We address topics, by working on different scales, concerning local structures up to the over-all city level, we think about local potentials and aggregated strategies, address local actors and therefore want to develop new space as well as potential for the urban society in Buenos Aires. We adduce PiedrabuenArte, a former shed and deposit of the world-famous Teatro Colón, as an Urban Lab, cooperate with local artists of the huge housing complex Piedrabuena and aim to transform it to an innovative and structure shaping cultural centre.Inputs lectures, site visits from guests will be given and teams of students from various interdisciplinary and cultural backgrounds will work together.
„Reality is partial to symmetries and slight anachronisms; Dahlmann had come to the sanatorium in a cab, and it was a cab that took him to the station at PlazaConstitución. The first cool breath of autumn, after the oppression of the summer, was like a natural symbol of his life brought back from fever and the brink of death. The city, at that seven o'clock in the morning, had not lost that look of a ramshackle old house that cities take on at night; the streets were like long porches and corridors, the plazas
like interior courtyards. After his long stay in hospital, Dahlmann took it all in with delight and a touch of vertigo; a few seconds before his eyes registered them, he would recall the corners, the marquees, the modest variety of Buenos Aires. In the yellow light of the new day, it all came back to him. Everyone knows that the South begins on the other side of Avenida Rivadavia. Dahlmann had often said that that was no mere saying, that by crossing Rivadavia one entered an older and more stable world.” (Borges, J. L., 2013: Fictions)
Buenos Aires with its more than three million inhabitants and as a metropolitan region with more than 13 million inhabitants, is the economic and cultural centre of Argentina. The city is marked by a long and moved continental, as well as European-driven history of immigration and thus displays a large diversity of everyday culture. In the upcoming summer semester of 2018, students from both Buenos Aires and students from the Technical University of Vienna will work together in the districts Comuna 8 and Comuna 9 in the southwestern parts of Buenos Aires, the so-called CABA, or Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. Those districts provide differentiating pictures of the home city of Tango, extensively used production, storage and industrial facilities, of autistic and huge structures of social housing, neglected residential neighbourhoods and seedy quarters / slums. We will dive into the quest for local dynamics and the local, spatial potentials of fragmented and marginalized quarters in Buenos Aires. We will look for the specific qualities of spaces and places and develop new space and place for opportunities, the most significant and innovative issues and topics in the field of a continuously revolving, globalized world: The urban commons, a social economy, of social housing, of new ways of working, employment and services in the city.
The project is organized in cooperation with Markus Vogl (visiting professor Walter Gropius Lehrstuhl (DAAD) in Buenos Aires).
- the workshop in Buenos Aires will be held beginning 26th of Feburary to 9th of March, 2018
- estimated costs approx. 1.500 euro (flight, accommodatiaon and stay) without travel subsidy.
Urban Lab – Piedra Buena – in the fabric PiedrabuenArte – have a look at there page:
www.facebook.com/galpon.piedrabuenarte
Spanish skills are helpful, but not necessary.
