Linking Manaus

Linking Infrastructure

South America - Argentina - Córdoba

Designer(s): Santiago Canén, Leandro Piazzi

English Español

If our societies – and therefore our production contexts – are unstable and everchanging, should we conceive our buildings as a response to these processes? Should we think in performances rather than in programmes? What kind of role does public space play in fulfilling such issues? Located amidst the Amazon rainforest, Manaus is all about dualities. As a thriving urban trade centre, it has been thought out and planned in deliberate dissociation from the intense geographical conditions it has to face daily. The lack of public space, in addition to the coexistence with flood levels and the disconnection between city sectors, forms a constant challenge to urban life. Manaus’s municipality understands these situations as three separate issues that allow no integral proposal that mutually links them. Our infrastructural proposal brings territory, urban tissue and infrastructure together by mixing a covered plaza, a new aquatic border, and a monorail station. It swallows up the existent mobility infrastructure by adding extra activities, it unveils the geography by making it accessible. As a product aware of the intensity of the context, it gives shelter to the multiple outdoor activities that take place daily in all stations in Manaus: it is an adaptive flux device, a performative public space.

Linking infrastructure deals with the intense context through public space.


Unveiling the geography. Aquatic Border (public resort)


Flux device. View from covered plaza


Groundfloor plan


Proposal overview (dry and wet season)


Context of production

text and photos from :http://www.archiprix.org/2015/index.php?project=3542