Architects:estudio relativo

Area:5651ft²

Year:2015

Photographs:Nicolás Mántaras

Manufacturers:Masisa

Lead Architects:Cecilia Rossini, Guido Hernandez

Blacksmiths:Drussi herrería

City:La Criolla

Country:Argentina

Text description provided by the architects. La Criolla is a small commune with just over 2,300 inhabitants, located 185 kilometers north of the capital of Santa Fe province. Based on a fund for minor works that the commune received annually, a project is presented for the first functionalization stage of a railway shed, as a center and space for cultural production. The requested program incorporated a rehearsal/exhibition sector, a room/auditorium for 100 spectators, a workshop for staging/scenography, a support sector with a dressing room, and a sanitary nucleus that should also serve the adjacent public spaces, within a park complex of 16ha.

We suspect, due to other commissions that the studio carried out previously in cities and towns with similar characteristics at different points on Route 11; the existence of a high development of the local artisan trade. Product perhaps, of the delay in the appearance of industrialization processes and its close relationship of production with the rural and railway environment that, based on the optimization of available resources, judiciously imposes the recycling and perpetual re-use of pre-existing tools and infrastructures. This determines the persistence of deeply rooted procedures, carriers of technical knowledge of enormous value to the community, which is evident in the sequence of charcoal ovens of ceramic brick on the side of the road, and in the prosperity of the work of lathe, blacksmithing, and carpentry in an artisanal key.

Because of the budget limitations and the production conditions already mentioned, it was decided to restrict the diversity of work items and guilds and concentrate resources on the execution of two fundamental operations. On one hand, a kind of habitable wooden furniture, executed by the work team of the community carpenter, whose materialization replicates in scale the assembly procedures of frame and veneer furniture, which were booming in our country in the '80s. Its layout, embracing the auditorium room, makes it possible to clearly define the distribution of the program in a new inside condition, containing the sanitary core and dressing rooms, and an upper floor that functions as a classroom/workshop or acts as an auditorium to increase its capacity. In the remaining space, in the 'between', the programs with the highest influx of public are developed, the rehearsal room/exhibitions and the room/auditorium itself.

On the other hand, a mechanism to define an income, to fold it. A 'transparent' machine, a gadget¹ reminiscent of railway infrastructure. Those that accompany the tracks and that, based on their simplicity, expose their operation and make it evident. His resolution would be carried out by the community blacksmith, a task that he would alternate in his free time with the manufacture of vehicles and agricultural machinery scale models, and that would be proudly displayed on the shelves of his workshop.

¹ A- Mechanism, machine, or device, especially one that is complicated to handle or that has a function that is not easily perceived or is unknown.B- Trick to get something

Project gallery

Project location

Address:La Criolla, Santa Fe, Argentina