In this article, we continue our series on Competitions.archi, presenting a collection of articles on different architectural competitions. Today, we will be featuring the winner of the Rebuilding Siargao Competition by ArchStorming.
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Rebuilding Siargao is the second contest we have entered as a team. All 5 of us are currently undergraduate students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and although some of us are closer to graduation than others, we belong to different generations. We didn’t know each other well, not even in person, but our team leader saw potential in the way some of us expressed ourselves and decided to try to bring us together to create something more.
Some of us were currently in France, Germany and Chile this year doing our academic exchange, others preparing their grade thesis, and others balancing the difficulty of the sophomore year with a real job.
WHY SIARGAO?
The Philippines immediately caught our attention because it represented a bit of a scale up in difficulty from what we knew: traditional architecture, special methods of woodworking and a different perspective towards the landscape. The challenge was to rebuild a community center (Tabo) in Burgos after the Rai Typhoon devastation. But we absolutely fell in love with the idea when we realized that this contest went far beyond that.
This movement and the people who make it possible are an incredible example of altruism, love for one’s community and a tremendous respect for preserving and improving their home, wherever it may be. That became invaluable to us.
A WORD ABOUT COCONUT PALM TREES:
Siargao is one out of 40+ islands in the Philippines with tropical weather, beautiful beaches and on average visited by 20 typhoons every year, five of which are destructive. At the same time a coconut palm tree in average takes 8-9 years to fully develop and become useful either for fruit production, or woodworking material. Local economy depends greatly on this.
It was shocking to understand the loss of crops and coconut groves that a typhoon represents. So much wasted timber and so few resources left to do anything about it.
We immediately knew that what was missing for these people was an advantage point. This scenario is not a fair game, so they need leverage to get back up after the disaster.
This was the major issue and the best tool we were given to understand it, was an extensive photographic registry of both the island and the community., When we took a closer look, everything changed. It was an extremely nurturing and informative process to see and understand all that this community is. The good, the bad, the destruction, the connection, the daily activities, how they live and how they make use of their spaces.
From there, we decided that our process would not focus on what separates us (the disaster and the resistance to uncertainty). Rather, it would focus entirely on what unites us; activity and community.
And with that, we began a multi-layered design exploration.
FIRST DRAFTS
The outer layers of our design started by approaching disaster. Intensive sketching and sharing ideas wanting to protect that community. Proposing reinforced buildings and focusing on the structure. We wanted to look at different constructive solutions to make the building stronger, but we realized that they already knew how to do that. We had to keep digging.
We also wandered about the crucial role of the physical building through several 3D models. What if a community center is also a community of buildings? Could they protect each other? Could this envelope protect and hold something within? But ultimately, further debates about what true resilience looks like, led us to drop any resistance and embrace the vulnerable part of risk taking.
It was not a question of whether we would be able to protect them from a typhoon or not, but when the typhoon comes again, what will they do? Where will they do it? And what do we have left then?…
The answer became:
“In this Tabo, embracing tradition is not just about creating a strong and resilient structure, but somehow returning to their old Tabo, because people will always be able to use it, rebuild it, and continue to make architecture.”
PEOPLE MAKE ARCHITECTURE
The best example of activity and community we found in Burgos was how furniture played a major role as a basis for many social interactions they had. So, we posed yet another question to touch a solid designable answer:
¿What if furniture could literally become the foundation of a building?
THE BUILDING:
By doing research through the history of the region’s architecture, we found all the different typologies of houses that possessed an amazing wisdom towards natural phenomena where Filipinos sought safety through different methods such as elevating buildings to prevent flooding and enclosing dry spaces to preserve perishable items.
This wisdom translated into: Non-negotiable spaces.
To create a core building where all the non-negotiable values of the community center are safe and sound. Dignified basic need spaces, such as bathrooms, a dry storage room for belongings and goods, and a basic management office.
The furniture and the core both established the immovable part of the project so they would always have a piece of their old Tabo left behind to help them get back up again. Perhaps quicker, more proactive and more connected.
MATERIALS SHAPE PROGRAMME:
When the idea materialized, we put everything we had on the table.
-What if these people don’t want to go back to building with wood, a flexible but fragile material? -What if we stopped trying to innovate?, is it so bad to re-create something that already existed?
Because the relationship we have with a material is fundamental, the building’s structure responds to a phased construction process within the allotted budget using local coconut palm wood for all carpentry, and hardwood for structural columns , while recycling discarded materials (in masonry walls and tables).
The 2-story building of about 120m2 needed to go beyond enclosed spaces for the furnishings to physically connect the planning.
Connect the outside (a community garden, a seed library, a rain collector or even palm tree plantings all activities already practiced by local people with the help of LokalLab studio) with the interior and give all facades a unique and useful character of their own through openness to embrace an open market, the Karinderya (eatery), community kitchen and a multi-purpose hall.
REPRESENTATION SKILLS (what we showed):
Because we knew our creative process beforehand, we relied more on the skills of each of us and decided that the visual message had to be direct and very informative without using many types of representation.
That’s why we divided the communication of the whole project in two languages: images (contest sheet 1) and diagrams (sheet 2). This means that we didn’t make any final plans or sections, we only did working drawings. We heavily exploited a single 3D model.
We took 2 huge risks that paid off. The first one, to replace a main render that showed the best side of the whole project, by two renders of equal hierarchy and of the same view of the building to share our intention to say that the “final project” is actually whenever they feel comfortable with the TABO they have built, whenever it becomes useful for something .
The second was to unify all the technical, narrative and feasibility information in a cycle of diagrams. We wanted to make clear through the graphics that the objective was not a building, but that every moment of the construction (or reconstruction) of this community center understood as a finished and useful building for the people.
PRESENTATION (what we said):
Our process shaped the form of a two-story building with a gable roof. Something that we knew the community could already build together
It’s that sense of security when we come home. When we smell the essence of what we know. Asking family how their day has been and re-immersing ourselves in our routines and being with the ones we love.
Our narrative was neither about innovation nor experimentation; it was about continuation with all the cultural and constructive background Philippines had. . We tried to develop that fluid language through simplification.
MEETINGS, MEETINGS, MEETINGS:
Backstage, we attribute much of our success to the constant process we followed. The weekly meetings were sacred. Sometimes fun, sometimes challenging, awkward or very fruitful.
Zoom meetings fleshed out the project and kept us communicating. It is not only the moment when 5 people share their ideas and draw on images that is important. There were also 1-on-1 talks between members, sporadic audios of random ideas, and we even shared what we saw, where we traveled and what each of us did that was meaningful.
We acknowledge that the way we do architecture has changed in the last few years and for everyone, students, teachers and practitioners it has been chaotic, but even in that disconnected and messy process, as designers we can still produce very sensitive and honest ideas (now more than ever at least for us). So “how we do architecture” has become as important as “the architectural statement” itself.
FINALLY, SOME TIPS (OR NOT):
- At the end we understood that entering a contest is not just about winning, it is about helping as architects in social problems that we have around the world. What matters is that you feel comfortable with your results, that you manage to understand the most sensitive part of people in order to make a project that responds accurately, creatively and realistically to a profoundly rich context.
- We´d advice always to understand the context you are working with, that will give you the first idea to approach the project. For example, for Siargao the main context we got was the amazing landscape of coconuts palm trees that seems to never end drawing distant lines on the horizon, so why not make a reinterpretation of this beautiful view on the building´s columns rythm. That’s how the phases started to make an important role on the project. It is a good start or idea when you can justify it. Context, history and people will always be an important point for each project, so it is essential to read about these three topics before even sketching.
- Trying new things and going beyond of what a contest requires either in a conceptual or technical way might be the difference between other teams. Many times, we had failed, and we had made wrong decisions but that has an important value for us, because when we failed, we learned a lot more and the important thing is to look back at those mistakes to improve.
- Finally, we´d say try to follow a bit more your own intuition. Ultimately what we do and where we commit is up to each one of us. Choice is quite powerful and carves your way through architecture. The more we try to listen to ourselves without distractions the more authentic the outcomes might be!
Author: Rodrigo Molina, Mariana Santamaria, Marco Luna, Erick Salvador, Pablo Ziga from Mexico
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