Concrete Jungle: Homes That Discover the Distinction Between Concrete and Vegetation

There’s something very engaging in regards to the mixture of lush vegetation and uncovered concrete roughness. That is what the guide Concrete Jungle: Tropical Architecture and Its Surprising Origins, printed by Gestalten, proposes to analyze. The publication gives a studying on trendy “tropical structure”, presenting homes positioned between the Tropics of Most cancers and Capricorn and their relationships with their cultural, constructive, and environmental origins. It options a number of initiatives and designers, from the Fifties to the current day, tracing a multifaceted panorama that features residential buildings positioned in areas as distinct as Brazil, Mexico, India, and Kenya.

Concrete Jungle “is an try to grasp concrete homes as extra than simply lovely buildings however as the results of a much wider phenomenon.” Inserted of their particular and plural political, financial, and cultural contexts, many of those architectures will also be understood as examples of reinterpretations and embellishments of some trendy canons and parameters, looking for to adapt to their means and prospects and create and set up their narratives, questioning a sure discourse of architectural universality that has been current within the subject for many years.

From an primarily imagetic and visible studying, complexified by 4 textual essays, the guide permits us to weave relationships and approximations between these buildings, typically temporally and spatially distant. With out failing to acknowledge the specificities of every undertaking, it illuminates lots of their timeless traits. The publication juxtaposes classics of recent structure such because the Casa da Canoa, by Oscar Niemeyer, or the Cuadra San Cristóbal, by Luis Barragán, with more moderen constructions equivalent to the homes of Marcio Kogan, from Studio MK27, and Angelo Bucci, from spbr arquitetos. Moreover, it illustrates how the residential typology will also be used for experimentation and composition in structure.

Past a dialogue or try to determine a “fashion”, the publication seeks to show the plurality of architectural manifestations and parts employed in these residences that may be seen as design potentialities even at this time, particularly of their relationships with the pure traits of their websites, such because the climatic and geographical options, broadly visualized by means of the guide’s images. In a climatic and environmental disaster, these parts turn out to be much more vital for dialogue. They reaffirm the significance of those constructions as reference prospects for quite a few initiatives. The examine and use of photo voltaic parameters, topographical options, vegetation, and native supplies, mixed with applied sciences equivalent to bolstered concrete, create homes that dialogue with their websites in a novel means.

In Europe and the US, architects have lengthy labored to regulate the pure setting, and isolation from grey, extreme, and chilly winters. However trendy architects in hotter climates had no selection however to accommodate, because the Pritzker Committee famous in 2006, “the omnipresence of nature.” These buildings represented not solely a brand new political order but additionally a recognition of man’s place in nature, a really perfect that’s extra related at this time than ever. – Michael Snyder

These constructions distinction, with the lightness of their compositions, the vivacity of the encompassing vegetation with the harshness of uncovered concrete. This creates a harmonious relationship between inside and out of doors, intervention and pre-existence, structure, and nature. At a time of intense world urbanization that usually happens to the detriment and hurt of the pure setting, these architectures are a breath of contemporary air. They’re additionally a risk transferring ahead.

Try a few of the initiatives chosen by the publication: