LIGA 25: Camilo Restrepo (Col). Canonical Tropics
Photography: Luis Gallardo
After decades of discussions centered firmly on design as a self-referential process—focusing on its outcomes—design has renewed its engagement with other areas of scholarship inserting, for instance, questions of geographical, ecological and territorial concern into contemporary design and urban debates. Triggered by the relentless expansion of urban agglomerations and the threads of environmental change the idea of disciplinary and scalar expansion has taken a leading presence across referential design discourses. In this context, the emergence of geography or ecology, and their impact on the renewal of design theory and practice are essential, both in terms of portraying the underlying multi-scalar dynamics of contemporary urban processes, and of engaging in renewed and meaningful ways with models of progressive urbanism that could present an alternative to today’s neoliberal urbanism. The flip side of this disciplinary expansion, however, has marked a displacement of the “object” of design—the building or the city—in favor of the fluidity and open-endedness of ecologically- and geographically-informed “processes.”
As an attempt to reunite and transcend disciplinary opposites such as object/process, society/nature, internalities/externalities or inside/outside, the work of Camilo Restrepo at AGENdA provides a framework through which these opposites are dialectically analyzed and theorized as co-produced. For him, “objects” cannot be understood without their constitutive territorial “processes.” His work relentlessly operates within a key principle: there is no society outside nature. Moving beyond meta-geographical opposites and understanding the co-production of architecture in the territory is the starting point for understanding Camilo Restrepo’s work. These core principles render architecture as produced, and constantly reshaped, by a continuous circulation of material and energy driven by both socio-political and biophysical forces. In this view, his work emerges as a process that can no longer be conceived as a bounded, closed and fixed entity, but rather as an extended fabric composed by “socio-ecological processes that are simultaneously local and global, human and physical, symbolic and structural, cultural and organic,” as the urban geographer Erik Swyngedouw would state. Using Canonical Tropics as a vehicle to navigate through his theoretical positioning, Restrepo proposes an installation consisting of carefully crafted and arranged screens as “extended fabrics” capable of blurring long-entrenched binary opposites.
By bringing in Van Eyck’s Sonsbeek Pavillion in Arnhem, Netherlands, as the constitutive precedent for the installation’s floor plan, Restrepo engages with Eyck’s ideas about “opposites” in multiple yet fascinating ways including Eyck’s concern with “reconciling opposites,” and the relationships between polarities such as archaic and avant-garde, the organic and the geometric, simplicity and complexity, constancy and change. While acknowledging the differences between extremes, Eyck’s tension between “opposites” were always rendered visible: the parallels and circles; the representation of lines as streets and circles as plazas; the solidity of walls in contrast with the emptiness of alleys; or the tension between constriction and expansion. However, Restrepo goes beyond Eyck’s emphasis on maintaining the dialectics of opposing factions under the idea of “reconciliation” and moves toward an integrative totality by “blurring” these oppositions into a singular metabolism.
By operating in a geographical context without climatic extremes such as Colombia, what was solid and impervious in the Netherlands, here becomes porous. What was enclosed and compartmentalized, here is open-ended and simultaneous. The solid walls in the North, here become screens that, rather than operating as boundaries or enclosures, are filtering membranes that control the entry of light without encapsulating air. The inside/outside opposition blurs in favor of an open-ended “in-between” space without fixed limits. This blurring is further expressed through the careful materialization of the installation: on the one hand, it is accentuated by the natural patterns imprinted on the screens that were carefully brought from the Colombian hinterland, the canonical mass/void opposition dematerializes creating a hybrid space that immerses the visitor in a trans-scalar phenomenological experience simultaneously “situated” in multiple spaces; on the other, it is further advanced by the physical, formal and material orchestration of the installation. The malleability of the screens responding to air flow, their translucency as a light filtering device, and their imprinted patterns as a performative display of shadows enable Restrepo to create an architecture in constant engagement with thermal, climatic and energy forces that also blur the polarization of internalities/externalities, moving into an architecture shaped only by air.
All this can only be understood out of a mode of practice that, by nature, is also blurred. AGENdA engages with other disciplinary formations, crisscrosses scales of inquiry and intervention and brings together a multitude of agents, human and non-human, to create architecture that transcends disciplinary concerns and becomes a powerful crystallization of variegated and complex socio-ecological processes that make up our built environment today. Paolo Soleri used to say that an architect should decide to be either “historically correct or evolutionarily meaningful.” As a modest contribution to Restrepo’s oeuvre, I believe his work, and in particular Canonical Tropics, transcends this distinction to become both historically correct and evolutionarily meaningful.
