6/19/2013

Serrana and Quitasueño a drawing project by Luis Callejas and Melissa Naranjo/LCLA Office

My apology for this long silence. I was particularly busy on calls for papers these recent days. Not an easy task! These call for papers, however, drive you to new boundaries, new research. Furthermore, three weeks ago, I visited a site near the city where my parents live, a city located in the Parisian basin, a changing territory, known for being agricultural now becoming energetic territory with the presence of onshore shale oil platforms (or hydraulic fracturing facilities)  in this contested territory. I'm planning to add one of two more next week. Consequently, I will be once again silent for a couple of weeks. I can't say more as I am currently working on a series of posts on this topic of landscape-energy.

Then I profit from this post to remind you this important information: two weeks left for sending me your abstract for Uncertain Territories' first volume Contingency. I will write a short post on this editorial project this weekend. I hope you all work hard…Good Luck!!!


Colombian architect Luis Callejas just launched the 33rd volume of Pamphlet Architecture, a volume entitled Island and Atolls. Some months ago, his office announced to have been awarded by Pamphlet Architecture for their 33rd volume.
Luis Callejas belongs to a list of architects including Mason White and Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office, Neeraj Bhatia of Lateral Office and Petropia, Smout Allen, to limit to these few names, I've been following for awhile.
Note that Luis Callejas regularly collaborates with Lateral Office — I cite a few of these projects: Hydroborders, Klaksvik City Center, and Weatherfield.

This Pamphlet Architecture will be a great occasion for me to have a better glance at his work.
I will order my copy rapidly, this week, (despite a two/three-week wait certainly due to a problem of distribution via Amazon France), and with evidence, will go back to this little publication as soon as possible. This being said, Luis Callejas is presenting a series of drawings at Storefront for Art and Architecture, in New York in the framework of the exhibition POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions, until July 26.
For those, me included, who didn't have the chance of visiting the first edition, POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions is Storefront For Art and Architecture's annual drawing show whose ambition is to discuss, transform our understanding of architectural drawings in the 21st century. This new edition gathers drawings of Amale Andraos of WorKAC, Adam Frampton, Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano of LOT-EK, Eric Owen Moss, Fernando Romero of FREE, Form_ula, Gia Wold, Hayley Eber of EFGH, Filipe Magalhaes & Ana Luisa Soares of Fala Atelier, Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Marcelo Spina & Georgina Huljich of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, Arturo Scheidegger & Ignacio Garcia Partarrieu of UMWELT, Bernard Tschumi, Caroline O'Donnell of CODA, Hedwig Heinsman of DUS, James Wines, Juan Herreros, Mark Shepard, Michel Rojkind, Michele Marchetti of Sanrocco, Neil Spiller, Norman Kelley, Odile Decq, Rafi Segal, Ryan Neiheiser, Giancarlo Valle & Isaiah King of Another Pamphlet, Stan Allen, Veronika Valk, Viviana Peña of Ctrl G, Yansong Ma of MAD and Luis Callejas & Melissa Naranjo of LCLA Office.

It's a good occasion to propose here a drawing of both Callejas and Naranjo for the moment when I will receive my copy. This drawing is titled Serrana and Quitasueño. Luis Callejas and Melissa Naranjo despict this drawing as:
Serrana and Quitasueño ı part of Pamphlet Architecture 33. Islands and Atolls | Luis Callejas and Melissa Naranjo/ LCLA Office, 2013
Hand cut collage on original maps
Courtesy of Luis Callejas and Melissa Naranjo/ LCLA Office


two versions Storefront's facade as a 220 km long line extending over the degrees in latitude. The Sf's facade aligns with the newly redefined aquatic border between Colombia and Nicaragua in the currently redefined aquatic border between Colombia and Nicaragua in the currently disputed archipelago of San Andres and Providencia. What are the new scales of exchange between the small banks and Islands that are trapped in the legal battle for the sovereignty of the archipelago? What will be the new mechanisms of regulation that will affect the aquatic landscape that so many Colombian fisherman depend on? As in the beginning of making the drawing the two players could not agree on the answer, it was decided that each author would play the game of trying to depict the interest of each nation by representing the possible exchanges through opening and closing the 30 km long pivoting walls in different degrees. While the Colombian version (right) tries to leave more spaces for open international fishing routes, the Nicaraguan side (left) opens in specific point of intense exchange while isolating others for potential oil exploration by US and European corporations.
In addition to the POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions exhibition, Serrana and Quitasueño is a part of this 33rd volume of Pamphlet Architecture, a volume that includes an interview with Geoff Manaugh and Mason White, and an afterword by Charles Waldheim. For those of us who cannot visit this exhibition, we will have an opportunity to discover this series of drawings. I hope to go back over Luis Callejas' work rapidly, at least on this new Pamphlet Architecture
For the most impatient among us, I will merely say that Luis Callejas is regularly described as a landscape architect. If the scale of the landscape constitutes his medium, Luis Callejas's interest focuses rather on non-built phenomena, namely, "things one cannot easily control and design" than on the notion of landscape. 
What interests me in Luis Callejas and LCLA Office's matters of concern is this question of 'non-built phenomena' that convokes a set of problems ranging from scale, infrastructure, space, production, complexities, contingencies, and so on.
Natural phenomena are the raw materials used to generate a projected landscape. In this way architecture is not separated from Phenomena, it doesn't resist them or reject them, it lets them interact. When a given site has no expressive natural phenomena, or none that are appealing to us, we should consider the possibility of de-contextualizing a foreign phenomenon and artificially relocating it.*
Let's wait and read this new volume of Pamphlet Architecture.
Those among my readers living in the North America, you can have your copy as it is announced available on Amazon. For the rest of us, let's be patient…



* See: On Ash Clouds | Harvard Graduate School of Design, Department of Landscape Architecture

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