WNL

We Need New Limits is an intervention and a practice of a dialogue between different ways of understanding and living the space. We Need New Limits is a call for coexistence that questions the limits established between traditional binomials – abstraction and reality, city and countryside, memory and future – that seem to fade in a world in crisis.

1. To learn from the factory to the landscape, from the landscape to the factory, and so on.

We Need New Limits is a practice of a dialogue between different ways of understanding and experiencing the space that surrounds us.

This intervention is part of an active learning process that has challenged us and continues to challenge us today. From MAPA we began to connect with remote landscapes in a way that we could consider “contingential”. More than 10 years ago, when we dreamed of a family of devices for explorers—later to take the name MINIMOD—we rethought our architecture through reviewing the construction industry itself. Thus, the incursion into the logic of the prefab (1) and plug and play (2) opened up an unprecedented horizon of experimentation for us, freeing us from the usual geographical restrictions, challenging us as architects, and finally as humans.

In this sense, and in retrospect, we can assert that although we started working from the machine to later think of the countryside, we ended up, happily, rethinking the machine (and architecture) from what we have learned from the land, that today, is more familiar to us.

2. From Masterplan to Matterplan.

Both the stories we tell ourselves and the tools we use, shape our ability to build worlds. In this way, as architects of urban origin, like a craftsman who gradually changes his tools to manufacture new realities, we transform our skills and our language when we face other landscapes; reviewing what we have learned and repeated in our schools and universities, to pay attention to new players, stories and sensibilities.

Leaving behind the urban burden entails rethinking, particularly, the notion of masterplan, an essential tool when working in large territories.

The very origin of the word is questionable today. The term master (3) is linked to domination, the hierarchical, with a single figure that controls and defines the fate of lands, organizations or people.

Likewise, the masterplan is a historical heritage of modern thought from the last century and there are already many criticisms that have been accumulating from various dimensions, as “the complexity of the city [and a territory] does not fit into a masterplan” (4).

We propose, then, to give rise to the new idea of ​​matterplan.

Matter means working with matter (5), with what is substantial, and in turn, operating with the problems and with situations of a world of increasing fragility. Thus, matter seems to better adapt to the richness of the ecosystemic, the complex or the unpredictable, and positions us as architects on another side: that of openness, fragility and the search for alliances.

As a design tool, the matterplan poses an interesting friction between matter and plan, enabling multiple interpretations, multiple contents, and processes that must be built in a shared manner.

3. We need new limits.

We Need New Limits is the continuation of We Need New Concepts, our project presented at Campo Artfest 2021, through which we review our language with the creation of a new collective dictionary.

The installation uses elements normally used in the demarcation of land, but arranged in such a way that they remain unstable and strange, as mediating artifacts between the imagined and the present.

On a larger scale, We Need New Limits raises the tension between an abstract, analytical and aprioristic grid, and the physical reality of the Field Studio in Garzón, rich in materialities, details and stories. Thus, it is configured as a call for coexistence that questions the limits established between traditional binomials and categories –abstraction and reality, countryside and city, chaos and order, memory and future– that seem to fade to give way to something new.

1. For us, prefab condenses a “predisposition” to create architecture from an industrial logic.
2. It is a characteristic of the devices designed to work perfectly from the moment they are transported and installed.
3. As a historical definition, in the dictionary we can read, for example, “a man who has people working for him, especially servants or slaves”, “a person who has dominance or control of something”.
4. Sentence from Gehl Architects, Taken from an article of the same name in El País, Spain, April 4, 2013.
5. Perhaps we could relate the term to what André Hadricourt defines as the actions of the western farmer in a “direct and mass treatment”. “Masal in the sense of mass, of mass treatment”. And that defines the spirit itself.

   MAPA
   Partners: Luciano Andrades, Matías Carballal, Andrés Gobba, Mauricio López, Silvio Machado.
   Project team: Diego Morera, Pablo Courreges, Sebastián Lambert,  Martina Pedreira, Emilia Dehl, Emiliano Lago, Victoria Muniz,  Flavio Faggion, Agustina Vigevani, Emma Prevett, Lucía Martinotti, Florencia Mastropierro, Constanza Manzochi, Daniela Moro, Juliana Colombo, Fernanda Dihl, Lucas Marques,  Ananda Rossi, Amanda Cappelati,  Erika Sato, Julia Zorrer, Ma. Eduarda Cavassola, Mateus Grandini, Mauricio Müller, Pedro Brandelli, Pedro Reichelt, Camila Tekiel.