buoyantlight, architecture, virginia fernandez

critical infrastructure - stairs
cities//infrastructure - 2013

Striving for subsistence, the growing population of Caracas has radically transformed the city in the course of the past fifty years. The inability of the city to respond to the accelerated growth that resulted from mass rural migrations left millions to provide land, shelter and basic services for themselves. The barrios, once thought to be a provisional solution to the housing shortage, are now home to more than half the population of the city. The urban poor now lives—out of necessity and through improvisation—on steep slopes, unstable soil and in flood plains. Sitting between remediation and anticipation, three asynchronous projects elaborate pragmatic responses to the prevailing scarcity of resources. In their ability to be informally adapted, the schemes test the capacity of popular manifestations of civic life to transform basic infrastructure into collective space. To overcome the precariousness that characterizes the barrios and incorporate them into the existing political mechanisms of the city, the projects are conceived as incremental frameworks that contribute to the physical integration of the ‘informal’ barrios to the ‘formal’ city.

awards

Winner, Urban Strategies Award 2012.
Publication

Published in On Site Review, Issue 30 Publics and Ethics (forthcoming).

Exhibited at Be Prepared: Architecture Responds to Disaster, Harbourfront Centre Toronto; and Architecture for Humanity's Crossing Borders exhibition, University of Toronto.