SAN JOSÉ, COSTA RICA Architecture as Excuse: Community Centers as Catalysts for Social Agency in Informal Cities (The Cave of Light in San José, Costa Rica and other Emergent Initiatives)

Recognizing our agency as designers to envision emerging, alternative, and new radical forms of practice, it is critical to reconceive our methods to have a coherent impact within the complexity of our cities. Continuously exposed to challenging political and spatial contexts compounded by divergent socioeconomic dynamics has engendered a human resiliency and contextual sensible space of practice. This condition is enriched by a boundless capacity for social endeavors working with local processes, existing resources, and promoting local assets within diverse communities and geographies. This exhibition will expose unconventional modes of production and social empowerment within the built environment in Central America. Utilizing community centers as catalysts, these spaces serve as the first line of convergence, interaction, and shelter for alternative enterprises defined by social agency, advocacy, and activism. Through this undertaking strategies of participatory and sustainable environmental design endeavors emerge by working alongside communities and in collaboration with transdisciplinary teams. The exhibition will encompass narratives with diverse mediums of display undertaking the importance of: the lack of justice, opportunities and urban challenges; Cave of Light as a practical demonstration on how to start among all collateral efforts; Process and sequence diagrams, pictures over the territory to express change and recreate site conditions; Show main stockholders and users stories as project enablers; A timber spatial mock-up of space for gathering and interaction.