One of Villanueva’s former students and long-time collaborators is Mateo Pinto. Together with his brother Matias and Austrian architect Hubert Klumpner, Mateo designed the Vertical Gymnasium, built on the edge of the small inner-city Barrio Santa Cruz by the municipality of Chacao.
The Vertical Gymnasium draws on the barrio practice of maximising the available resources by taking a single open air basketball court and raising it to the roof thereby creating 3 levels for multiple overlapping programs below. These include: a judo area, an indoor basketball court, an indoor running track, a weights gym, a medical centre, meeting rooms and a rooftop basketball court.
The intention of the Vertical Gymnasium is to provide a dense bundle of services and recreational opportunities to the residents of Barrio Santa Cruz. The centre is used by local schools and sporting teams and even those not actively engaging with the centre are accommodated by the undercroft seating where motorcycle couriers congregate and local men gather to read newspapers shaded from the heat of the midday sun.
The Vertical Gymnasium could be seen in a number of ways. On one hand it is the generous gesture of the formal city stepping into the barrio to provide it with services. On the other hand, given that Barrio Santa Cruz is a relatively small barrio completely surrounded by formal development and that the Vertical Gymnasium presents a hard wall and opaque screens to the barrio, opening to and connecting more strongly with the formal street, it could equally be seen as the formal city encroaching on the barrio as providing services for it.
This raises questions more generally about the often non-participatory projects of ‘urban acupuncture’, which aim to connect the informal city more strongly with the formal city by inserting formal elements into it. But is it a connection or an invasion? Is it acupuncture or just a jab with a pin?
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