Proving Ground
This studio examined the international holdings and architecture of UNESCO, whose World Heritage Sites program dates to its earliest postwar campaigns. Departing from previous vocabularies of culture and ecology, the organization more recently describes its Sites as laboratories, aligning preservation with both scientific practice and the familiar architectural type.
In an era of global upheaval and climate change, what is the architecture, and future, of the UNESCO laboratory?
Location
USC SoA
Vietnam/Wuhan
Studio
Proving Ground by Marcos Sanchez
Year
Spring 2020
Venice Hospital 2.0
Venice
“Historically being a quarantine island to mainland Italy, Venice has always had a long history with notions of virus, quarantine, and hospital. The word quarantine, which derives from the Italian words quaranta giorni meaning 40 days, describes the practice in the 14th century in which ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before making port to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics.”
Wuhan
“In January when the outbreak of coronavirus first started in China. The government decided the solution was to construct several quarantine centers that could house 1000 patients each in Wuhan to help to provide medical service to the citizens. Something unique about these quarantine centers is their speed of construction which took only 10 days from the beginning to the end as well as the fact that this process is broadcasted to the world through a live cam installed on the site before the beginning of construction.”
Hospital
“Fitting the hospital into existing architecture, the plan repurposes and occupies the whole ground floor by keeping the existing structure and inserting the hospital modules into the structural bays. Patients would come to the hospital using the existing circulation path by means of transportation both on land using an ambulance and on water using the water taxi.”
