Instalación "Lugares comunes" Iglesia San Francisco 2009

Project Details

“Lugares comunes” Installation San Francisco Church 2009

DESCRIPTION

The project emerged as an initiative of Bogotá’s District Secretariat of Culture, Recreation and Sport, which sought to take contemporary art beyond its traditional circuits and turn the city into a large-scale setting for encounters between different audiences, artistic practices, and reflections on urban life. To this end, it launched Lugares Comunes (Common Places), a program bringing together ten ephemeral interventions by Colombian and international artists across different locations in the city. Each artist was also asked to establish an exchange with a local creative studio capable of helping to make the project possible.

House for an artist

In October 2009, we were contacted with the idea of designing and building a “flying house” for Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi. Much of his work revolves around creating new contexts around urban structures such as public monuments, elements of street furniture, or specific architectural features.

During a brief visit to Bogotá, Nishi selected the tower of the Church of San Francisco for the intervention, an important landmark of the city’s colonial architecture located within one of its most significant historic settings. At that point, the idea consisted of constructing a domestic room around the clock on the front façade. A few days later, we received an email from Tatzu with two photographs of the church altered with drawings of a structure floating not in front of the façade, but above the church itself.

For Nishi, his role concluded with the proposal of an installation that would “construct new environments in which citizens could literally approach historic heritage in a different way, renewing its meanings and making its historical dimension visible.” For us, this marked the beginning of a highly undefined project that we chose to approach by ironically revisiting that classic exercise assigned to architecture students: designing “a house for an artist.” After all, the modernist tradition suggested that the design of houses offered particularly fertile ground for experimentation, research, and the testing of new ideas. In this case, it would be a temporary house, thirty meters above the ground, and open to the public.

Low resolution

Our first step was to connect the project with several lines of research already present in our work, including the vitality of everyday life and the exploration of low resolution. By vitality, we refer to the relational dimension that architecture can establish with reality: the number of social and natural relationships it proposes, the encounters it is capable of generating, the new uses and users it invents, and the degree of agency it gives them over that reality.

To resolve the form of the house and the way it would be built, we began with a simple observation of the everyday and of the energy already available. We have called this optimistic way of working within the natural constraints of any project “low-resolution actions.” In other words, valuing the everyday, revitalizing the ordinary, and treating imperfection as another useful condition are ways of adapting to the accidents and bureaucracy that precede many processes in our society.

The thing is very bad

We began by resolving circulation, knowing that this decision would simultaneously determine how the project could be built. Scaffolding appeared as an efficient and standardized system for constructing stair towers. We evaluated different alternatives based on two fundamental premises: stability at a height of thirty meters and the impossibility of creating fixed anchors into the church tower.

We selected structural CR steel scaffolding measuring 1.50 × 2.10 meters. Although less flexible than multidirectional scaffolding, it was stronger and more stable—30 cm wider and 60 cm taller—than conventional systems. According to the structural model, an eighteen-section self-supporting tower required a core of four frames and three cross-braces per level, together with counterweights at ground level.

Because the church is a protected architectural property and a national heritage building, there was one basic rule: the house could not touch the church. The next challenge was therefore to define a structural system that, connected to the scaffolding tower, could support a 5 × 5 × 3.20 meter house—together with a considerable live load—without transferring any load to the walls of the original building. After considering several structural models, we adopted a radical solution given the limitations of time and budget: to fabricate a steel platform that would cantilever over the church tower.

I love your work

We designed a prefabricated 4.5 × 8 meter platform with bolted connections so that the steel profiles could later be reused. Because of the complexity of the installation, the platform was assembled in situ and lifted by a PH crane to the connection point with the scaffolding, where it was welded to specially designed safety joints. The equilibrium of the platform depended on two tons of counterweight placed at the end opposite the house.

Once the platform was in place, lightweight dry-construction walls and a galvanized metal-sheet roof were installed. As agreed with Tatzu, the interior would simulate a traditional domestic room, complete with armchairs, tables, lamps, and paintings. The intention was not only to disorient visitors by placing them in a familiar domestic setting at an extraordinary height, but also to dilute the presence of the cross as the only remaining visual reference to the church. To unify the intervention, the exterior walls, scaffolding, and platform were all painted with blue anticorrosive coating.

In November 2009, after four weeks of simultaneous design and construction, the work opened to the public. More than 6,000 people visited the installation free of charge over three weeks—one week longer than originally planned—from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. A significant achievement for a small-scale experiment.

P.S. If you are wondering how we managed to convince the priests responsible for the church to allow the installation, the answer is simpler than it may seem: an agreement to carry out maintenance work on the cross, and the promise that they would be the first people to go up.

DETAILS

Use

Installation

Type

Ephemeral intervention

Area

16 m²

Location

Bogotá D. C. – Colombia

Meters above the sea level

2625

Average annual temperature

13.1 °C

Year

2009

Client

District secretary of Culture, Recreation and Sport + Bogotá Town Hall

Strategic partner

Fundación Thrida

Intervention and Artistic concept

Tatzu Nishi

Design and construction

Yemail Architecture (Oficina Informal)

Project team

Antonio Yemail + Ingrid Duarte + Juliana Jimenez

Structure

MMC Construcciones Miguel Morales C. / COLREJILLAS

Scaffolding

Equipos Gleason + Serrano Gómez

Dry Construction

MMC Construcciones Miguel Morales C. / Jair Rojas

Photo Credits

Santiago Pinyol

Categories: Culture