Arch. Myriam B. Mahiques Curriculum Vitae

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Mi punto de vista sobre el Artista y su Técnica

Nebulosa. Pintura digital de Myriam B. Mahiques
Platón consideraba que el conocimiento es innato y se perfecciona a través de los años de crecimiento. Idea base de la teoría del Constructivismo.
Aristóteles, enfatizó el desarrollo integral de la persona; jugar, entrenarse, escuchar música, -entre tantas actividades-, formarían el cuerpo, la mente y el alma.
Para hablar de técnica, no nos confundamos con tecnología, si ambas las palabras provienen del griego Techne. Literalmente traducida, sería arte, manualidad, habilidad. Pero conceptualmente, es el uso sistemático de un conocimiento para realizar una acción humana. El origen del conocimiento? Pues que lo discutan los filósofos.
Mucho podemos contar acerca de nuestras técnicas artísticas, para escribir, dibujar, pintar, cocinar, cantar, fotografiar..... Pero yo creo que uno no encuentra la técnica, sino la técnica lo encuentra a uno.
No estoy segura si el conocimiento es innato, pero sí que nacemos con ciertas habilidades, que en los tiempos de la inteligencia emocional, nos pueden situar por arriba de cualquier persona de alto coeficiente intelectual. Obsoleto este sistema de reconocimiento de inteligencias, hemos de hurgar en nuestro pasado para ver la luz en nuestras técnicas del presente.
En mi caso particular, no cursé preescolar, ni ¨jardincito¨, que no eran obligatorios en ese momento. Sin embargo, entre los cuatro y cinco años, tenía necesidad de escribir. Fue sencillo, me senté en un banquito con una mesita de juegos en el patio de casa, tomé una ¨birome¨ y comencé a escribir continuamente mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Las letras se me presentaron como una expresión distinta a los dibujos infantiles, y por su concepción no legible, diría que ¨el texto¨ se acercaba más a un gráfico monótono. Letras, dibujo, una misma cosa, porqué no?
A mis nueve años, se acercó a casa un vendedor callejero, trayendo unos libros de la colección Walt Disney, esas hermosas ediciones españolas llenas de fotos y con tapas duras brillantes. Recuerdo a mi mamá dudar, pero me leyó la expresión, o tal vez para que ningún vecino la critique (porque estábamos en la puerta del jardín), me dijo, ¨elegite uno¨. Y sin dudar, elegí ¨Maravillas del Mar¨. Esas fotos del fondo marino me cautivaron, pero especialmente un par de ellas mostrando los monstruosos peces piedra. Confusión en el mar! Cómo un pez puede ser piedra, animal, mimetizarse en el fondo, todo en una maraña de colores, elementos inertes y vida a la vez. Creo que esa fue mi primera imagen de un fractal, cuando Mandelbrot recién empezaba a pensar, qué pasaría con la Bolsa y los cereales, y los patrones de ventas, etc. Con los años, me bastó ver una foto aérea de una ciudad africana. Pez piedra, ciudad africana, todo me cierra, basta conseguir softwares para aprender a representarlos con la tecnología adecuada.
El vendedor volvió y yo elegí ¨Mitos y Leyendas¨, ante las protestas de mi mamá, que resignada decía, ¨si los vende tan baratos y no los trae todos juntos es porque los está robando¨. Este asunto no estaba entre mis preocupaciones. No sólo leí el libro unas cinco veces, sino que me preguntaba porqué las ilustraciones deformaban los cuerpos, todos elongados, estilizados, planos, sin intención de mostrar la tercera dimensión. Esa fue mi primera apreciación curiosa de arte, que después de todo, estaba emparentado con el arte bizantino. 
Tapa del disco " Burn" de Deep Purple


A los quince años, edad de la música y los bailes, me compré el long play (qué antigüedad!) Burn (Quemar) de Deep Purple. Y no dudé en empezar a copiar con las pinturitas del colegio, esas cabezas con una vela arriba, impresionante, cabezas derritiéndose en explosión de colores.......Me llevó once años más llegar al taller de pintura y tomar contacto con los olores y la textura del color.
A los dieciséis, mi familia cita al ¨maestro mayor de obras¨ que diseñaría nuestra casa nueva. Todos absortos, y yo, pensando, ¨ahhh, ésta será mi habitación, para mí sola!¨. En las caras serias y absortas de mis padres comprendí que este hombre, que no era arquitecto ni lo sería, estaba cambiando con simple un dibujo nuestras vidas. Creo que este fue mi primer encuentro con la arquitectura y la sociología, que tiñó todos mis escritos doctorales.
Entonces, mi técnica, cómo explicarlo correctamente?, es una mezcla de todas esas sensaciones, el ver un cuadro digital –o no- y decir, ¨así¨, sin vueltas, sin meditar si le falta luz, color, si la imagen se me ¨cae¨ o si se hizo un agujero visual; en mis escritos mezclados, se confunden los idiomas, y la poesía se junta con el lenguaje técnico, las imágenes de morfologías urbanas representadas con fractales se asocian a los santos y rituales, las recetas de comida se vuelven proyectos arquitectónicos.... y no hay forma de desdoblar el producto artístico en un proceso regido por el paso 1, paso 2, siguiente....

Monday, March 1, 2010

Easter Island’s Statues at Risk

Moai with “hats”. Picture by Marc Pelissier.
The Chilean Easter Island has always been an object of curiosity and it is well-known for tourists due to its monumental statues. There has been controversy and confusion concerning the origins of the Easter Islanders, Thor Heyerdahl proposed they would be Peruvian descent, but archaeological evidence indicates that Polynesians discovered the island at about 400 AD.
The island, with the native name of Rapa Nui is located 3500 km West of South American continent. During the aftermath of the earthquake in Chile, last February 27th, there was a tsunami warning and people were ordered to evacuate the coastal areas, to move to the highlands. The warning expired and the island weathered the tsunami with no major damage.
But, regardless the earthquake, Easter Island’s statues are at risk, as weathering imperils them continuously.
The following text is taken from Kristin Weichman’s article “Easter Island’s Statues at Risk” for National Geographic Magazine, November 2005:
Moai. Picture by Cliff Wassman.
“The great stone faces are showing their age. For some six centuries, beginning a thousand years ago, the Rapa Nui people of Easter Isaland carved images of their ancestors into the island’s soft volcanic tuff. The sculptures –called Moai- probably started wearing away soon after the statues were dragged from the tuff quarry to their platform sites, some of which are miles away. But years of exposure to wind, water and human activity have sped the deterioration.
At Ahu Tongariki, largest of Easter Island’s moai sites, the 15 statues have already been through a lot. Feuding Rapa Nui began toppling and breaking the figures, which weigh as much as 98 tons, in the 17th century, and a 1960 tsunami washed the scattered stones hundreds of feet inland. When archaeologists started reconstructing Ahu Tongariki in 1992, it was a rubble pile. They hoisted the broken pieces upright, then cemented them together. Recently the mended moai were covered with tarps to allow them to dry. A water repellent was then applied to prevent further erosion –but the coating is expected to last only a few years.
“It’s sad but unfortunately true that existing methods cannot preserve all the statues,” notes UCLA archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg. Since 1981 she’s complied more than 12,000 images, along with historical, ethnographic, and excavation records, of the island’s 887 moai. “The Rapa Nui community and their scientific advisers have some hard choices to make,” says Van Tilburg. “Statues containing the most valuable scientific or historical information can and must be saved.”

Concurso Gratuito con Premios Internacionales. World Architecture Community

Llamada a la comunidad de World Architecture
Registrate y presenta tus proyectos en worldarchitecture.org, tendrás reconocimiento internacional
20+10+X Premios de Arquitectura, 7ª Convocatoria:
Plazo de presentación: 23 de Abril de 2010

worldarchitecture.org, el primer portal interactivo creado para proporcionar una oportunidad para todos los Estudios de ámbito local, invita a todos los Arquitectos Mundiales a registrarse y presentar sus proyectos - gratuitamente - hasta el 23 de Abril de 2010 para participar en el 20+10+X Architecure Award, 7ª Convocatoria. Más de 200 Miembros de Honor, entre los cuales se encuentran Udo Kultermann, Hans Hollein, Fumihiko Maki, Robert Ivy, Wolf D. Prix, Charles Correa and Michael Sorkin, pueden participar en la votación online y constituyen el Panel científico y jurado.

CÓMO PARTICIPAR

20+10+X Awards es un programa de Premios internacionales en línea de la Comunidad de World Architecture que ya ha alcanzado un nivel prestigioso gracias a su extraordinario panel de Miembros de honor y al elevado nivel de los proyectos ganadores de los primeros seis Ciclos. Los Premios se repiten cada tres meses e incluyen un programa internacional de publicación de los resultados en colaboración con un amplio número de revistas de arquitectura en todos los continentes. Cada convocatoria recibe aproximadamente 1100 proyectos presentados por los miembros de la Comunidad, entre los cuales después de un primer proceso de votación pública vienen seleccionados 250 proyectos. A continuación se proclaman a través de los medios de comunicación relacionados con la arquitectura los 35 ganadores, además de otros 30-40 proyectos mencionados.

Visita la colección de Proyectos Ganadores de las primeras seis convocatorias

Estudiantes, paisajistas, ingenieros pueden también presentar proyectos de los cuales sean autores. Todas las categorías (residencial, comercial, educativo,..) construidos o prototipos son considerados elegibles para los premios.

worldarchitecture.org invita a todos los arquitectos a crear un perfil en WA. Todos los proyectos presentados serán promocionados y puestos en valor en todo el mundo. El portal WA es el único registro abierto internacional de arquitectura contemporánea donde todos los arquitectos, investigadores e instituciones someten su trabajo y enlaces para compartir con el resto del Mundo.

para mayor información:
www.worldarchitecture.org
info@worldarchitecture.org

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Testing Priests´sermons at the Interior of Crypt of the Colonia Güell Church

Interior of crypt. Picture by Rolando Polo. From Rolando Polo.com

I´d like to share with you this great article on the Colonia Güell church´s crypt interior. It is published in the book ¨Gaudí¨, by John Gill, p. 120. Parragon Publishing Book, 2004. Before the article, it says ¨Courtesy of AISA¨.


¨If, as seems likely, the Colonia´s churchgoers had difficulty concentrating on the liturgy while inside this Stygian marvel, Gaudí devised a way to help them focus on their devotions. In some of the most exquisite furniture he ever designed, he produced molded seats that were explicitly intended to keep the congregation alert, perhaps even on the edge of their seats. As with the organic moulding of the snake bench in the Park, the prayer benches were specially designed to keep the sitter erect and attentive. Or, perhaps to test the allure of the church and the power of the priest to keep his congregation interested in the same old sermons. With Gaudí it is sometimes impossible to tell if he is testing God, himself or everyone else on their belief. These interiors are possible evidence of Gaudí´s growing interest in the power of nature, of the existence of a very real threat to the idea of immortality offered by the church and absolute belief in God.





For the front at the rear of the chapel, Gaudí decided, for probably the first time in his career, to actually use a piece of raw nature, a giant clam-like shell, as itself rather than echoing it, copying it, or mediating it in any way. Held by three supports extending from a base of extravagant metalwork, and secured to one of the stone pillars, the font, meant to hold holy water, looks slightly impractical –but it also looks sublime. Is this Guadí´s great joke on God? In baptizing the innoncent child into the House of God, Gaudí had the priest immerse the baby in this very real and immense sea shell.
The use of the sea shell in paintings of mermaids and other creatures of the deep is a sign of the drowning power of sexual attraction –something that, apparently, Gaudí resisted his whole life, though not actually thoroughly (his one offer of marriage was rebuffed by a woman who then joined a convent). Gaudí´s intended wife gave up her sex life –and in doing so his- for God.¨

Exterior of crypt. From wikipedia.org

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Terremoto en Chile. Earthquake in Chile

Terremoto en Chile. Foto de clarin.com
Por este medio quiero expresar mis condolencias  a nuestros hermanos chilenos y desearles que las terribles consecuencias del terremoto sean superadas lo antes posible. Mi email está en mi profile y desde ya pueden enviarme links para pedidos de ayuda, con mucho gusto los postearé en mi blog.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Article: Focusing on Foreclosures

Foreclosures. From http://www.realestate-homes-sandiego-steveroque.com
In January 15th 2010, I posted about the foreclosures in a mobile homes park in Huntington Beach. I was so astonished to see one house next to the other for sale.
This is so bad to see that more than one month have passed since then, and the expectations are even worst. Los Angeles Times, editorial, has published in February 23 the bad news that analysts have provided.  From 2.8 million declared foreclosures last years, this year the projection is 4.5 million. If so, that would be nearly one out of every 20 homes. Analysts also estimate that there is a " shadow inventory" of 1.7 million to 7 million homes in foreclosure that lenders haven't yet put up for sale.

" The extremely high foreclosure rate is a problem not just for the individuals at risk of losing their homes, but also for their communities, the housing industry and the economy in general. And the problems are mounting despite the signs that fewer homeowners are falling behind on their payments, home prices may be hitting bottom and more troubled borrowers are benefiting from federal aid programs.
As of January, nearly 1 million homeowners  were receiving at least temporary help through the federal Home Affordable Modification Program.  But lenders are still moving too cautiously, hampered by financial complexities (such as mortgages that have been bundled and sold to investors), insufficient staff to handle the volume of modifications, uncooperative borrowers and loan servicing companies that profit from delinquent loans. " 

If you are strong enough to keep on reading, and want to learn more about California, click on the link below, unless you do not want to ruin your weekend.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Ship-Shape

OffRamp showcase image from Auto Club Southern California's archives.

I came across with this article called Ship-Shape, written by Morgan P. Yates for the magazine Westways, March-April 2010 (p. 80). I've seen a kind of romanticism in this architecture, though I'm not defending to copy a ship's shape or a lighthouse. Anyway, this is an old nice story about the first front beach houses in Southern California.

"In 1930, when this photo was taken, drivers who traveled the Roosevelt Highway (later renamed Pacific Coast Highway) between Oxnard and Malibu experienced a wide view of uninterrupted expanses of beach with pearlescent combers rolling gently over the sands. Beachfront homes were just beginning to sprinkle the shoreline then, including these nautical neighbors -Pasadena businessman Freeman Ford's land yatch, dubbed Colema, moored next to silent-screen star Pauline Frederick's lighthouse.
Ford employed a maritime theme throughout the landlocked ark's interior, which included a gallery kitchen and berths with bunks in place of bedrooms. He explained his motivation for creating his unique residence to the Los Angeles Times: "I like the simple, primitive life of ships. It is my belief that all kinds of people like to get away from the stuffiness and stupidity of conventional houses."
The complementary design of Frederick's beacon house hinted at the owner's acting career, with an outdoor patio that resembled a stage, complete with wings and a row of dressing rooms.
Californians have subsequently discovered the pleasures of beachfront living, and homes jammed cheek by jowl now occupy this stretch of shoreline, where whimsical structures once turned the heads of travelers along the scenic coastal highway".

Peter Calthorpe and How Slums Can Save the Planet

Proposed urban center on the Tunis waterfront by Peter Calthorpe, recipient of the 2006 J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. Image: Calthorpe Associates. From http://www.architectureweek.com

In 1983, the British born architect, Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he was not successful at organizing neighborhood communities and moved to a boat house in Sausalito, a beautiful town on the San Francisco Bay. This 400 houseboats community of South 40 Dock is a very dense place. There, all residents know each other, including their pets, they pass each other on foot daily. It works as a community because, in Calthorpe’s words, it is walkable.
Based on this insight, Calthorpe became one of the leader proponents of New Urbanism, also called Neotraditionalism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and others. He is the author of Sustainable Communities, The Next American Metropolis, and most recently, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (co-authored with William Fulton).
In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Redefining Cities,” an article in the Whole Earth Review, an American counterculture magazine that focused on technology, community building and the environment. Since then, new urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design and regionalism. It drew one of its main ideas from the houseboat community.
In his 1985 article, Calthorpe made a surprising statement: “The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.”
Years after, in his interview, hosted by Scott London, 2002, Calthorpe stated (excerpts):

 Pedestrian pocket design, by Peter Calthorpe assoc. From deepblue.lib.umich.edu/html

Calvine project, Sacramento, California. By Peter Calthorpe. The Specific Area Plan, defines a  compact and integrated land use pattern with a mix of different building types. In the northern portion of the site, around the light railway stop, there is major office development and an entertainment-oriented retail complex, within walking distance of 1.400 homes. At its centre is a triangular village green, surrounded by the transit stop, day-care and retail.  From www.webstrade.it/news/11-Murst/Urb-images.htm

London: Most metropolitan areas seem to be moving in the opposite direction. For example, in Seattle the population grew by 36 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the developed land area grew by 90 percent. Cleveland’s population actually declined during that same period, but the city continued to spread outward.
Calthorpe: Yes, it’s because we’re building lower density suburban subdivisions at the periphery of regions. We’re not going back in and repairing and recycling older neighborhoods in inner-city areas, or even older suburban areas. It’s a disposable-society strategy to building cities — basically you use them then throw them away and move on to some virgin land. It’s a pioneer ethic. There’s no question that it’s in the blood of America. But at some point we have to recognize that we’re no longer pioneers on a frontier.
London: Will be able to turn things around?
Calthorpe: Democracies tend to be self-correcting, and I think we’re in a self-correcting mode now. We see the problems. The first and most profound sign of it is the anti-growth movement. People are saying "I don’t want any more development."
London: You’ve pointed out that we should be narrowing our streets and roads, not widening them.
Calthorpe: What is a street? It’s not just a utility for the car. It’s everybody’s most immediate neighborhood. At least that’s what it used to be — a place to walk, a place to bike, a place for kids to play, a place to park cars, a place for trees, and therefore a place for birds. To think of the street as just a utility for cars is so absurd. And yet that is exactly what is happening because we have segmented design so that the traffic engineer designs the streets and the civil engineer designs the utilities and the architect designs the buildings. Nobody is thinking about the whole composition. Narrower streets win in every way. They make cars go slower, which means that the neighborhood is safer for kids and more enjoyable for pedestrians.

Calthorpe´s theory is followed by others, and urban designers have a new point of view about urban overpopulation and density that is opposite to the traditional one. After all, they explain that it is not so bad the concentration of people in the cities.
Stewart Brand, one of the world´s most influential and controversial environmentalists, co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and the Global Business Network, also living on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay, exposes the reasons in his article  ¨How slums can save the planet¨, published in Prospect. Issue 167. January 27th, 2010. I am showing here some of them.

 Dharavi, Mumbai, where population density reaches 1m people per square mile. Image from http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/01/how-slums-can-save-the-planet/

¨The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”….
¨The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.
Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up¨……
¨The Last Forest (2007), a book by Mark London and Brian Kelly on the crisis in the Amazon rainforest, suggests that the nationally subsidized city of Manaus in northern Brazil “answers the question” of how to stop deforestation: give people decent jobs. Then they can afford houses, and gain security. One hundred thousand people who would otherwise be deforesting the jungle around Manaus are now prospering in town making such things as mobile phones and televisions.
The point is clear: environmentalists have yet to seize the opportunity offered by urbanization. Two major campaigns should be mounted: one to protect the newly-emptied countryside, the other to green the hell out of the growing cities¨.

REFERENCES
This post was made adapted from and based on:
Stewart Brand. “ How slums can save the planet” in Prospect. Issue 167. January 27th, 2010
Interview to Peter Calthorpe, hosted by Scott London. Published in the Fall 2002 issue of the architecture journal CriT. (This interview was adapted from the radio series Insight & Outlook)


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