2019 > DISC* DESIGN INNOVATION FOR SUSTAINABLE CITIES @ College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley

DISC is an immersive five-week program that explores an interdisciplinary and multi-scalar approach to environmental planning and design. Through seminars and lectures, studio workshop sessions, site visits and fieldwork, students engage in the discourse of urban innovation and develop creative solutions to tackle the challenges global cities are facing today.

The program is comprised of four components. The Global Cities/Global Challenges Seminar establishes a theoretical framework for the program. The Lecture Series & Guest Speakers exposes students to the work of some of the most renowned and forward-thinking researchers and practitioners in the Bay Area. Site Visits & Fieldwork give students an opportunity to engage directly with the built and natural environments of the Bay Area using it as a living laboratory for study. The Studio Session & Digital Workshops builds core hand-on skills, empowering students to craft their own design solutions. Working in teams, students develop a project from design conception to prototyping and present the final result of their work to instructors and guest critics.

Upon completion of the DISC program, graduates have a strong understanding of urban dynamics and a broad toolkit to tackle its urgent demands, as well as compelling artifacts for their academic portfolio. Students gain the necessary knowledge and skills to develop and represent their design ideas, preparing themselves to become the next thought leaders and game changers in the shaping of our built environment.

2017 - 2018 > ARCHITECTURE STUDIO 1 - URBAN HETEROPIAS OF THE ORDINARY @ UDLA, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Theoretical framework / Argument

The studio investigates those spatial-temporal appropriations of the urban reality, understanding the territory through the interaction of form, space, and its system of activities within the banal existing landscape. This will be approached from three different scenarios and scales. First, from the domesticity of the single-family house -HOME-, secondly, from the study of certain specific urban sectors of Santiago -URBAN- and finally, we will make a trip out of the city -COUNTRYSIDE-.

Methodology Our methodology aims to systematize the study of those appropriations that configure a spontaneous and unconventional relationship with the landscape. This, hoping to understand and demonstrate from them open systems that inform potential radical design strategies. Some methods used for this purpose will be anti-drift, photographic record, planimetric and spatial survey, interviews, cognitive maps, phenomenological and spatial models. We will also carry out, as a workshop, certain interventions in the territory which will be built on a natural scale.

Representation The means of representation will be varied. From them we will always try to work with different layers and scales of information simultaneously, allowing simple manual and digital operations to be related. This, to materialize graphic and spatial proposals that build complexity.

2017 > ARCHITECTURE STUDIO 6 - OPERATIONAL LANDSCAPES @ UDLA, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Studio Statement / Argument

The monopolization, hyperaccumulation, and over-exploitation of natural/economic resources, added to the deregulated and accelerated growth of cities, have left in evidence an exacerbated and polarized social friction. This translates into the territory causing violent socio-spatial segregation of some groups over others. The urbanization process and its complexity make the interest of the workshop lie in investigating those daily practices of space (domestic production) associated with the phenomenon of globalization prevailing in our human settlements. This takes us to the proposition of new typologies that are informed from the new contemporary social configurations and structures. The production, storage and distribution of energy, sustainable policies in the management, and preservation of natural resources are the framework for action and operation of the studio. Based on these, the design strategies propose architectural devices that act as ecological catalysts for the existing territory, understanding it as an opportunity for economic, political and socio-cultural development of local communities. The workshop questions the fictitious border between “the urban and the rural”, tearing down this binary understanding of the existing landscape and, on the contrary, aims to open up possibilities for potential hybridizations between natural and artificial landscapes and their simultaneous interaction with society.

2017 > ARCHITECTURE STUDIO 8 - INFRASTRUCTURAL LANDSCAPES @ CAMPUS CREATIVO, UNAB, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Theoretical Framework / Argument

The workshop understands the territory as the support where socio-spatial phenomena that constitute pre-existing landscape systems occur. They enable the possible relationships between what is planned (or previously designed) and what is practiced (or actually happened) to be investigated and questioned. These appropriations for the temporary occupation of urban space will be mapped and registered as complex phenomena, where their daily spatial practice -activities, uses, configurations and reconfigurations- happens in a way that is foreign to the forecasts imposed by the political codes underlying urban planning. Those practices are inputs that allow to build from their understanding, relationship and subsequent evolution an argument that formulates radical pedagogical questions / opportunities from the territory and its landscape towards the discipline.

Characters who use the territory as a super-experience support will be studied, specifically those who build their daily activities from the ordinary landscape. Boards proposed as the curatorial line of the workshop will have two entries. The first from the natural landscape, and the second from the artificial, both understood from their most canonical categorization. Thus, we established the following three contextual conditions by landscape: river, hill and ravine for the first; and plaza, promenade and street / highway for the second. The specific territorial area of work and operation for the projects will be those where these landscapes are in constant negotiation and conflict.

2017 > INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP: BAROZZI VEIGA (DISCUSSION + CONFERENCE + UNIVERSITIES WORKSHOP) @ Uss, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Project Statement / Argument

The project seeks to extreme three conditions typical of the mountain: 1. Topography, 2. Watercourse and 3. Verticality. In this way, the physical artifact is considered as an enclave on the mountain located in the ravine, understanding that it meets the three areas mentioned.

The extreme landscape of the mountain is understood as a place that only explorers can reach, hence the scale of the hotel is reduced to the scale of refuge. This way the programs contained in the project seek to generate a new experience associated with the mountain proposing a new way of living it. The programmatic strategy proposes two main programs. The first, associated with minimum rooms that are related to a large interior patio that allows the activities of extreme inhabitants, the stove, rest and a place to cook. The second, related to the construction of a large hot spring -in which various activities are carried out- that comes off through the walls that contain the associated program.

The project is presented as an opaque monolithic element establishing only vertical relationships with the landscape, denying views and horizontal relationships with its surroundings through the generation of walls as a programmatic thickness.

The monumentality of the project expressed by its scale and materiality -concrete- seeks to rescue the primitive of living in the mountains with spaces that generate this new experience and sky visual relationships.

2015 > LANDSCAPE + ARCHITECTURE STUDIO IV: TYPOLOGICAL CORRECTIONS @ CAMPUS CREATIVO, UNAB, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Theoretical framework / Argument

This studio investigates typologies in ordinary landscape. It is a restriction that these phenomena and activities are not designed by architects, but materialized by the adjustment and the evolution in time of those who occupy them.

Hypothesis
The territory is understood as the existing landscape in our cities, with which we will work investigating and demonstrating the systems of existing rules in banal and ordinary urban activities, recognizing that they are part of a complex system or major network.

Proposal Construct a typological catalog of possible strategies. The project will propose a system of simultaneous relations between these cases of study, achieving the construction of an argument that evidences the original process investigated.

Format The studio produces graphic information with weekly frequency. Here, two explored formatting possibilities are shown. The first version produced documents of graphic axonometric representations and the second physical models. In both cases, all the work was part of a final catalog, where the process and the result are the final delivery and publication of the architecture studio.

2018 > CONSTRUCTION TECNOLOGIES - BUILDING SYSTEMS, DISSECTING THE PROCESS @ CAMPUS CREATIVO, UNAB, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Framework: The construction processes, the stages associated with them and the design decision making dynamics - processes and stages - are the argument that define the theoretical framework of this course. Consequently, the simultaneous and bidirectional relationship between processes and design decisions is established as the main interest of this class.

Methodology: The methodology used proposes a mixture where transfer and production of knowledge is carried out in two formats: theoretical sessions and field experiences. This is intended to detonate relationships between two simultaneous sources of information, such as theoretical (knowledge) and practice (experience). The means of graphic representation to be used will always be axonometric view and its specific method of operation will be the dissection of components and parts of the investigated project.

Objectives: The general objective is for students to understand technically and systematically the construction processes and from that base, develop relationships and possibilities that arise from theory to architectural design.

The specific objective is that students construct through the dissection of components and parts of a preexisting system, a single document with multiple layers and information scales that propose a complexity in the crossing of three specific variables: a constructive process, a material chosen and an argument of architecture that gives theoretical support to the architectural work in case of study.

Representation: In this course, the graphic representation is understood as a research tool, which is used itself as a process of projective thinking and on this basis, proposes the construction of graphic documents with specific curatorial drawing constrictions, intending to achieve complex visualizations comparable to each other. The notion of complexity involves the student making, both individually and collectively, an understanding and relationship of the different building systems that make up an architecture project.

2016 - 2018 > FORMATIVE PROFESSIONAL SEMINAR: DISSECTING CONSTRUCTIVE PROCESS @ CAMPUS CREATIVO, UNAB, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Ibid

2014 - 2016 > IN-SITU PRACTICE SEMINAR: BUILDING SYSTEMS, DISSECTING THE PROCESS @ UFT, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Ibid

2015 - 2016 > THESIS AND FINAL THESIS ARCHITECTURE STUDIO: DIALECTICAL STUDIO @ UFT, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Frame of action / Argument

The positive influence and contribution these two final thesis architecture studio versions, in which I have participated, have had in my training as a teacher are key to understanding my genuine interest in testing methodologies and radical pedagogical systems, pursuing empirical output projects verifiable quantitative and qualitative in reality.

It is in this sense that the framework of action proposes that management strategies, location and scarce resources such as time and budget are relevant.

The theoretical framework of work is focused on those relevant and necessary phenomena, such as the combination of some socio-spatial constraints like vulnerability, inequality and segregation. All features common in the current landscape of our context for the construction of human settlements regardless of its scale, size and complexity.

The project presented here (By the student Jaime Errázuriz, 2015), is presented as an outstanding example in the management of the above mentioned issues, as it managed to convert social realities –violence/segregation- and geographic threats –risk of the brook- from an extreme vulnerable context into a landscape of resilient action, Including the local community from the outset in the design processes and therefore using the accumulated experience of users as a catalyst to inform the shape of the architecture project.

2015 > PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE SEMINAR: DESIGN AS RESEARCH - RISK & RESILIENCE GROUP @ UFT, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Frame of action / Argument

In a conference an experienced skater claimed that he was against the construction of skateparks, they were expensive, exclusive and seldom well made; he preferred, instead, a better elaborated city in their common spaces. For example, he argued, Barcelona is not designed a priori for skateboarding, but the quality of its pavement materials and street furniture, the continuity of surfaces, the care and design of its elements, made it “the mecca of skateboarding”.

Based on the thesis above, it is proposed, for the case of the technical ventilation site for the future metro/subway in Pedro de Valdivia Street, the project of more than just a skatepark, a space of inclusive urban social activities; where users of wheelchairs, strollers, skates, bicycles and skateboards can coexist and enjoy simultaneously with those who rest or walk. Located adjacent to the school of architecture at Universidad Finis Terrae in the south and to the Alborada student residence in the north, this space lends itself to host the proposal as a support for outdoor fairs, organic markets, small concerts and activities of transversal public character.

It is interesting that, although this project is made on the basis of specific constraints, the design strategy is a generic and repeatable model for other public spaces that have this building normative impediment.

2015 > PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE SEMINAR: RESEARCH AS PRACTICE - RISK & RESILIENCE GROUP @ UFT, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Frame of action / Argument

Japan is the nation with most experience and preparation in the world in earthquakes and tsunamis, after the 1933 Showa-Sanrikun tsunami event began to implement a series of “countermeasures”, among which are the vertical evacuation towers. Most of these are manufactured by the Japanese company Tasakaru and are designed by structural engineers. This presents an attractive opportunity for our discipline given our local reality, since these designs lack the qualitative areas that architecture could provide, such as the management of the landscape, the production of space, the proposal of new programmatic relationships, compositional and aesthetic aspects, materials and several others that could significantly improve its performance.

In the Japanese experience of the 2011 Tohoku Tsunami, it was shown that large investments in heavy infrastructure work to protect against tsunamis such as walls, dams or gates were surpassed by the power of nature, but where there were good results of mitigation or reduction of the damage were in the places where the combination of various prevention measures was implemented simultaneously: protection and heavy infrastructure, mitigation forests and vertical evacuation towers. This latter, in addition to serving to evacuate at the risk of tsunamis, represent for Chile a typological opportunity of social interest, since they could take charge of daily local aspects complementary to pre-existing urban systems, such as landmarks and landscape viewpoints, coastal, aquatic and nautical sports activities, fairs and markets, fishermen’s coves, tourist information centers, etc.

This device that was born exclusively as a response to the need to evacuate against tsunamis in Japan, today more than ever seems relevant and necessary for our country, the fact that they are addressed and studied and investigated within the framework of the professional practice seminar.

The expected disciplinary outcome of this research line will be, on the one hand, to generate the technical and theoretical contents, and then report on specific architectural proposals that synthesize the quantitative and above all qualitative aspects of the discipline in this specific case study.

2010 - 2014 > ARCHITECTURE STUDIO FOR TECHNOLOGY: STRUCTURAL WOOD LAB @ UDP, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Frame of action / Argument

This was the first architectural studio in which I collaborated as a faculty member. It was very important for my experience and training as a teacher. The studio was taught in the professional practice cycle, and being the last one students took before moving on to their final thesis architecture studio, it had an special technical and professional approach.

The theoretical framework raised the work with wood as a material of architectural design and the test in concrete proposals that detonated radical possibilities of its use in architecture. Always understanding the material from a logic of own or natural use of it, that is to explore those structures where the material was thought in and from its most precarious and daily structural logic.

The proposed action framework, included a series of competitive exercises within the studio. The winner was submitted to a participatory design stage with a local community in a vulnerability situation. After the end user, their requirements and experience informed / modified the form of the proposal, the studio was transformed into a collaborative team in order to face the following stages. These were the planimetric development, subsequent manufacture and implementation in a real place.

This project reflects one of these exercises, carried out in 2014, an emergency shelter that after being completed was contributed to a municipal school in the commune of Independencia, in the city of Santiago.

2013 - 2014 > ARCHITECTURE STUDIO 6: TACTICAL RESILIENT ARCHITECTURE IN URBAN LANDSCAPES @ UFT, SANTIAGO-CHILE

Frame of action / Argument

This was the first architecture studio in which I could have more autonomy and interference in the thematic framework, contents and methodology to implement with students. From this teaching experience I was able to consolidate and guide some empirical experiences, where I developed a relevant interest in two specific topics that I have been working on since then.

Firstly, to understand the academic exercises as the generation of binding bridges with society and in this sense, to make real contributions to specific local communities in situations of vulnerability and resource scarcity. Secondly, follows from the above and is to understand the discipline as a tool for proposing projects that operate on two simultaneous planes. The first is generating dialogues where communities and their requirements have participation from the beginning in the design processes and the second is the latent opportunity that architecture has from its synthesis power to propose concrete proposals that can materialize short cuts to equity.

This specific project intended to materialize an open system of possibilities to be configured with the interaction of users with the proposed device. In this sense, the proposal raised a seat that had two likely static positions, one where people stood facing each other to establish a possible conversation and the opposite, where they stood back to back contemplating the existing landscape. Complementarily, the wheel shape allowed its transfer and change of context to be simple and necessary.