Weaving the Street
Presentation at Museum Würth La Rioja Concéntrico 02
Marina Fernández Ramos is an architect from ETSAM, UPM, Product Designer from the Art 12 School and studied industrial design in Madrid. She obtained a Master’s Degree in Art and Creation Research. She has worked in different design and architecture agencies and independently through the Submarine studio. She is part of C + Arquitectos de Nerea Calvillo. She is especially interested in collaborative processes, interventions in the public space and the hybridization between crafts and new technologies. “Weaving the Street” is a project open to participation. It consists of the elaboration of parasols using the XXL crochet technique, which are installed in the streets of Valverde de La Vera (Cáceres, Extremadura) during the cultural week and the town’s August celebrations. The installation helps to express the identity of the place, supports the intentions and wishes of the participants in the project. It welcomes visitors and helps create an atmosphere with a festive spirit. The pieces work as sunscreens during the day and incorporate light at night, showing the way to the town square, the main meeting center during the holidays. For the elaboration of the parasols they reuse plastic material, shopping bags or garbage, which they transform into long strips that are then woven. The resulting pieces are light, waterproof and can be used again from year to year. The call is open to all people who want to participate, regardless of their previous knowledge. Each participant weaves his pieces individually, or in a team with other neighbours. Meetings are held once a month in the town square where experiences and knowledge are shared. Each weaver makes his own personal design, which will be part of a collective work for the whole community.
Workshop DE2 & Gutiérrez-DeLaFuente
Presentation at Würth La Rioja Museum Concéntrico 02
TallerDE2 and Gutiérrez-DelaFuente are two architecture offices located in Madrid and formed by four young Spanish architects who collaborate since 2008. They have been awarded in national and international competitions, among which we can highlight the 1st Europan 9 Prize in Selb (Germany) for this project. As a result of it the projects Day Center for Children, Youth Club and Youth Hostel have been built. The experimental-IQ collective housing project for young families, currently under construction, is part of this strategy, the result of a 1st Prize in 2010. Children’s Day Center, The Children’s Day Center project (Haus der Tagesmütter) is the first building out of a total of four. Three of them are still under construction. This was completed in September 2012 and is the result of the implementation of the 1st Prize won in the Europan-9 International Competition in the German city of Selb, in 2008. The Children’s Day Center is part of a global urban strategy that aims to re-activate the shrinking city center of Selb in Germany. The intervention consists in making small insertions, oriented towards the young population, which triggers a complete reactivation of the social dynamics of the city. The Children’s Day Center hosts a program self-managed by associations of mothers in order to take care of children outside school hours, to help reconcile work and family life, strengthening the local economy and preventing the population from escaping. The proposed program is characterized by the flexibility of the system consisting of organizing the project into 6 specialized programmatic bands, which function by addition. With them, the void between the buildings is filled, thus completing the urban front of the incomplete blocks. The project resolves roofs and facades with the same material in the longitudinal direction of the bands. The scale and color of these pieces are adapted to the particular use of the building and are integrated into the Bavarian urban landscape. The formal and material result is a system that reproduces topological forms that are self-sufficient, but that in turn produce a non-evident estrangement.