Greenhouse construction workshop in the Festival de la Madera
The Festival de la Madera (‘Wood Festival’) is celebrated every year in Rivera, Uruguay, to highlight the value of wood (local main raw material) through architecture and design. It is organized by Campo Abierto, an innovative platform for exchange and experimentation with a focus on multidisciplinarity and cultural diversity. In the first edition of this Festival, we proposed what we called Operation Nickel, with two main objectives:
On the one side, the development of a workshop so that a heterogeneous group of people with different backgrounds can design a seedlings greenhouse in a collaborative way, making all members define both the design process and the construction.
On the other side, experimentation with remnants of eucalyptus wood, very accessible in the area, in order to generate new constructive solutions to be replicated and developed in this typology and in others.
Our work focuses on generating the necessary conditions for the synthesis of an effective group that would resolve the design and construction of the greenhouse in an autonomous way. We work on the basis of how a group without apparent coordination nor relevant individual knowledge can give intelligent answers and solve complex problems, showing the capacity for greater adaptability instead of rigid hierarchies.
The protocol focuses on building this capacity for self-management by releasing the decision-making throughout the process until a complete automaton operation is achieved. This leaves to the group decisions such as the measurements of the frames, reaching the capacity to manage any unexpected events and to resolve those predicted.
As a final result, in addition to having reached constructive details and optimal technologies, we have had the determination to leave the process open, collecting all the learnings, from constructive details to social technology, in an open-source manual.
With free access to this information to anyone who wants to reproduce, replicate or develop the model, we intend to contribute to the popular wisdom and engage ourselves with the collective intelligence of the place.
