For the 10th anniversary of CA’ASI, and to celebrate FREESPACE in the context of the Collateral Events of the 16th Architecture Venice Biennale, we have invited Young Architects from Latin America to participate in a competition so as to display their works.
As in previous editions with young Chinese, Arab and then African architects, we organized this new competition without imposing any specific theme, in order to highlight emerging ideas.
Within such a vast, diverse and ever-changing region, we discovered similar characteristics among all the projects, highlighting the efforts these young architects put into improving the living conditions of this region of our fragile planet.
Given the high quality of the projects and the large number of entries – and also for methodological reasons – we have chosen to analyse the projects starting from their common features.
The role these young architects play in society, the challenge that their works represent for their context and the way the projects propose new ideas to their own communities, led us to identify different series of projects which helped us enrich the analysis and animate our discussions:
1. THE GENEROSITY OF THE SOUL
2. EMPOWERMENT, CO-BUILDING THE CITY
3. THE RIGHT TO LANDSCAPE
4. 10 VARAS, THE SWEETNESS OF RIGOR
5. HOUSE AND TERRITORY
6. HERITAGE RELOADED
7. COMMON GOOD, A SPACE TO INVENT
8. COHABIT
9. MATERIAL / IMMATERIAL
10. RESPONSES TO EMERGENCY
Out of 201 submissions from eighteen countries (Argentina, Brasil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Perú, Salvador, Uruguay, Venezuela), three projects were awarded prizes by an international jury, 15 honourable mentions were granted within each series, and 59 projects were selected for the exhibition. The three winning projects as well as the honorable mentions perfectly show the ten different themes. Source YALA, photos Courtesy of Metropolis Communication.