will support the young talents, listen to their new ideas, views and possibilities for the better future development of our State.

The column was first published in the printed edition of ESCAPES magazine #5.

ESCAPES’s contributing architect Mariano Arias Diez from a10studio, with offices in Cabo San Lucas and Mexico City, has sent us an exciting news about their recent work. It’s a project they did for Agricultural Museum in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico.

Agricultural production is one of the most internationally recognized emblems of Mexico, and particularly of the State of Sinaloa. The state of Sinaloa is known as the “granary of Mexico” because it is the producer of a big variety of food. Its efficient fields have become national leaders in their yields.

Because the economy of Sinaloa is sustained by its agricultural activities, the project seeks to recognize it and promote it, through a work that displays objects related to branches of technology, history of agriculture and agronomy as well as agricultural ways which sustain the economy of Sinaloa. Through the creation of the Museum of Agriculture the city government tries to allow the public to learn more about the forms of production in the locality, while recognizing both the agricultural practice as such, and those who make possible such a noble activity.

Project Brief

Intro:
Through agriculture, man has colonized the territory for centuries, creating irrigation systems and by planting with geometric laws. He has de-naturalized the natural areas through the planting of natural elements; the distance that is between the planted trees or plants depends on both the size of the crop itself as the collection systems used. Each plantation produces a texture and color over the territory.
Agriculture industrializes, the landscape urbanizes.

a10studio proposal’s outside is as important as the inside. There are no objects and an external reality, but a continuum between forms that wrap and un-wrap, that close and open, that focus and serve as a focus. The architecture as this, expanded in reality, in the middle, through the environment, is an extension. The environment in which it appears is a field.

They present 3 key strategies for the development of the project:
_Operative Topographies
_Ecomonumentality
_Active Ecology

The spectacle of nature and city become now comparable.

_OPERATIVE TOPOGRAPHIES:

Based on the topographic analysis of the site, we suggests a strategy of folding, cutting and movement of the territory. Such movements define platforms developed as programmatic scenarios, functional plateaus exacerbating their flexible surface condition, either as slipped and extended surfaces [dynamic soil], or as extruded surfaces [located reliefs]. In both cases it is manipulated landscapes that refer to the nature of vacant spaces, and ultimately, the very definition of landscape as a background, as construction and stage at the same time: landscapes within landscapes.

The ground respond to a willingness to overlap, the reliefs to an interlock.

These topographies form in any case, new geographies on the ground; mineral and vegetal landscapes in which the movements and flows are articulated by a manipulated geography and a generated space.

_ECOMONUMENTALITY:

We are used to think of architecture in function of the place, meaning that it could find the keys with which to tackle the project. There are many ways to anchor to the site. The whole place has gone from being understood as a landscape, whether natural or artificial, and it has ceased to be the neutral ground on which man-made architectural objects stand out, to become the object of primary interest and focus of attention. Thus, changing the point of view, the landscape loses its momentum and becomes an object of possible transformations, both at the architectural level, neighborhood and city-level.
The architecture starts a process of artificial blurring with an obvious interest in incorporating a natural condition, both in terms of composition as constructive (proposed construction system of rammed earth walls, to emphasize the use of existing assets in the site as well as develop strategies for sustainability and passive ecotechniques), in search for environmental sensitivity and a formal complexity that responds precisely to the values of the Culiacan society.
The project seeks to build a complete redefinition of the place, offering primarily the invention of a topography. So with this double movement, from the nature to the project and from the project to nature, we seek to rescue a “ecomonumental” condition.

An architectural proposal characterized by:
- Address both what is between things as things in themselves: public space [a hall, a plaza, a terrace] is therefore the primary object.
- The identification of the variability, the change as a key ingredient of architecture. With emphasis on the design of objects rather than the definition of definitive architectural programs.
- The commitment between scales. The project its determined and affects many areas beyond those granted by reason of mere physical contiguity. A project with translation capability, traveling between scales.
- Understand and feel simultaneously different scales and fields of perception and action.
- Acting on the near, immediate, tactile, and understand at the same time many other receptacles and dimensions that get modified with user actions, it is a flexible work program for the upcoming years.

_ACTIVE ECOLOGY:

To the old nostalgic or pseudobucolic ecology (freezing landscapes, territories and environments) we propose a bold ecology; reclassified to be reformulated. Based not in a fearful and non-intervention purely defensive -resistant- but in a no-tax, projective and rating -(re)promotive- intervention in synergy with the environment and also with new technologies. Not only possibilities but (re)positivist.

a10studio proposes:
- An ecology where sustainability means interaction.
- Where Nature is is also artificiality.
- Where the landscape is topography.
- Where energy is information and technology the vehicle to development.
- Where development is recycling and evolution is genetic.
- Where environment is the field.
Where retain involve always intervene.
The selection of vegetal species to exhibit took into account the degree of maintenance as well as the main agricultural products of the state of Sinaloa and the natural species of native vegetation. In this way we achieve that public space becomes in a same gesture an inside museum-park-public space. Presenting the exhibiting object in real time with their processes and characteristics of agricultural activity, where the user can directly see how these are conducted and its temporality. Species selection also took into consideration the color palette that these species may have throughout the year generating a “living park” an ever-changing exhibition and intervention which always seem dynamic and not static representation of agricultural processes.

PROJECT DATA:

architectural project: a10studio + lab07
project team: Mariano Arias-Diez, Luis Alarcón, Carlos Marín, Hugo Sánchez, Mia Modak
type: institutional, museum and park
location: Culiacan, Sinaloa (Mexico)
area: 45,000 m2
project year: 2010
client: Instituto Municipal de Planeacion (IMPLAN) de Culiacan
status: Competition finalist

CONSULTANTS:

landscape architecture: Hugo Sánchez / ENTORNO taller de paisaje
structural engineer: Ing. Fernando Alvarez / Construcciones FASA
rendering and digital visualization: Carlos Marín / lab07
lighting design: a10studio

contact a10studio:

_Sierra Guadarrama 85-1, Col. Lomas de Chapultepec, Mexico .D.F 11000, Mexico
_Isla Santa Catarina, Cabo San Lucas, B.C.S., Mexico
tel. +(55)26.23.26.73, +(624)13.15.14.7
email: info@a10studio.net
web: http://www.a10studio.net

Check out the area plans. We love how the thought has been put to every single detail:

And the competition boards. We would love to see the project built!

Congratulations to the whole team!

THE ILLUSION of excess has finally gone off with the global economic crisis. In cities there is now a need to think on the reasons that led us to a point where the debauchery and waste generated only a sumptuous emptiness, material and ideological.

This affected the growth and shaping of cities, and now we need a real and transcendent change, to affirm from a reactive posture that we abandon the idea that “a society of wealth is a society in which all material and cultural needs meet easily”, leaving behind dysfunctional social logic that has condemned us to a “luxurious and spectacular famine”. In this sense, the public space and its proper management is crucial for the rectification of the urban nature of any contemporary city. The cities of Baja California Sur have based its development in an obsolete model of urban development FONATUR institutionalized in the 60’s.

Among other deficiencies, the local leisure facilities (for people who actually live in these tourist destinations) are always last on the list. The shortsightedness of cities and federal governments left us with mediocre private efforts which aimed more at mass consumption spaces than mass leisure areas.

In these lines we will mention the exercise of urban “acupuncture” that was recently carried out in the city of La Paz. At the beach water park Coromuel, located in front of Pedregal de la Paz, the city has recovered one of the largest and more traditional leisure spaces in the area, transforming it with a clear intention of creating quality public space, to exploit a situation presented by Urban Nature.

This intervention includes the increase of capacity of the beach area for up to 2,500 people, a quay of 115 meters which is the pinnacle of the pier, 36 palapas, 263 palms, a treatment plant with capacity of 90 thousand liters of water daily, walkways and ramps, 100 parking spaces, 6 sanitary units, public lighting, water tank, restaurant, outdoor theater and 28 store spaces.

While noble, and widely accepted by local residents, the Coromuel water park is a shy demagogic effort to generate public space. Still, the project, as many others we encounter around us, is not taking proper advantage of good situations presented by the Urban Nature. The space could among others generate its own power by solar panels that could educate people in the use of “public space”. Besides that this could be the starting point of a process of “socialization” of La Paz (or even the State) being the first intervention of a systematic and planned renovation of public spaces that is strongly needed all around Baja Sur. The nature around us is rich and offers plenty of entertainment, energy and sustainable resources. We should use them wisely and learn how to blend them into the public space, in order to be able to give back to the society and the nature itself.

During the XX century, cities were thought as a clear organizational scheme, with a simple and predictable order, capable to be designed and planned in such way that the life quality of its residents could be modified manipulating the physical shape of the city. The result was a tragic social engineering effort, fueled by a scientific method in the form of urban planning that have dominated western societies the last 60 years, and now, unfortunately, the developing world. Urban systems everywhere, are just way to complex to be reduced to what conventional science can focus on.

The Contemporary city is the amalgam of invisible fluxes and visible materializations of information that operate simultaneously in spaces of global nature as also in spaces of local nature. To recognize these forces, fluxes and potentials is the challenge of any contemporary urban design or planning.

In September 2008, at Dalian China, the 44th International Congress of Urbanists took place. The main subject was “Urban Growth Without Sprawl”, one of the fundamental problems of urbanism these days together with the indiscriminated territorial expansion and the occupation of natural reserved areas, which destroys important natural resources and the lack of long-term projects for population distribution.

We will mention 2 out of the 7 Mexican projects presented:

The project for the Development of Playa del Carmen, in Quintana Roo, takes as starting point the concepts of City and Region generating identity at different scales: neighborhoods, parks and dwellings with simple solutions and integrating low-cost innovative construction systems, using local materials and workers as also eco-technologies and integration of the infrastructures with public spaces. Makes also emphasis in pedestrian mobility, the different areas of the plan are not more than 5 minutes far from each other, the urban development enhancing social interaction.

The STRATEGIC PLAN FOR URBAN DEVELOPMENT 2030 for Cancun (awarded with the EXCELLENCE IN URBAN PLANNING prize in the same congress) where It’s key aspects are the master plan for the Hotel Corridor as the integration of irregular housing to the territorial reserves for year 2030. Including the revitalization of downtown and its connection with the hotel corridor, also contemplates to improve the traffic infrastructure as public transport system and the integration of bicycle paths. On the environmental side it aims to protect the wells and the generation of lineal parks to communicate the city, once again the public space as city articulator.

This are just the beginnings of new futures, the development of new urban strategies will deliver better and more efficient urban areas, specially for those like us who live in a coastal setting with specific situations and agents that are not macro-scale settings like Mexico City or New York. Its convenient to mention the emergence of young new groups of study about Coastal Cities, academic institutions like the IaaC (Barcelona), the Intelligent Coast group (Spain) and the SUPERSUDACA collective (Latin America) are among the research groups in sustainable urban development for tourism-based areas.

In our own very area of Los Cabos the young CAPA collective (formed by 3 young offices of Los Cabos with international credentials) has been studying new alternatives for the sustainable development of our Baja territory, will be hearing more of them soon and hopefully in this column we will show you some of their work, if you wish to get more info or in contact with CAPA, drop them an e-mail to:  contacto@capalab.net

Most of this proposals are still theoretical, but they are a huge resource of ideas for what the future of the human settlements and territories can become. Urban strategies should always think ahead the administrative territorial capacities, it has become urgent to implement strategies for economical and social development, unfortunately, most of times there’s no effective political and legal frame for the management of the urban settlements and its resources (natural, economical, social, etc); Today’s territorial management should be based in collaborative and relational processes which wont compete but complement each other. The coordination of local governments, social participation, the view of a common project, and the efficient instrumentation is basic for the successful development of proposals.

The difference between socioeconomic layers in the area makes all of this even harder to manage, most of urban strategies and plans fails for the lack of proper management and not because of a wrong planning. A good planning without proper management becomes “plain good ideas”. And good management without good planning only generates wrong realities.

Mariano’s column was published in ESCAPES, issue 3, November 2008.