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

There’s something very enticing concerning the mixture of lush vegetation and uncovered concrete roughness. That is what the ebook Concrete Jungle: Tropical Architecture and Its Surprising Origins, revealed by Gestalten, proposes to analyze. The publication provides a studying on fashionable “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 Nineteen 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 stunning buildings however as the results of a 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 fashionable canons and parameters, in search of 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 discipline for many years.

From an primarily imagetic and visible studying, complexified by 4 textual essays, the ebook permits us to weave relationships and approximations between these buildings, usually temporally and spatially distant. With out failing to acknowledge the specificities of every venture, it illuminates lots of their timeless traits. The publication juxtaposes classics of contemporary 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 components 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, extensively visualized by way of the ebook’s images. In a climatic and environmental disaster, these components grow to be much more necessary 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 singular manner.

In Europe and the US, architects have lengthy labored to regulate the pure atmosphere, and isolation from grey, extreme, and chilly winters. However fashionable 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 super 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 international urbanization that usually happens to the detriment and hurt of the pure atmosphere, these architectures are a breath of contemporary air. They’re additionally a risk shifting ahead.

Take a look at a number of the initiatives chosen by the publication: