non-typological architecture
Archipiélago Hermoso, Archipelago of the Blessed
The term hermoso – one used by Canarian grandmothers to describe both their islands and the chubby babies delivered to their volcanic soils - can be traced to its Latin root in formosus: literally, full of beautiful forms. Torn between the tectonic plates of three continents, the archipelago has long been a microcosm where interrelated European and global crises converge and erupt. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Canaries were a prototype, and a strategic supply, staging and stop-over ground for the colonisation of the Americas, Africa, India and beyond, teeming with Spanish and British colonial architecture: palaces, proto-factories, ports, ships, barracks, missionary, and entrepreneurial ventures.
Today, non-stop flights arrive full of Europeans fleeing endless work, inflation, and unaffordability back home. South Americans of mixed indigenous blood flee climate and political-economic crises by the hundreds of thousands, returning to the land that their European ancestors left long ago. Boats packed with famished and dehydrated African refugees arrive daily if they avoid disaster on the way. But the archipelago they land on is itself defined by droughted fields and greenhouses in ruins; by cave shacks and ‘informally built’ concrete block towers precariously perched at the edge of plunging ravines overlooking megalithic strips of black asphalt jet runways, and luxury shops, or big box IKEAs and Leroy Merlin home DIY stores. Parched earth and diminishing species struggle meters from adventure water parks with replicas of the imperial religious architecture of Angkor Wat. Rows of beach chairs and palm tree-lined turquoise pools in front of hulking ziggurats of hotel rooms are serviced by Big Tech data and travel sites and financed by multinational banks.
These Canarian profit architectures remind us that for too long, architects have been delegated the task of giving good form to bad content. Archipelago of the Blessed is part of a larger agenda and practice concerned with using architecture’s tools, curatorship, and genius to urgently transition away from cultures of endless production and extractivism. During our first year on La Palma, we will learn from practices and architectures that are already experimenting with more intimate, and reciprocal or caring relationships to this place and those things and beings who share it. We will work to give architectural form to immediately workable possibilities for alternative modes and models of land tenure, housing, and tourism, including for example non-human personhood, cooperatives, and land and data trusts, which are worker and community-owned and governed in perpetuity: one ‘user,’ one inhabitant, one share, one vote. To this end, we are interested in archetypes: examples of landscape, infrastructure and architecture derived from plainly useful, and enjoyable features of the landscape like plains, caves, terraces, and charcos. We are interested in forms that are common, recognisable, and full of particularity to this place but are equally almost empty and thus open to new, free, and common invention and use.
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Archipelago of the Blessed is a workshop as part of a wider research agenda spanning seven years, one spent on each Island. The first year will run from September 6 - 16, 2024 on La Palma and Grand Canaria. Directed and taught by María Páez González and Brendon Carlin with the Architectural Association with Prof. Ricardo Javier Santana Rodríguez UPLGC Escuela de Architectura Translation and Assessment: Prof. María Fe González Batista Universidad de Los Andes. Architectural Association Canary Island Visiting School. In Collaboration with: Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canarias (UPLGC) UPLGC Escuela de Architectura Sponsored by: Colegio de Arquitectos de La Palma Colegio de Arquitectos de Las Palmas de Gran Canarias.
