Fluid Territories of America © 2011 Eiroa Architects

Fuild Territories of America is an interdisciplinary think tank lead by architect and professor Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa composed of a combination of a series of workshops and real time interdisciplinary project proposals. This strategic unit is an ongoing large scope research project based on a compilation of a series of particular proposals and site specific projects that challenge current visions for the relationship between architecture and water surfaces, fluid territories containing large percentage of water and the man made infrastructures that compose both inland shore landscapes, in-between soft-landscapes and open water territories and their intermediate landscapes that have been largely unexplored and striated in the American Continent that oppose the use of conventional linear use infrastructure. This unit is presented as a space to develop alternatives to the conventional solutions offered by contemporary ecological concern, energy efficiency and green interventions. 

The historic architecture pendulum movement between the renaissance and baroque paradigms, seen as structure and structure displacement that conveys several architecture canons, became also related to landscape interventions such as the canonical thickening of the ground surface. This thickening of the ground induced topology in architecture imposing ground based formal displacements to conventional rigid structural organizations such as grids, modules, etc. For this unit, this concept is transferred as a theoretical-formal concept to open landscapes in a dialectic relationship between infrastructure and such soft territories. While infrastructure has been conformed by rigid structural interventions, the natural or artificial ecologies of soft territories that involve fluidity and time based accumulative transformation, implies a different and opposite post-structural logic.

These research projects and proposals are developed by this unit conjunction with research developed with the University of Buenos Aires FADU-UBA, Princeton University School of Architecture and The School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, in many forms of collaborations such as scholarships (Butler Prize), course development with students, independent research and professional work and other interdisciplinary associations including architects, urban planners, landscape designers, geological engineers, structural engineers, etc. The particular projects that are test of this research relating architecture, and water, ecology, landcape, infrastructure and the city are the following:

11- Ecoinduction II: JFK Airport Expansion, Jamaica Bay Wetland Restoration - Festival of Ideas of The City

10- Ecoinduction: Rio de la plata 2050 Barcelona Exhibition

9-Surface as Interface: research studies

        

8- Series of Structural natural accidents that compose the coast of Uruguay composed of a repetition of a group of Natural Bays, framed by Peninsulas, that become Capes, that are mediated by Lagoons, that break into the open waters by natural bars, that are feed by deltas, islands and rivers all of them composing soft territories, an independent professional proposal and research (2008-onwards). Beachfront groundscraper terraced building in Uruguay (2011)

7- Series of Structural natural accidents that compose the coast of Uruguay composed of a repetition of a group of Natural Bays, framed by Peninsulas, that become Capes, that are mediated by Lagoons, that break into the open waters by natural bars, that are feed by deltas, islands and rivers all of them composing soft territories, an independent professional proposal and research (2008-onwards).

6-San Fernando Club de Veleros Barlovento shore park, Rio Lujan, Rio de la Plata, North Buenos Aires, Argentina nautical park proposal for competition, a professional architecture and landscape submission published in different media. (2007)

5-The Mississippi River and Delta Areas, Mississippi, USA analysis, research and design workshop developed at Cooper Union with students (2006);

 

4- M.ArchII Graduate Thesis proposal sited on the Rio de la Plata Bay, Buenos Aires, Argentina, developed at Princeton University School of Architecture (2001-2004);

3- Vicente Lopez Shore Park, North Buenos Aires, Argentina: a professional work executed as an associated architect in 1998-2000;

 

2- Rio de la Plata Bay, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Colonia, Uruguay. Independent research project proposal for a scholarship in the University of Buenos Aires for the 2000;

1- Butler Research Prize, Princeton University School of Architecture research prize awarded to analyze architecture and infrastructural effects on offshore and shore structures, for the Shearwater North Sea Central in the UK and the Holland Polders (2002-2003);