ARCHITECTURE IS NEVER COMPLETE
Soon after architect Elisa Silva moved to Caracas, Venezuela, in 2007, she found herself in La Morán, one of the city’s many barrios. Erected in the mid–twentieth century during the country’s economic expansion, these self-built, spontaneous settlements have since grown to house almost half the capital’s population. However, such unplanned sectors, which also include La Palomera and Chapellin, suffer from unequal access to resources, and are both stigmatized and under-recognized as part of the official city. It’s this fragmentation that Silva is interested in reconciling.
Almost 15 years on, Silva — who grew up between St. Louis and Venezuela — has created a multidisciplinary design practice, Enlace Arquitectura. Part of its focus is on community initiatives, civic activations, architectural interventions and exhibitions that address the public domain of the barrios — attempting to bridge the formal and informal urban fabrics through their interstitial spaces. From pavement to planters and publications to parties, Silva and her team design in a decidedly open-ended, bottom-up fashion that prioritizes consultation and engagement and results in an egalitarian process of city-making. “You’re asking people to think about something in their city that they’ve never much questioned,” she says of these largely ignored neighbourhoods,, which followed 2015’s in tracing the evolution and issues endemic in these territories.
