#Inspiration
santiago cirugeda prescribes urban recipes for ailing societies
A traveling playground installation that could be placed anywhere.
quickly becoming well known amongst a new breed of ‘guerrilla’ architects sprouting up all over the world, seville-based architect santiago cirugeda speaks at the 2015 design indaba conference in cape town about his unconventional creative practice. subverting the traditional bureaucracies involved in the building process, cirugeda questions the values many architects and political powers place on urban development and finds the legal loopholes and forgotten spaces to create functional architecture by the people and for the people. from the popularity of his first public project where he converted a dumpster into a ‘a self-built and self-managed urban playground’ that would transform from a swing to a seesaw to a flamenco stage, he continued to intervene in a variety of scales in all the recession-battered sites. spain proves to be a veritable breeding ground for this type guerrilla studio. with over 500,000 abandoned skeletons spread throughout the country, there are plenty of situations begging for intervention — be it legal or illegal.
the significance of his work lies more in the process of the projects while the structure itself is merely a finished product whose reward has been the journey and the use it provides afterwards. the public and in fact many architects have gotten very enveloped in the idea of building ‘beautiful’ buildings and making money, and in the process the architect separates himself from the groups of people that are involved in making the building a reality, and from the larger question of hwo the building serves its community. ‘recetas urbanas’, his studio based in seville, is built around the premise of creating inclusive architecture that integrates all trades from design to realization, to take a palpable need and answer it with functional design. the studio also considers education of paramount importance- that is they aim to spread their cause and their strategies so that everyone around the world can implement similar goals.
there’s nothing glamorous about the lifestyle- after 17 years he still hasn’t received a paycheck from his work. cirugeda apathetically states that his projects are often criticized as ‘ugly’ to which he responds, ‘who doesn’t have an ugly friend?’ his partner ‘bifu’ spent a year living in the ‘spider’ structure in one of their most well known projects ‘la carpa’, in order to claim the illegally-squatted space. he lived without electricity or water and endured routine muggings every couple of days. for an entire year.
in return, tens of thousands of people attended free live music concerts, theater performances, circus shows, and workshops- until the government shut it down.
the work of cirugeda and indeed the thousands of ‘guerrilla’ architects around the world is not to aim for the glory, for the big beautiful commissions from big names and deep pockets. instead they urge us to look at all the corners and pockets that surround us, to find opportunity in the derelict and to involve the community to improve a space for the many, as opposed to the elect few.
exposing the inefficiencies of governing bodies, the result of asking the state for money to begin the basics of the restoration process was an immaculately paved walkway complete with patches of grass, bins, benches, and lights- the structures themselves, however, still suffer the same ruin as they originally started with.
