Urban Acupuncture: Chacao’s Vertical Gymnasium.

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?

Informal Inventories: the tactics of Federico Villanueva:

Federico Villanueva is an architect, educator and activist. Together with his partner, Josefina Baldo, he has been researching and working on projects in the barrios for over 30 years. Together they oversaw CONAVI (Consejo Nacional de la Vivienda - National Housing Council) from 1999-2002.

The following is a summary of Villanueva’s ideas and tactics for architects working in the barrios. It is based on an interview with Federico Villanueva at his home in Caracas. Through our conversation I was able to learn some of the knowledge and tactics which he has developed through his long experience.

The barrio is more common, more successful and more efficient: The barrio is often viewed as an aberration, but it is the barrios where more than half the people of Venezuela live. In reality it is the formal city which is strange. The barrios are also much more productive. Over the last 20 years the barrios have grown each year by an average of 3.1% almost double the growth rate of housing in the formal city of 1.6%!

Getting many horses to run together: The key to successful projects is to get government, community movements and trained professions such as architects to all go in the same direction at the same time. This requires delicate negotiation and careful combining of often very different agendas.

The Architect and the Community: The architect brings the knowledge of alternative structures, materials and processes and the skills to analyse technical factors, manage multiple agendas, to see the big picture and coordinate individual actions. The community brings the knowledge of local conditions and relationships as well as the skills derived from constantly reconstructing their homes and facilities. Neither of these should be underestimated.

Architects at invasion: If it is possible the best time for the architect to get involved is during the initial land invasion. If the architect can have input at this initial stage then things will not need to be redone later.

Counting the stairs: The basis of any work must be a detailed study. Analyse the area, record the dimensions of every house, the slope of every road and path, the number of streetlights and stairs, the width and length of all the drainage channels. Then, when proposing improvements everything can be calculated and budgeted for: the length of electric cable required for new street lights, the amount of concrete to pave new pathways and so on.

Starting small: After the detailed study, begin with a small project: one house, one day-care centre. The people may be dubious at first but once they begin to see results they will be much more open to get involved. A successful small project can create an explosion in community participation.

Staying separate: When working with a community is it important to remain professional, don’t try to become part of the community. Treat them as you would any other client, explain the alternatives then leave the room. If you get too involved you may start to influence the outcome.

Build before you demolish: If relocation or rehousing is unavoidable, make sure you build the substitution house before you tear the old one down.

Building the City Twice: An Introduction to Venezuela’s Barrios.

View to Barrio San Agustín from Parque Central  in the centre of Caracas.

In Venezuela more than 50% of the population lives in the barrios, those sectors of the city built by residents themselves without official rights or provision of services, on unstable land, under constant threat of eviction and with no legal rights to the homes which they have, in many cases, occupied for generations.*

Barrio Mamera as seen from the Metro station.

The barrios are the spatial expression of a deep segregation within Venezuelan society. They contain within them many other types of exclusion; unemployment, lack of access to medical services and education, exposure to crime and violence.

The official city has always had an ambiguous relationship with the barrios. The barrios are home to the builders, drivers, nurses, teachers, cooks and cleaners on which the official city depends. It is a vast pool of cheap labour. Yet the official city refuses to recognise the crucial function of the barrio, referring to it only as a problem, a source of crime, an eyesore, and an urban blight. On most official maps the barrios do not exist at all, they are depicted as blank ‘green zones’.

A view from central Caracas towards the surrounding barrio

In Caracas they say the residents of the barrios had to build the city two times. First, brought into the city as cheap labour, they came as the construction workers who built the highways, stadiums and apartment buildings of the official city. Secondly, on finding no place for themselves in that city, they also worked by night, in solidarity, with rough materials and much imagination, to make their own city - the barrios.

In such a way the barrios are on one hand the expression of segregation and on the other the expression of the fight against that segregation. The residents of the barrios have had to fight over many generations to claim their right to occupy land, their rights to clean water, sewerage and electricity, their rights to medical care, to affordable, good quality food, to education and employment. This struggle continues in Venezuela today with growing support from the government as well as many urban professionals, including architects.