Faculty of Architecture, Universidad Ricardo Palma [URP]
URP_Synthetic Floating Orchids
AMAZON: fragmentation and complexity
The complex geography of the Amazon rainforest, lush vegetation and the network of rivers make this region a difficult environment for economic exchange and cultural dynamics of native groups, encouraging their isolation. Human settlements are organized around domestic sedentary activities like hunting and gathering. But it is the cultural exchange activities and natural species that make the operations and survival of aboriginal groups possible.Tribes developed complex activities in superimposed maps in weaves, which have variables of change and transformation. To operate on such conditions, it is important to adapt to such conditions in order to create a complete navigation system adaptable to that many variables.
Architecture of non-extinction: Nomad Architecture
Since the patterns of domestic native architecture are established according to sedentary and community activities internally in the villages, our proposal seeks to extend inter-ethnic ties using rivers as a natural route for trade. The idea is to incorporate new nomad architectural forms able to cover these intricate journeys through rivers and facilitate domestic activities and trade exchange. These air shelters move by floating at low heights among the Amazonian rivers carrying part of the culture of each ethnic groups: crafts, local clothes, small pieces of exotic flora and fauna, with the aim of making the world better known to each tribe and expanding the cultural ties across the Amazon jungle.
The presence and progress of civilization into the remote regions of the Amazon, threatens the natural balance of the rainforest and its inhabitants. We intend to use to our advantage all the negative elements of this process. The need for developing technologies that improve living conditions for the inhabitant of the jungle has been possible, based on research three specific points:
URP_Synthetic Floating Orchids
Plastic waste pollution
To encourage awareness and implementation of popular domestic recycling methods, using plastic waste bags and Polypropylene Copolymers bottles (PP), Polyethylene of high density (PE) and Polyvinyl Chloride pipes (PVC).
Cannabis is potentially a practical alternative to hydrocarbons in manufacturing stationery, fuel, textiles and plastics. Its combination with recyclable polymers allows its biodegradation. It allows us to use different bioplastic materials for lightweight building, at low cost and highly resistant to environmental factors of the forest.
The recent gas exploitation in the jungle
Companies that exploit the gas fields daily, extract a percentage of additional impurities such as nitrogen, carbon dioxide, helium, oxygen and water vapor, which are considered surplus. They do not require refining for processing and are easily separated by relatively simple physical processes. The use of helium as noble fireproof gas enables the buoyancy of our proposals.
Synthetic Floating Orchids
Inspired by the landscapes and most exotic species of our rainforest, the Synthetic Floating Orchids are hybrid structures that combine bio-polymers with inflatable structures flying over rivers of the jungle, taking advantage of these three issues in order to spread the cultural and trade relations of the tribes in the Amazon.
“Orchids in the Amazon … are born many meters above the ground; they are linked to the kingdom of angels. The Amazon region is the largest and most ancient rainforest of our planet. Life comes at each corner, birds, insects, plants, flowers, trees and giant animals that seem to come out of paradise. From the air, the forest looks like a giant bouquet of flowers. Above all,
where orchids live, the branches of trees grow toward the sun and to the stars…
… Orchids restore the union between the Cosmos and Earth, and bringing men and angels together… “
Andreas Korte
URP_Synthetic Floating Orchids
They are part of the genre Epiphytes. Orchids are known as ”Air plants.” It is characterized by its growth around other plants or trees, far from land. This characteristic allows better use of solar energy and humidity, without damaging the host tree on duty.
The Synthetic Floating Orchids also grow around trees. Its transparency and its synthetic components allow an infinite range of possibilities in light color, fast mounting due to its flexibility and lightness. Later, when they are filled with helium gas, they drop off the trees to levitate and move freely in the rivers of the Amazon.
Synthetic building block structures
For four weeks, the students in the first year of Architecture Workshop 5 had the first approach to space by building a physical model at real scale.
Once the problem, the characterization of context and the elementary program areas were established, the Workshop organized a study process and a possible development of general guidelines that may lead to different projects. Within this subject, each student may find alternate paths and to solve the problem and allow them to express their own search and particular view.
The execution takes place in an open area and prototypes are subjected to various tests in the Workshop. These tests consider life situation inside the shelter, as well as stability and rigidity of the proposed structure. Subsequently, the student translates his or her representation through model-scale prototypes, drawings, sections and shows a professional presentation of the results of this experience.
The spatial organization generates a resultant material that incorporates and translates the instrumental base into a possible imaginary feasible approach, which must be resolved by the student in order to be executable. All users lead to a specific and original structural system built at real scale. The use of recyclable plastic allows multiple outcomes.
The flexible properties of plastic, its lightness and its manoeuvrability suggest a number of alternatives different for each structural component, which are subjected to various tests and study of possible details for joints and unions, as well as to maintain the structural integrity of the physical model.
At the same time, these conclusions allow to develop the nature of space itself, adapting it to the movement and routine of the residents. It hosts more intimate space solutions linked closely to the anthropometry of people that will move inside.
Within this complex landscape of imaginary atmospheres, there is a place to create the first architectural spaces. The open and direct body staging allows students to determine matrices towards the search of a first approach of architecture. The Shelter, as an anthropometric primitive unit, is generated from the different conditions in each proposal.
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“… The God Ñañe came to a stream in the shape of a white and large stone,
as an egg.
From inside the stone came out sounds similar to the chirping of a bird. That egg was found by Hueapau’s two daughters, the oldest man. The girls took the stone in the egg shape and took it home. They placed the white stone in a new pot. In a couple of days they heard the crying of a child and there is when god Ñañe was born. “
Secoya Myth
URP_The Synthetic Floating Orchids
