Sólido Líquido Lítico

The project explores the re-naturalisation of the river Arzobispo (Bogotá) and the creation of 1 km river garden punctuated by 9 'neighbourhood rooms'. The garden becomes an encounter between mountain and city, untamed and domesticated - it is a place for the discovery and regeneration of the natural as well as of the human environment.

The project proposal involves 3 levels of intervention: - the urban-ecological scale for the re-naturalisation of the polluted river; - landscape design for the articulation of the garden and its zones; - architectural design for the creation of the 9 pavilions (neighbourhood rooms) and the infrastructure, which allows the interaction with the re-naturalised landscape. To re-naturalise the river it was required an act of removal of the concrete layer and the excavation through the ground to restore the natural soil of the river bed and its water capacity. This action of unearthing is also the driving concept for the pavilions and it acts in two dimensions: - vertical, by excavating the soil and - horizontal, by carving openings through the dense urban block, concealed behind barbed wire. The elements of water and soil are then not only found, but (re)discovered and brought to unexpected places, woven within the urban fabric. Discovery, secrecy and meandering are characteristic of these pavilions. They are imaginative, tactile, ‘sounding’ spaces, which often come as a surprise, emerging from the ground, from behind a wall or a line of trees. The architecture of the ‘neighbourhood rooms’ aims at interacting with the landscape in the form of light infrastructure, providing access, enclosure or contact with the elements of soil and water, while simultaneously offering alternative forms of non-programmatic public space. The rooms dialogue with their immediate context and their architecture transforms along the river garden. From an expression of surface, floor, wall and enclosure, architecture slowly fades into a door, a series of columns, up until showing its structure and dissolving into the landscape. Architecture reaches then a “lithic” state, a reduction to its elemental function, a mass sculpted by time and use. To unearth also means to reveal and experience what is lying underneath or behind. The physical excavation of the soil suggests exposing what the river used to be for the city in the past, while at the same time dictating its own future and the one of the community around it.