studio statement

Designing the Architecture of Public Works (Health Care Facilities, Educational, Cultural, Recreational, Public Spaces, etc.) implies a series of challenges in both developed and developing countries. In developing countries, and particularly in Latin America, public facilities design may pursue extra challenges in addition to the purely functional endeavors: they should not only be clearly affordable and sustainable in durable and reasonable economic terms, but should become an instrument for transforming individuals, through their current needs, into a condensed social community, providing a broad, sustainable and meaningful sense of public healing.

Physical but also social healing starts with the Public having access to this universal status, regardless of their economic, social, political, or ethnic conditions. This sense of public healing begins the domino effect: individuals are healed by professionals (doctors, teachers, trainers) and technology (buildings, equipment), but at a larger scale, entire societal groups are healed because the facilities extend a sense of belonging, of place. As a public congregator, the facility becomes part of the people, pertains to the people, belongs to the people, and reactivates the local idiosyncrasies and relevance of the social bond, thus cultivating the civic citizenship.

The Public Facility performs and renders in its design the urban drama of public space, articulating the formal/institutional with the informal public life in the city. Social invisibilities, local lore, that which has been forgotten, that wisdom which has managed to survive, the marginalized, the alienated, denied, those not officially recognized or those confronted by homogenization as a condition for their integration, could rise in the design as a form of particular and patient counterpoint to the abstract machine of the formal city, uniting members in a dynamic, common healed body.

Public healing works is a sort of significant cure that begins the transformation of sick individuals into a stronger, more reconciled, healed community. It is a chain reaction, an epidemic that spreads the healing process. Each member heals another one reverting social invisibility into the manifestation of Public, a demonstration of built dignity and inclusion becoming a social celebration, a public display of affection from the city to the people, for collective engagement, conquest, and realization.

From a building to an infrastructure or a city fragment, in the form of public acts of architecture, it provides the real, comprehensive construct to help localized urban constrictions meet occasional social emergences, offering to precisely unfold in the situation an embedded but at the same time expansive and fertile architectural/urban release; a rich fabric of complex textures able to reconcile and surpass the simplistic formal/informal contradiction, inexorably immersed in the real grounds of the urban complex becomes a powerful tool for public enhancement of the city.

The rapid emerging of contemporary socio-cultural issues and human challenges are immersing the old stable urban contexts of the big metropolis in the vortex on new dynamics (Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, etc.): the case of street kids, extreme poverty, cartoneros, favelas, violence and crime, infant prostitution, drugs dealing, aids, etc., is the real political ground for Public Architecture and Urbanism acting effectively on the platform of societal transformation, happening right in front of everybody's eyes.

school of architecture & landscape architecture / arizona state universtity
study abroad program / buenos aires / fall 2006