Foto: Arturo Arrieta
LIGA 43: Moments of Stress
Dubganem+ (Arg)
Dubganem’s proposal (an Argentine office formed by architect Angie Dub and engineer Sonia Ganem) is built on the balance between tension and precision, occupying and reconfiguring the confined space in which they work.
Precision in architecture might be defined as the capacity to make and carry out design decisions in an exact, conscious, and coherent way, establishing clear relationships among form, structure, materiality, scale, and space.
Tension is not only inherent to the material being used; it arises from the need to relate elements that, though different or even opposed, must coexist: metal plates and void, reflections and light, weight and lightness, limit and deformation, linear systems and flat surfaces. This tension is what keeps the project active, preventing form from becoming static or arbitrary.
Precision, on the other hand, is the way Dubganem allows the sought- after tension to find an order. It is not only a matter of exactness in construction, but of the capacity to make conscious decisions: to define a series of industry-standard elements, such as a standardized sheet- metal size, an industrialized connecting piece, a variable thickness, a necessary rope diameter, or a commercially available system of pulleys and hoists. Architecture and engineering blur their boundaries.
Precision implies a kind of skill, in which each element responds to an intention and occupies a specific place within a system of relationships. Each precise decision intensifies the tension of the whole and, at the same time, lends it coherence.
The proposal shows an architecture that does not seek to eliminate tension but to make it precise. This is where the craft and discipline of Angie and Sonia come into play: the capacity to control what seems unstable and to build relationships in which each element has a specific role. Precision does not neutralize tension: it organizes it, makes it perceptible, and turns it into a spatial experience.
