Winning projects 2011 in Latin America

This project for a multifunctional public building, Grotão – Fábrica de Música (music factory), is located in Grotão in the heart of the Paraisópolis favela of São Paolo. With more than 100,000 inhabitants, it is one of the largest informal communities worldwide. Like many favelas, and despite its unusually central location, the area is effectively separated from the formal city and its social and cultural infrastructure.

This master plan was developed after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami that struck Constitución, a city of 46,000 people and proposes to respond with “geographical answers” to the “geographical threats” of the earthquake and tsunami risk. Construction of 484 dwellings in Villa Verde has been completed, with additional reconstruction works and riverside forest/park zones.

The project is part of a general strategy introduced by the Mexican federal government for Ciudad Juárez, a city of 1.5 million people on the US-Mexican border, which with El Paso in Texas forms one of the world’s largest bi-national metropolitan areas. The city is located in a strategic position for drugs and arms trafficking and suffers from increasing levels of violence as the current administration’s efforts to curtail the drug trade are strongly resisted.

The intention of this large-scale project is to save an area of more than 50ha of the Mountain Cloud Forest in the municipality of Banderilla, adjacent to the state capital of Xalapa in Veracruz, Mexico. The forest is at risk from the urban encroachment pattern of the city. The project aims to ensure that the physical, ecological and economic capital of the site are enhanced and remain sufficiently robust for further adaptation over time. Both parts of the project intend to make local

This university library project continues from earlier building works to construct the private non-profit Diego Portales University. Founded in 1982, the university in central Santiago has more than 1,300 academic staff and 11,000 students with nationally-recognized programs in business, law, psychology and journalism. The design meets the demands of the dense situation with a multi-floor layout and elements that bring additional natural light and fresh air into the building.

The Trojan Library project was initiated by the municipal government of Rosario in response to the nation’s poor results in a 2009 worldwide evaluation of 15-year-olds in mathematics, science and reading. The strategy provides both the infrastructure of the library and a vast network of supplementary activities to generate flow-on use of the facility in Argentina’s third largest city with a population of 1.2 million.

The project’s idea is the regeneration of the disused rail transport network in the Valley of Oaxaca – one of the poorest states of Mexico. The rail system had been an important transport element for more than a century until the tracks were decommissioned in the 1990’s after the urban area had grown. Facing the challenges of the future, the project proposes to insert a new electric low-floor train system to provide a safe and high quality public transport system.

Taking Mexico City as a tangible study case, Regenerating La Piedad River reflects on the growth of mega cities and societies’ reliance on individual motorized traffic systems, leading to the environmental degradation of ecosystems worldwide. What is intended is the regeneration of living systems to perpetuate self-renewing patterns instead of their contamination and rapid degradation – proposing a fundamental change in societies’ relationship with the environment.

The concept, SED – Water Factory, responds to the scenario of the breakdown of the global system based on the trajectory of current ecological, economic and social crises. It then questions the role of architecture in this kind of future. As its basis, the project depicts a positive turnaround with the beginning of a new cycle – beginning with action, evolution and innovation, reaching for a more sustainable architecture.

The project is designed for the UNESCO World Heritage listed Pantanal Conservation Area, a complex landscape encompassing 200,000 square km of lakes, rivers and wetlands in the border area between Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay. The strategic importance of the area for the South American interior is identified, both through an investigation of its potential as a transportation route between the ocean harbors and the inland.

The disorder within the university campus of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC) in Rio de Janeiro and the lack of space initiated the Binding infrastructure: expanding the university’s capacity project. The relocation of a parking area that today disturbs the entrances to the campus to an unused roof slab of a tunnel is the first component of the project. The second and major intervention is a new structure, connecting and thus upgrading two existing buildings.