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Review: Détournements

MBIArch Notes

Assistant Professor Olga Felip reviews the objectives and final conclusions of the Short Design Studio ‘Détournements’ led by Cecilia Puga.

La Cruz Grande Dock, Chungungo Settlement and their proposed connection, are all physically located on the cost of the arid zones in north of Chile, on latitude 29 south and longitude 71 west, 70 km north of the city of La Serena.

In the studio Détournements, the students have constructed a place and an event, to which they only had access to certain remains or outlines of architecture. With the aim of reusing these physical and cultural remains, the students have defined personal intervention strategies, which they used to express a new programmatic and material identity over the pre-existing one and through acts of interpretation, détournement and juxtaposition.

The settlement focused on tourism and was physically located over the ruins of the settlement of Chungungo and Puerto de la Cruz Grande. The program, dispersed over this ‘territory’, had to construct a self-sustainable autonomous tourist unit and needed to comprise accommodation and beach resort, the machinery which supported life in the whole program and finally a programmatic element that had to give connectivity to the whole system.

Final Jury, view the full set of MBIArch 2011-2012 photos here
 
The studio, which lasted one month, was organized in three phases (in accordance with the text Disjecta Reliquiae by Robert Williams on the Tate Thames Dig by Mark Dion):

Collecting Methodology: A first approach to the site was developed by identifying surface finds. Every detail had to be recorded such as to better facilitate a possible total identification. What wasn’t found had to be supposed, based on constructive and formal means as suggested by each part. A reconstruction of the site had to be biased and so, the reality came to be an interpretation based on informed strategies and systems.

Final Jury, view the full set of MBIArch 2011-2012 photos here
 
Organization in the Field: In groups of three students we opened a discussion and speculation on the possible individual and collective rituals of today’s tourist, who with free access to a considerable amount of free time and independence, and a desire to move around, demands a response to his/her necessity for play, adventure and mobility. Our program, a kind of Center Parcs, according to Auge’s description, could be seen as a sort of detourned New Babylon. Glimpses of La Cruz Grande and Chungungo, as Eames’ Glimpses of the USA did, orchestrated an image proposal of the projects, three different ways of understanding the spaces for meeting and relating and its material condition. The multimedia format resulted to be a very effective tool, a kind of declaration of principles of the project in conceptual terms and of the programmatic, constructive and material strategies. The proposals were diverse and heterogeneous and approached the subject of tourism from concepts such as Isolation, Clock Distortion and Backpacker’ or non Institutional Tourism.

Final Jury, view the full set of MBIArch 2011-2012 photos here

Consequences: The third and final phase was developed by groups of two and three students and the starting point was the image proposal of the previous stage. Each design responded to the circumstances and relations between the objects that were found and the juxtaposed ones, formulating a new physical, material and constructive reality. Two of the groups developed the subject of Isolation understood in different terms: while one of the groups understood the site as a space of transition and explored the concept of isolation by a constructive strategy based on subtraction, the other group saw the site as an opportunity to explore the potential of solitude as a sequence of atmospheres held on the preexisting industrial remains. The last group of two students developed the concept of Clock Distortion, where uses occurred simultaneously and encounters happened by accident.  A timeless space of endless night or endless day physically located underneath Chungungo Village and above the water of the Dock.

Finally, the group of three students responded to the need of the non institutional travel of the backpackers and established a clear dialogue between past and present, between the remains and the new layer, between permanence and ephemeral: A basic light self-sustaining unit and its rules of settlement.

With this complete, all the proposals established references to physical, virtual and disciplinary sites, from which the material was collected and articulated through the proposal design the actual discussion on the rituality of tourism.

-Olga Felip, Assistant Professor
Architectural Design: Short Design Studio ‘Détournements’

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