Morelia.PinkQuarry.

The Spring Semester 2018 studio started by looking at the historic centre of Morelia, a fascinating and harmonious unity of architectural buildings of pink stone. This pink spirit proliferates in a checkerboard-like street layout that opens up to give space to plazas and views to the surrounding hills. The studio looked beyond this core to explore something more pedestrian: the walking distance between adjacencies. We questioned how to transition from one area to the next in order to explore the future character that complements the cultural heart of this Mexican city.
Through group work students recorded and mapped the existing conditions of the area as an accumulation of layers of information that represented tangible and intangible qualities – ie. infrastructure and flow, activity and time, verticality and pattern. The exploration of these topics inspired individual strategies for ambitious proposals that address the future of Morelia. Design proposals were multi-scalar in scope, enabling architectural propositions to respond to a larger narrative relating to the aesthetic, programmatic and socio-economic capacities of the city and its infrastructure. Students were invited to explore their own aesthetic style as an outcome of the progress, and the ongoing dialogue between two- and three-dimensional representation revealing unpredictable qualities to inspire their design narratives.

Students:

Mo Chen
Yuxuan Lei
Maria Diavolova
Emma Brown
Devon Christeleit
Erisa Nakamura
Rabih Bassem Arasoghli
Michelle Mounir El Kadi
Christina Battikha
Alex Sassine
Nirvana Kobeissi
Careen Matta
Carmen Matta
Miranda Herpfer
Pei-Hsuan Chen
Nicole Somi Lee-Park
Thein Manimekalai Sowrirajan
Isadora Panjaitan
Revathi Anandan

Tutors:

Naiara Vegara
Marie-Isabel de Monseignat-Lavrov
Katya Larina
Dimitris Gyftopoulos