The architect who dreams of a Kafkaesque cultural center for La Boca

Belinda Noemí Rodas Martínez (28 years old) graduated as an architect in December 2022. Dream big.

He wants to build a Cultural Center in the area of ​​Puerto Madero and La Boca. She presented a project in an international competition and was among the hundred finalists for the Excellence Award.

Merit brings a bonus of origin: he comes from a workers’ neighborhood and it was there where in full confinement due to the pandemic, developed the project that had her and has her as the exclusive protagonist. But the story of her early consecration begins earlier.

As a teenager, I didn’t want to know anything about robots or computers. He read everything he could get his hands on related to science, as well as novels and encyclopedias. But what she always liked is architecture.

It counts without an ounce of makeup above, in a room of the House of Culture of Buenos Aires. His story is set in a building that housed the newspaper. The Presson Avenida de Mayo, and the stained glass windows of the Golden Room were brought by ship from France.

Ideal scenery for someone who is, after all, one of the hundred finalists of the Concurso Tamayouz Excellence Awardwhich, since 2012, has awarded original architectural proposalslandscape design, urban planning and architectural technology.

It all started with a faculty subject where a Master Plan had to be carried out between Puerto Madero and La Boca, facing the river in the South Dockin the Naval Quarter whose land is exposed to the elements and unused.

His idea: to create a Cultural Center there that would house craft workshops, a public library, a museum, a theater hall and a symphony hall.

Includes a room for technology workshopsbuilt with a cement block, and another block that breaks the building, which is made of metal.

In an imposing frame and with surreal features are the transparencies, the panels that allow you to change the facade. And there another idea is triggered that captivated the specialist jury.

The construction is based on the concept of Metamorphism, that is, it is an open project that can change shape like a living organism. And the surprise is even greater when the novel appears on the scene. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, cited by the architect.

At the beginning of the book, the protagonist turns into an insect. “Kafka’s work has a lot to do with shape-shifting, dehumanization; he talks about the capitalist machine that begins to absorb the human being. The opposite is to create the humanization of space.”

All this conceptual support was formulated in the middle of the pandemic: Belinda, isolated in her apartment, reread Le Corbousier’s article The ineffable spacewhere he maintains that the first proof of existence is inhabiting space.

Rodas says that he is from San Esteban, a neighborhood of Cañuelas in the province of Buenos Aires. It is a working-class neighborhood. Since she was a child she spent hours reading the book The Tree of Life. He was always interested in the difference in races, he wondered why we were different, each one with his origin and color and there the word metamorphism stuck in him; say, the ability to adapt to the environment.

That’s why He dreams of his building as an organism, as something alive, humanizing the object at the service of good living.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, Buenos Aires began to be a dormitory city to house more and more people and thus a type of junk architecture began to emerge. My building, although it was born with the destruction that the pandemic implied and that is seen in my images, which They are black sky without a vivid colorit turns out to be a still boat, a way of reinterpreting what the tenement was,” says Rodas.

La Boca has that history of metamorphosis too. First it was an upper class neighborhood, which abandoned him because of yellow fever and moved to the north.

Then, the workers crossed to Maciel Island: the Avellaneda bridge is still there, which is a symbol of the port neighborhoodwhich the painter Benito Quinquela Martín immortalized in his pictorial works.

The arm projected as a Cultural Center extends between the Naval Intendance and continues to La Boca, consisting of a total of 7,260 square meters.

The idea is that people walk and walk, that a human bond is created with the city and, as Jacques Derrida wrote, architecture becomes a form of communication, a new arrangement that returns again and again to the links between its inhabitants. , and where the boundaries between the city and the new building are blurred.

The project was born at the height of Covid-19 infections, but that limit situation It prompted Rhodes to create beauty, and this too can be planned as the great architects did.

“My project has no limits, it is open and allows for a change of form as well as air and for the city to be livable with the natural energy that man’s relationship with nature possesses, where architecture does not crush us like a cockroach. Where planning is allowed based on the needs of those who transit the public space and not on the means of transportation. There is no typical user, nor a typical family, nor a typical job,” explains Rodas.

All true art is an unfinished work and lacks “perfection.” The young architect shares the idea of ​​Jorge Luis Borges: is published to stop correcting.

Rodas dreamed of a project that raises its glass silhouette in front of the river and the trees in the south of the city. Now all that remains is for the capitals to appear who dare to make that dream come truefor the benefit of all Buenos Aires residents.