The Ubiquitous Block
Block Typologies in Buenos Aires
Cornell University
Ithaca, United States, 2008
Professor: Ciro Najle
Collaborator: Homin KimKimn
Students: Sara Arfain, Heather Beck, Jaein Choi, Suemin Jeon, Junshick Lee, Catherine Meng, Sachin Mulay, Francis Panchoshim, Kinjal Raval, Jung Wook Lee, Seok Yoo, Woo Young
During his twenty-day journey returning by boat from Buenos Aires to Europe in December 1929, Le Corbusier collected a series of writings and put them together a book called Precisions, where a general state of urban emergency was declared for the city, denouncing its pathologies, and demanding their mitigation or eradication, presenting several problems urgently needing to be solved by architectural organization.
The Ubiquitous Block explores the unfulfilled promise of overcoming the mandates of modernism by means of a radically systematic bottom-up pragmatism, where over-determination touch the sublime. The grid is thought as a ground for new architectural variants without resource to a therapeutic or salvaging attitude, and without dependence on top-down models. The block, in turn, is reconfigured before strategy, consistently adapting its geometric logic, blindly following its regulatory restrictions, and integrating the potentials of the organizational problems it encounters. New forms of architectural order result of incorporating congestion in the block, nurturing density and mixture in the process, and developing singularities via over-determination.
