Global Design New York University: Spotlight: HHF

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Spotlight: HHF - "Ruta del Peregrino"

Ruta Peregrino is a path that goes from Ameca to Talpa de Allende in the State of Jalisco near Guadalajara, Mexico. During holy week, about two million people walk along this pilgrimage path. The municipalities involved wanted to give the pilgrims some permanent service areas and have invited an international team of architects and designers to design the various parts of this project like shelters and lookout points.

The HHF lookout point is designed to be an additional loop in the pilgrim`s path. Its round shape was developed as a formal anticipation of the people`s movement through the platform, going up to enjoy the great outlook in the surrounding countryside. The asymmetric arched openings provide access to an open hall which is covered by the platform above. The inner walls are a shifted repetition of the primary facade in four tangential circles between which the two staircases define a route up to the platform and back down. The only exception to the curved shape is a brick wall with a cross-shaped opening in the most protected part of the building serving as an intimate room for resting and prayer.

Ruta del Peregrino

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."