Multiple colorful container units were stacked to create a new cultural production zone in the Guacara city of Venezuela. Designed by Venezuela-based architecture firm Pico Colectivo, the 550-square-metre project was developed as a microorganism of alternative economies based on the realization of artistic disciplines, from the restructuring of an unoccupied property, using containers and objects.

Called Cultural Production Zone: Uunits Of Urban Creation, the project acts as a symbol of a process of cultural conquest that derives from the confrontation by taking the street as a space for transformation. 

The building is located in the most intense area of the city center, very close to the main square, shops and municipal institutions, and situated in an underutilized plot where technical offices of the public telecommunications company operated, until the vandalization of its facilities during violent protests in February 2014.

The architects see the opportunity to recover the infrastructure as an alternative construction tool. The project manages to access the city to reprogram the building in order to develop a cultural creation space that endorses different cultural activities developed by groups of young people. 

The nucleus of the project is able to articulate a preexisting building with a series of new devices that rest on the original structure, unifying operative spaces in a single system composed of different productive units: Urban garden and cafe restaurant, image laboratory, audiovisual, networks and social media, recording studio and room in musical rehearsal, exhibition gallery and multipurpose workshop, skatepark, multipurpose court and concert hall, constitute the areas of the set.

"The use of containers responds to a pre-established condition that makes it possible to take advantage of these objects once they were chartered to transport the technical equipment acquired as a nucleus endowment, concentrating economic resources in the technology transfer devices and technical resources in the construction," said the architects. 

The strategy consists in articulating the old building with these new devices, taking advantage of surplus structures commonly generated by the construction industry, to install prostheses and extensions of containers, oil drums in the manufacture of window components, high pvc boards density as covering surfaces, wood cuttings, fiberglass, galvanized brass. 

By giving second lives in between different materials, parts and components present minimal imperfections obtained when registering in landfills of materials coming from other works.

"The Cultural Production Zone is not only a building that belongs to a cultural group, although it is managed by urban artists and creators, it radiates to the whole community, issuing articulated programs with other organizations inside and outside the country," added Pico Colectivo.

"These groups produce graphic, musical and audiovisual productions, while the plaza, the basketball court and the skatepark are regularly used by local groups, in the same way that the multipurpose room receives periodic meetings of neighbors, conferences, forums of cinema and public conversations, opening the space to society as a whole."

Project facts

Architects: Pico Colectivo 

Location: Guacara, Carabobo, Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of

Project: Marcos Coronel

Project team: María Isabel Ramírez, Michelle Isoldi, José Bastidas

Size: 550 m2

Year: 2016

All images © José Alberto Bastidas

All drawings © Pico Colectivo 

> via Pico Colectivo