Arch 201 Spring 2009

Professor René Davids

When Le Corbusier sketched a proposal for Buenos Aires in 1929, he visualized a business center on an island in the Río de la Plata that would serve as an iconic presence for travelers arriving by boat. Although it was superficially similar to his orthogonal abstract proposal for the Ville Contemporaine (1922), Le Corbusier’s scheme for Buenos Aires was as site-specific in its way as his curvilinear plan for the undulating hills of Rio de Janeiro: vertical towers that were a conceptual response to the meeting of the pampas and the river in a single line stretching across the horizon to infinity in both directions. The seemingly endless horizontal expanse of the pampas has an urban counterpart in the dense sprawl that is contemporary Buenos Aires. Located on the southern shore of the Río de la Plata, the third largest metropolis in South America, with a population of about 13 million, Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina, a country that once had a bright future, but has seen its prospects dimmed by political and economic turmoil. Variously described as the most cosmopolitan, most beautiful, most European city in Latin America, Buenos Aires is a proud but faded city plagued by poverty, pollution, and decaying infrastructure.

Study Area: Riachuelo Continuing the investigation of the relationships between architecture, infrastructure and urban waterways previously explored in Xochimilco, Mexico and in the Tamanduatei River Basin in São Paulo, Brazil, the Buenos Aires Studio will concentrate on the floodplain of the Río Riachuelo, the river that defines the southern boundary of the Buenos Aires federal district as it flows from western Buenos Aires into the Río de la Plata estuary, through fourteen barrios that are home to 3.5 million people. Factories and open garbage dumps located on its banks pollute the Riachuelo, and numerous illegal sewage pipes discharge directly into it.

Site

The program site is located in the Barracas area of Buenos Aires, a district, in the southeast part of the city located between the Ferrocarril General Manuel Belgrano railroad and the Río Riachuelo. The name Barracas comes from the word barraca, which refers to a temporary construction of houses using rudimentary materials. The project site is bounded by Alvar Nunez to the east, Vespucio to the west, Daniel Cerri to the north and Rio Cuarto to the south. Two regional winds exert a great influence on the Río de la Plata and the climate of Buenos Aires: the pampero, a wind which blows from the south to southwest, and southeasterly storm winds called sudestadas. When it is most powerful, the pampero drives the water from the river onto the Uruguayan coast, so that the water level drops on the Argentine side. During the Spring and Fall, the sudestadas prevent the waters of the Riachuelo from reaching the Río de la Plata, causing frequent floods in low-lying areas like La Boca and Barracas.

Program:

Urban Water Strip To reverse the southward direction of urban expansion, cleanse the waters of the Riachuelo and stimulate economic growth, the city of Buenos Aires intends to rehabilitate the river’s edge. The establishment of a sports, working and recreation strip along the river, with an emphasis on water sports in particular, may help Buenos Aires launch a successful bid to become the first Latin American Olympic city. The city intends to locate its new water sports infrastructure along the Riachuelo in a park that will be both productive and recreational, venues for water sports located within a water farming and/or hydroponic park. The specific farming component might be related to energy production, fresh water vegetables, fish, or any combination of these and is meant to give work to the people inhabitant living in the informal settlements along the river. You are asked to design facilities for the following water-sports:

• swimming
• diving
• synchronized swimming
• water polo
• rowing
• kayaking
• sailing

A regulation Olympic swimming pool is 50 ( 164’) meters long and 25( 82’) meters wide, with 10 lanes of 2.5( 8’-2+7/16”) meters each and a minimum depth of 2 meters. Rowing lanes are 13.5 ( 44’-3+1/2”) meters wide and 2000( 6561’ -8+3/16”) meters long. Diving pools are 100 feet long, 50 feet wide, 14 feet deep at the deep end and 3 feet deep at the shallow end. Lockers for men and women approx. sqft 5600/ 4 WC, 4 basins and undressing area of approx 1200 sqft

Consult De Chiara and Callender Time Saver Standards for Building Types, . New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1980.

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