Project Description
There is a growing desire for the island to be more self-sufficient. Understanding resiliency as self-sufficiency, the project investigates a regeneration of local material and building ecologies, and how an architectural intervention may support a body of local knowledge, craft, material and labor where the distance between the place of extraction, the place of construction and the place of knowledge are collapsed. A site to facilitate knowledge production and making opportunities so that Puerto Ricans may be empowered to begin new local practices of building while rewriting the historical system of financial and material extraction on the island. The hope that this architecture can expand and dismantle Puerto Ricans perceptions around building, in the same place that is oriented towards finding better solutions. A place for people to live and learn alongside the residents, local communities, visiting experts, while working to design, develop, build and test ideas to address challenges associated with building in Puerto Rico. The workshop engages intimately with the landscape in which it finds itself while posing questions surrounding a larger practice of building and resiliency in Puerto Rico and beyond.