A solution for the Guajiro Masterplan, placed just outside of Manaure, sought to provide a permanent place of residence for civic, commercial, and residential entities of Wayuu living, a cultural of semi-nomadic clans.
Students from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island have been working with students from the Autonomous University in Colombia to combine efforts to create work that give feasible options for organizations and governmental bureaus that might want to help the Wayuu to bridge into the modern world.
Programmatic Elements of a Wayuu Masterplan.
1.
Develop Synergy between buildings and open spaces based on programmatic relations.
Building synergy throughout a landscape is a product of familiarity and flexibility. The horizon line weaves together inhabitants, buildings, and the land. Nature, in this context, has the same characteristics as a seemingly, never-ending volume, like a sanctuary with niches built into the ground below for life’s creatures to inhabit.
The relationships of niche size, fluctuates in response to climate, where vegetation in some areas surrounds as a collective unexplored territory, to be privately lived in. The smallest pockets of space become fabric for which a Wayuu homestead can set roots. Paths that traverse through the mass appear as time passes, but should the family find that leaving this
niche is necessary, the land will dissolve their paths, an exhibition of the cyclical nature of life and living.
When drought brings the land and its creature to submission, vegetation becomes scarce in some areas, these become civic plazas for the Wayuu. As paths multiply over an expanse of the landscape, often a saturation of paths, created by the Guajiro, began to collect, also creating a plaza. When the frequency of use has grown, a community village has been naturally selected. A civic arena for hospitals, schools, and other public structures can now directly compose a landscape. Man-made architecture pulsates against a dry desert horizon, with cactus intermingling, a source of sustenance and building material.
Wayuu pathways and Colombian pathways challenge one another, as both are derived differently. The city builds with a heavy hand, unearthing anything to lay a straight path to some other industrial center. These pieces of infrastructure fight the landscape and disregard a natural intent. Pathways used by the Wayuu, are built by use and frequency of use only, moving in a serpentine way to avoid brush and cactus, but finding the most direct way to a place.
One path must synergize with others. The Wayuu have an impulse to engage in a modern world, as climatic changes have taken away their herds, and left women to trek for many hours each day to sell their textiles. A new architectural relationship can unite both pathways at a commercial epicenter. This is symbolic of the two groups of people coming together. The landscape uses vegetation as a changing threshold. The diversion of some paths from the consumer, create private pathways for the Wayuu. This will be a way for the outsiders and insiders to give to each other, while defining inherent and necessary differences. Buildings and the landscape can unify along a threshold, defining usable places for sale and cultural exhibition.
Ten Principles of Ecological Design.
I. Pathways and places should be derived from the landscape, not on top of it.
II. The interchange between paths create interstitial spaces that should be used to house infrastructures and social gathering
III. Areas of growth and sacred spaces should be in close proximity for the well being of the community
IV. In order to protect the ecosystem, harvesting of building materials should be done through moderation, selection of plants should be singular and far apart
V. Where permanent architectures are created, thermal properties should be utilized. Free resources like the sun, the wind, and all natural forces should be used in each new structure
VI. A semi-nomadic life requires that material components come together with ease and come apart without creating waste
VII. Rain water, a central determinant of everyday living, should be incorporated in the weaving of networks
VIII. Commercial infrastructures should emphasize weaving as an industry.
IX. The creation of a communal eco-garden, is
X. All the public venues should offset their surplus of energy to the surrounding Rancherias.
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