Architect Simón Vélez (b.1949 in Manizales, Colombia) has pioneered using structural bamboo seeing that he first began on his personal on the age of 23. a unprecedented draughtsman with an intuitive experience of structural engineering, he has equipped over 250 constructions utilizing structural bamboo or guadua.
Simón Vélez has designed structural bamboo constructions in Germany, France, the us, Brazil, Mexico, China, Jamaica, Colombia, Ecuador and India. He has been invited through the Vitra layout Museum in Germany and the Georges Pompidou Centre in France, to behavior masterclasses.
In 2000, he was once requested to build a wide pavilion in structural bamboo in Hannover, Germany for the realm Expo. development this pavilion along his pal and modern Shigeru Ban’s paper cardboard tube pavilion for a similar web site, Vélez’s round bamboo constitution, which was once forty metres in diameter, used over 3,500 structural bamboo stems. 40 employees flown in from Colombia equipped this pavilion, for which no heavy equipment similar to cranes was once required regardless of the size of the development operations.
Vélez’s constructions exude the language of human craftsmanship, a practice that has speedily misplaced validity within the seriously mechanised building surroundings of the western global. Simón Vélez sees himself within the culture of the master-builder operating with a guild of hugely expert craftsmen, with the architect on the best of the hierarchy. usually this collaboration among architect and builder produces an important flexibility within the building of constructions as judgements are made and adjusted whereas the development goes up on site.
A hugely dynamic sole practitioner, Simón Vélez’s physique of labor stands proud, not just for his hugely charged ‘signature’ - his constructions necessarily hold indelible marks of his creativity - but in addition for the drawing procedure by which constructions are
produced from the day that they're conceived to being performed on website. Simón Vélez’s perform increases serious questions about modern, western architectural perform the place the typology of the location has virtually turn into invisible. on account that so much paintings is drawn digitally in an workplace setting instead of Vélez’s extreme handbook tactics on web site, the positioning as an architectural typology has disappeared. It has turn into one other piece of photo entity on a working laptop or computer monitor to be manipulated in general in an place of work setting. Simón Vélez’s operating equipment represent lengthy stretches of drawing on website and the communique of those drawings on website, to the craftsmen via conversations.
Simón Vélez might be one of many final last practitioners of the method the place the human hand is the foundation of a complete architecture.
This booklet endeavours to question seriously the validity of what we now have misplaced and what we've won with the onset of the electronic period.
In December 2009, Simón Vélez bought The imperative Prince Claus Award for his contribution to a favorable interplay among tradition and nature. This prestigious Dutch award, based through Prince Claus, was once offered to Simón Vélez for his blend of innovation, conventional references and sustainability, whereas coping with to create a latest structure that displays smooth sensibilities and desires.
About the Author
Ajay Khanna (b.1969) certified as an architect in India in 1994. on the grounds that 1997 he has lived in London and Cambridge, united kingdom. After operating for numerous London practices, together with Foster and companions and Allies and Morrison, he based his personal layout studio known as The place of work of London structure and Urbanism in April, 2009. The studio is presently engaged in engaged on overseas layout competitions and in accomplishing examine on artwork and structure.
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