The Project “towards the center” is the story of a young university student who lives and studies at the Pómez University. This university is located in the Campo de Piedra Pómez (a pumice field), in the desert of the Puna of Catamarca, province of north-western Argentina. The story takes place in the year 2084, taking as a reference the Emerson College building in Los Angeles by Morphosis architects.
The disruptive agents that inspired this drawing and transformation were: the show, new teaching methods, and criticism. Taking each of them as a kickstart to project our new building planned and implemented in the desert of the year 2084.

This building seeks to develop for hybrid users. Even though Jimmy is human, there are characters throughout the comic that are not, or are in a lot of contact with technology.
In this university campus where these different characters live, study and develop the model of society proposed is a focused, committed and concentrated one . This campus allows the connections within it, through high-speed tubes, which connect the different programs.
Jimmy sleeps and studies on the same campus. Through the graphic resource of a comic strip, we show a day in the life of Jimmy, since he gets up, takes the transporter tube to the university, and develops all his routine on campus,

The relationship and ideological position with respect to the Catamarcan desert was based on the futuristic landscape that the desert itself transmits, but beyond the look we were made aware of what Peter Reyner Banham says, “To inhabit the desert is to inhabit the immensity; it is to be in the extension to build an order in relation to the tectonics of the Earth, the stone and the sand”.
In our immensity there are many environmental and climatic isues thinking about them we develop and designed the clothing, transportation and the building trying to solve the conflict of this plot.
Our character searches for answers, not only in this desert but in others, and so he begins his journey to another planet, thus leaving an open ending for the development of a new volume.

Guided by comics like El Eternauta (The Eternaut), or movies like Star Wars, and series like love death + robots, helped us with the aesthetics of our project in order to characterize it through this comics langage, using it as an means to show our building and our future fiction. We decided to characterize our entire project in black and white, using this resource to show the different spatialities and emotions that our main character is going through. Being able to transmit this future utopia with its complexities and understanding how it is also mentioned by Alessandra Ponte, that the interpretation that is made of the landscape is linked to a proposal for action that is expressed in the built form. In this way, the way to build imaginaries for us, future architects, is by projecting.

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This work was carried out as part of 2022’s 2nd quarter course Ficciones Futuras at the Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo, Universidad de Buenos Aires (FADU UBA).

Cátedra Ficciones Futuras: Francisco Hesayne, Profesor titular; Agustina Giambelluca, Jefa de trabajos prácticos; Santiago Albarracín, Jefe de trabajos prácticos; Agustina Pía López, Jennifer Kazár, Agustín Poch, docentes.

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