Huellas

Project for Deserving Architecture (ATC Agencia de Tránsitos Culturales)

The El Toscal neighborhood in Santa Cruz de Tenerife is a place marked by a peculiar layout of small, single-storey houses built around patios. Most date from the early 20th century. They are distributed in the form of ‘citadels’ (ciudadelas), a type of collective housing consisting of two rows of independent rooms that are placed facing each other, arranged around a communal courtyard or private road. In 2007 the area was declared a Place of Cultural Interest (Bien de Interés Cultural). Currently, El Toscal is suffering a process of deterioration seen in the growing number of abandoned houses that are progressively being overtaken by vegetation and wild animals.

Silently, an urban jungle is expanding, swallowing up roofs, terraces, courtyards and gardens, extending the empty spaces in between the edifices. This process of gradual filtration is invading entire city blocks, converting the jagged, atomized forms that used to make up the blocks’ open spaces into large, continuous and interconnected surfaces. In this process, internal voids – gardens as well as remnants of walls and rooms – are becoming inverted into exteriors. An externalization of the interior and intimate is taking place.

Wandering through this built forest, one perceives the parallel existence of two disconnected worlds: the silent space of the citadels, fallen into oblivion, comes up against the activity of the inhabited dwellings, which are vastly different in height and volume and generate a new cartography. By recreating the empty spaces inside the vacant blocks – consisting of courtyards, gardens, ruined or collapsed buildings, excavations – this project attempts to make visible the traces of a lost world, traces that, at the same time, can be turned into the footprints of a possible future. In the installation, the empty or dematerialized space of the block re-materializes through models made out of concrete – a conventional modern construction material.

By filling in the gaps and extending them to a height that includes the maximum buildable height as set out in the zoning plan, the concrete takes on an ambiguous role: it bears witness to the past and, at the same time, announces a possible future. The models become spatial traces or footprints that in turn leave a trace, a shadow, thus revealing the mechanism of an architecture of disappearance.

Exhibition dates: 19 March - 28 July 2018

Collaboration 3D modelling: Andrzej Gwizdala. Photographs: Emeterio Suárez, Andrzej Gwizdala.