LEARNING FROM CARACAS

L2S1

LEARNING FROM CARACAS

Spring 2025

What can we learn from Caracas?

More than a question of nostalgia, this was the starting point for a semester-long exploration involving 40 architecture students. Caracas—a 500-year-old city shaped by Indigenous, African, European, and modern influences—became the ground for a critical reflection on architecture’s role in contexts of crisis, informality, and resilience.

The studio was anchored in the work developed within DisLocal, an academic platform dedicated to situated architectural practices. The research built upon the collective knowledge generated in Virtual Community, the academic program launched in 2021. This semester extended that reflection—deepening the questions, broadening the context, and continuing a collaborative mode of inquiry.

Alongside the studio, four interns contributed in February to the development of public facilities for urban agriculture and public space. Their work reinforced the connection between research and action, exploring how architecture can support shared resources, food sovereignty, and forms of collective life across Caracas’ fragmented urban fabric.

Through mappings, readings, collaborative drawings, and critical dialogue, students engaged with a city where more than a third of the population lives in self-built neighborhoods. There, architecture is not static or idealized—it is improvised, negotiated, and lived in response to necessity and solidarity.

Caracas was not treated as a model to imitate, but as a city that provokes. A city that asks us to listen better, to think differently, and to imagine other ways of building. These 40 students didn’t seek ready-made answers—they allowed the city to transform their questions.

What remains is a shift in posture: architecture as process, as care, as collective knowledge. To learn from Caracas is to learn how to inhabit uncertainty, how to engage critically with context, and how to build with others, not for them.

Teachers:

Khristian Ceballos Ugarte+Max Turheim

Assitants: Guive Korshand +Jeremy Thim