'Unsolicited Architecture' being picked up in the Spanish speaking word.

PUBLIC DOMAIN OCCUPATION WITH SKIPS

” Santiago Cirugeda’s Recetas Urbanas (Urban Prescriptions). Cirugeda hacks the legal code. Because his home town would not authorize him to build a playground, Santiago Cirugeda obtained a dumpster permit and installed a playground that looked like a dumpster. He also built and occupied a rooftop crane that passersby believed was there only to move building materials. There used to be a video on you tube where the architect used Playmobil toys to demonstrate how to build a temporary flat in your rooftop. The solutions Cirugeda proposes are cheap, fast, accessible to everyone and the key ingredient is to find out the gaps in administrative structure and official procedures, to intervene where the law falls short.” - WMMNA

BUILDING YOURSELF AN URBAN RESERVE

“The work of urban activist Santiago Cirugeda invariably deals with the conflict between individuals’ spatial interests and the rules defined by society to control them. Each of his urban installations give form to a human desire that in order to fulfil itself needs to negotiate a set of legal constraints. Instead of opposing these constraints explicitly, Cirugeda carefully studies them in order to harness their potential. Between the lines of the legal code he sniffs out unforeseen residual possibilities of action and grants them (il)legal asylum in his architectural interventions in public space. In order to add a balcony to his apartment (which was not permitted), he vandalized the facade of his building with graffiti. To clean a façade, one is entitled to erect scaffolding for a period of three months – during which time he appropriated the scaffolding as his balcony. In another project he applied for a permit to install a construction waste container in order to make a play area for children in the street. Once he had the permit, he closed the container with a platform and then mounted a seesaw on the platform. In yet another project he realized a (forbidden) apartment roof-top addition by making the shape and material of the illegal habitat such that it would be invisible to the administration officers who regularly surveyed the roof-scapes from helicopters. In Cirugeda’s urban interventions the very instruments of control intended to streamline every-day life in the name of the law uncanningly mutate into tools which help to overcome these restrictions and open up spaces for potential action.” - from the article Reprogramming Architecture by Ilka & Andreas Ruby - Volume #2 -Doing (Almost) Nothing - 2005

EMPTY LOTS OCCUPATION WITH CLOSET STRATEGY

HOUSING IN ROOFS

Resources:

Recetas Urbanas website (English and Spanish)
A lecture (video) by Santiago Cirugeda (in Spanish) at The Influencers (2008) festival