Project – ILIAD LAB

Dome

“Science and technology are conducted with mathematics that is non-conceptual and the 99 percent of humanity do not understand science or technology because they do not understand the mathematics, which it uses. I find then that society thinks of technology as something new and threatening and only connected with weapons and big business. The universe itself is nothing but the most beautiful technology.” – Buckminster Fuller

Several of the architectural courses that Professor Brakke has taught have questioned the predominance of the cube and have explored the basic geometry of the tetrahedron. The work of figures such as Buckminster Fuller and Frei Otto has sparked dialogues that are carried out in parallel with making. These inquiries have involved multi-scalar permutations and construction. Each has been completed with a different agenda linked with the course objectives. The undergraduate courses have developed domes with wood, PVC and plastic sheets. Some have been built to examine joinery; others have been taped up and inflated. In a graduate seminar, students used the base form of the dome and found materials to create an emergency shelter that could harness wind and harvest water. Each investigation has provoked more questions than answers and thus the exploration will continue.

Minka Lab Maloka

In 2014 we co-elaborated a geodesic dome relying upon local materials in Santa Rosa de Cabal, Colombia. This dome serves as a Maloka that hosts community activities in this rural laboratory.

Minka Lab is a rural laboratory that works to empower local indigenous groups, farmers and Afro-Colombian minorities to resist marginalization through community building and sustainable agro-ecological practices. In 2014, Iliad was contacted by Minka Lab to build a Maloka in their site in Santa Rosa de Cabal. A Maloka is a traditional structure of many Indigenous communities that inhabit the Andean Region of South America, which serves as the physical space to realize special ceremonies.

The structure created is a geodesic dome made of Guadua, a locally available material similar to Bamboo, and the structure was assembled and constructed with local artisans and friends of the organization.

Cazuca Park / Zig Zag Park

As current ILIAD Director, Aaron Brakke, was working at Universidad Piloto in Colombia, an opportunity to work with communities in the periphery of Bogota emerged. A multilateral, long-term collaboration gave way to the construction of Zig Zag park, a place for community building in a neighborhood affected by several forms of displacement.

The city of Bogota grew south with the explosive urbanization of the Tunjuelo River basin. Many of the neighborhoods were created by people moving into the city with their families, in an exercise of insurgent planning and architecture. Today, even though many of the neighborhoods have been formalized, precarious conditions prevail for many of their inhabitants, who live among extensive mining operations, but with unpaved streets and limited access to social services. Over the years, the south of the city has received displaced population from other parts of Colombia and from Venezuela, creating diverse, and often fragmented, neighborhoods.

Neighbors do not know their neighbors and don’t feel a sense of belonging, which we evidenced in their behaviors and words. We identified that many of them did not feel as if they had a community, nor that they had sufficient space to gather. We started working with a local community organization that promotes schooling by providing food and after-school learning support for children. We worked with them to identify a “leftover” space that was left vacant and had become a repository for construction debris in the neighborhood. Our aim was to develop a sense of solidarity and empowerment amongst residents so that they could take action to transform the built environment. We felt that if we could activate a public space together, new dynamics would emerge.

The project was developed through the synergy of many actors who abided by the methodology of Participatory Action Research, as developed by Orlando Fals Borda. The intervention involved several steps, including 1) Mapping the territory, 2) a workshop to Identify problems and needs, 3) a Dream Workshop to develop a list of objectives and collective dreams, 4) a Design ideas workshop to develop ideas for physical space, 5) the design of the park, 6) Crowd Funding, 7) Educational courses on construction with SENA (a public technical education institution) and 8) Construction.

This process has taken nearly five years and the investment in people and in the space is starting to feel like it has paid off and is reaping the reward. Residents of all ages are coming together to use this space. This has become a ‘place’ in the neighborhood to play, talk and build community.

This project was recognized in the I Biennial of Public Space of Bogota in August 2019.

TaDIC

In August 2019 we supported the Community Design and Innovation Workshop that took place in Tumaco, Colombia. During the workshop, diverse teams worked on the design of low-cost technologies, services, and experiences to address local issues or opportunities. A participatory design approach involving grass-roots community members, design, architecture, and engineering students and professors, was used to prototype a park, envisioned by a local community of recyclers, fishermen, and cocoa growers and their families.

The TaDIC was an immersive co-creation experience that took place between July 27th and August 12th, 2019 in the city of Tumaco, along the Colombian Pacific. Its purpose is to amplify local innovation capacities by teaching a co-design methodology through a project-based curriculum.

During the workshop, one of ILIAD’s researchers co-facilitated the work of a multidisciplinary team that included community members from the neighborhood where the project was envisioned. The group performed research through observation, participatory workshops in the community, site visiting, and interviews. The knowledge gained from this research phase was downloaded through collaborative meaning-making sessions that allowed us to determine the scope of the project and the design needs. After several ideations, experimentation, and feedback sessions, the group built a functional prototype of a playground. This unit sought to embody community values that had emerged during the research and serve as a device to help empower the community visions and efforts towards the park.

The Workshop was organized by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and its local headquarters in Tumaco, supported by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Waterloo, Mount Royal University, the Social Sciences, and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Tumaco Diocese.