Iojann Restrepo, Alejandro Vargas & Daniel Felipe Zuluaga, Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín, Medellín, Colombia

Peripheries of Globality – Telecommunications Infrastructures: A Methodological Model for Landscape Integration

Nowadays, telecommunications are one of the main engines of global economic development by supporting digital relationships in the era of globalization and generating an unprecedented increase in the number of its infrastructures; This last, essential for the growing modern habits of interconnectivity.

Paradoxically the communities in which these generic infrastructures are inserted, strongly refuse to live with them based on the belief that they generate health issues and that they cannot establish a relationship with the landscape nor a symbolic relationship with the territory they transform.

According to what is previously mentioned, how, from architecture, can we respond to these problems, improving the energetic, programmatic and environmental performance of both infrastructures and the communities associated with them?

From a multidisciplinary and multi-scalar perspective this research project seeks, to propose a model that integrates these infrastructures into the contexts where they are inserted, hoping that it would be replicable, scalable and sustainable. In addition, these infrastructures would understand and adapt to the landscape (climatological, technical, iconic and cultural conditions of each place). Promoting spaces for social encounters, environmental education and cultural exchange. Leading to a local understanding of a worldwide problem.

Water is the hot topic among the project entries for the Holcim Awards in region Latin America. Whether for wastewater, drinking water, or tidal water, many of the prize winners have innovative and often surprising proposals for ways to master the use of this precious resource in Latin America.

Whether camouflaged or in plain view, mobile telephone telecommunication antennas are spreading across cities worldwide. Questioning their mono-functionality, the project’s authors argue in favor of a strategy that would open up infrastructure to a broad palette of functions that could benefit communities, specifically those with insufficient public amenities. The design thus seeks to generate a novel network of public facilities attached to either existing or new telecommunication towers – appropriately so in Medellín, Colombia, a city undoubtedly open to innovation.

Telecommunication infrastructures: Current global issue – Local solution

Currently, telecommunications are one of the main engines of global economic development. Since the arrival of the digital age it has generated an unprecedented increase in the number of infrastructures that have not been able to adapt physically or functionally in cities. Recognizing that current and future lifestyles depend on these devices, we conceive a project that seeks to integrate these infrastructures and the spaces associated with them through social, landscape, architecture and urban interventions. Our project creates replicable models which could be interpreted on a worldwide basis, giving a multidisciplinary, multi-scale and timeless response to this problematic. The proposed intervention models include existing infrastructure and provide alternatives for new developments.