FInalist proposal for YAP_Constructo 2019 (MoMA Young Architects Program)
Architects: BASE studio
Felipe Sepúlveda + Bárbara Barreda
Architectural Collaborators:
Matías Ramírez, Consuelo Guiñez, Matías Faundes, Ignacio Salinas, Catalina Ellena, Rodrigo del Campo, Santiago Ortúzar.AIReS
Finalist YAP Constructo, MoMA YOUNG ARCHITECTS PROGRAM ‘AIReS’ is a lightweight inflatable responsive system with basis on the observed behavior of invertebrate and natural soft-body systems. ‘AIReS’ investigates the potential of inflatable structures for creating geometrical, material and non-conventional spatial formulations that can host and seek new ideas of temporality, structural flexibility and material dependency in architecture.The pavilion is conceived as a flexible and adaptable multi-apses object. Its pneumatic nature and a programed inflation system provides an animalistic appeal to its behavior and physical performance: a pressurised pvc plastic skin sensorised with programed sensors that continuously evaluate atmospheric conditions in order to activate (on/off) a number of turbines to supply air to a series of pillow-like components. This programmed breathing behaviour utilises air as a catalyst for structure and space, air as a physical phenomena that contains and is being contained, as a mediating force that negotiates between softness and stiffness, questioning the notion of structural resistance associated to rigidity. ‘AIReS’ is a large-scale enclosure; a public hall of seemingly spatial complexity where the sense of scale and proportions get distorted and the condition of interior/exterior dilutes in a continuously mutable patchworked envelope, creating a strange atmosphere of blurry transparencies and reflections. Contrary to the static idea of traditional buildings, the proposal aims to create a dynamic, more imaginative and playful relationship between the context and its visitors, stimulating people to engage and interact with architecture in unexpected and spontaneous ways.