Nueva Pompeya User's Manual
Developed in a workshop organized by the Oficina Cultural de la Embajada de España and the CCEBA, with the collaboration of the magazine PLOT and the students of the FADU-UBA, this publication is a guide of 12 unexplored readings of Nueva Pompeya, a neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires. Its goal is to rediscover a forgotten area through its secret, hidden or ignored spaces. In its pages, you will find instructions that allow detecting new landmarks banal contexts, ordinary but symbolic objects or potential spaces within illicit sites. If one carefully follows its instructions, will enjoy derives guided with maps of other neighborhoods, will construct archipelagos of unexpected monuments, will chase exotic animals or even will learn to demolish inconvenient buildings.
It invites the participants of the XIII Bienal de Arquitectura de Buenos Aires and also every citizen, to build an urban imaginary that needs no construction, preserving the preexisting conditions and providing new meanings, using only simple observatories and invisible installations. The book is an alternative to the explosive developments that destroy the city nurtured by real estate bubbles, but it also avoids the cliché of neighborhood activation, based on sporadic, temporary and isolated interventions authored by young emergent architects. The guide for Nueva Pompeya attempts to generate the type of lasting unanticipated knowledge that does not leave other footprint that those on the neighborhood public unconscious.
In summary, you have in your hands a catalog of ways to preserve based in avoiding intervention, i.e. doing almost nothing. Preservation defined, in this case, as a conceptual operation that forces the audience to explore ways of looking that save the future from oblivion.
We thank specially the indefatigable collaborators Victoria Cobeña, María Cielo Armengou, Florencia Rodriguez, Ariel Schapiro and Virginia Billoch for their endless patience and the students Lucia Alvarado, Martin Berger, Gonzalo Benedetto, Natalia Cetani, Luciana Collado, Demian Schneider, Josefina Penedo Maria Pozzi, Marisol Sotera, Olivia Morgenstern, Paula Kaufman y Vanesa Torres, actual authors of this publication.
Project: Nueva Pompeya User's Manual
Status: Completed
Clients: Oficina Cultural de la Embajada de España, CCEBA, magazine PLOT and FADU-UBA
Location: Nueva Pompeya, Buenos Aires
Program: Publication
