Judith Rodríguez

Refresca Sao Paulo pilot

cajuinitiative.org

Voted top 3 ICCG Best Climate Practices 2015

Urban Urge Awards finalist 2014

Initiative for urban resilience with measurable evidence-based and accessible design strategies that can prepare urban communities to cope and adapt to climate change in regard to heat stresses. 

The proposal conceived as ‘Refresca São Paulo’ intends to implement on the ground ideas to fight against heat stresses and morbidity of vulnerable communities in the favelas of São Paulo, Brazil. The low-tech and affordable proposal ‘Refresca São Paulo’ tackles water security and recreation by helping qualify the community of Paraísopolis to capture rainwater for domestic non-potable uses, to establish staple tropical fruits vertical gardens, and to profit from recreational water use. This initiative is envisioned to make a splash during the hottest month in a grand community inflatable pool day event that would transform public space with harvested rain, bring public awareness and test its impact on the ground.

Baltic Art Park Competition

In collaboration with LCLA Office

The Baltic Sea Art Park will be established in two parts. A ground based area acting as a park defined by a corridor and an above-water itinerant museum composed of ten national floating pavilions. It uses the Baltic sea as it’s main space for itinerant and temporary forms of art exhibition and performance.

Organized from Pärnu, the itinerant pavillions will connect leading cultural institutions and underground creators from the worlds of art, music, food, literature, and film for a series of site specific cultural interventions. In addition to bringing art to the cities, the organizers will raise funding through ticket sales and donations to support ‘non-traditional programming’ at various museums and galleries across the Baltic Sea.

Collaboration with LCLA Office, Mantheykula, Charlotte Hansson, Groma and Grape.

30-year concession

34 km long

26 stations in 51 minutes

132,000 commuters per day

US $.54 per ride

US $270 million investment

32,000 tons of CO2 emissions reduction in Lima per year

The Metro Lima Line 1 project consists in the operation and maintenance of the first urban electric metro train line in Lima. It runs on a double-rail track on a mostly elevated viaduct connecting 11 highly populated districts from the south to the northeast of the city, while resurrecting 20-year-old unused rail and station infrastructure. It is sited in generally unused areas in the median space of three main avenue central berms, avoiding demolitions and relocations. Once finalized, its almost 34 km length will run 19 trains, connecting the most populated areas of Lima. Currently moving around 132,000 commuters per day, this metro train has direct large-scale impacts on the mobility of more than 3 million people who live in its area of influence, contributing to expected reductions in traffic volumes, CO2 emissions, and air pollutants, and also has indirect impacts on the citywide productivity level by reducing commuting times by almost threefourths.

Credits: 

Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure

Research sponsored by Inter-American Development Bank

Dr. Andreas Georgoulias, Research Director

Images and video from Línea 1

More info here.

The rapidly changing weather conditions and forceful winds make the tempestuous landscapes in Iceland a testing ground to explore new ways of harvesting wind energy coupled with erosion control, one of the most severe problems Iceland is facing since settlement .

Honorable mention

Urban design competition collaboration with LCLA Office & Stefan Tischer Landscape Architect

A new park is created on former Berlin’s TXL Tegel Airport. Connectivity and Accessibility

Continuity of the green connection through a differentiated tree concept, forms a distinctive landform. Existing embankments and canal bank also characterize the compounds to the south, east and west, all reinforced by accessible bridges with both pedestrian and bike paths.

The new parks and open space sequence is dominated by distinctive elements of the airport Tegel: Wherever possible, the signage patterns the former maneuvering area is obtained, including color marks, joint pattern, and surface texture.. In these areas, linear drainage canals with Phytoremediation vegetation filter stormwater, as well as cut holes in the contrete for tree grates. All other functions (disabled parking spaces, bicycle parking areas, experimental plots of the Beuth University, etc.) are painted. In the non-fixed parking areas the same round concrete elements are used (recycled from demolition areas in any future building sites) for seating for a unified, inspired from the airport apron aesthetic character.

Bogotá Botanical Gardens Tropicarium Design Competition

In collaboration with LCLA Office and Equipo de Mazzanti.

The jardins d’hiver have always been about building an inner paradise. A midpoint between garden and palace. If the interior winter gardens have been ways to challenge the climate and contain exotic worlds, they then try to build one in the tropics?

Design work done in collaboration with LCLA Office with El Equipo de Mazzanti from Colombia, and Anita Berrizbeitia from Harvard GSD.

A fragmented garden where tropical vegetation typical Andean altitude plays a key role in integrating the building into the landscape. Different ecotones are possible without the need to maintain completely contained atmospheres. Rooms containing various tropical ecosystems are defined with PVC curtains are open to the courtyard on warm days.

SoWey ecological fish farm

(Teamwork)

The SoWey ecological fish farm restores water ecologies on former Naval Air Station by integrating fish farming into the waste water treatment proccess.  The fish farm ponds consists of extensive polyculture that uses the trophic pyramid and natural habitats to grow fish found in Massachusetts watersheds with commercial value.

The Flexible Leviathan: Reconsidering Scale and Fixity in the Contemporary Metropolis

Arms and Heart of Iztapalapa is a proposed system of connections and destinations that seek to secure the future of youth in Iztapalapa in two ways: one with arms connecting and mobilizing neighborhoods from the higher and lower elevations; and two by creating a heart in the new Centro Oriente that un-stigmatizes Iztapalapa’s image, helps create a new Identity with a new destination made of a more dynamic center that connects spectacles, sporting venues and storm water management in multi-functional landscapes.

This framework aims to address the major security challenges present in Iztapalapa: youth marginalization, lack of mobility, lack of water and lack of housing. Iztapalapa is one of the delegations with the youngest population in Mexico City, which is experimenting the biggest demographical bonus in young people till 2015(Héctor Castillo Berthier) or 2025 (Iztapalapa Delegation) and is putting its hopes into the youth to make up the working population to push the city forward. The realities on the ground are different; for instance, youths in Iztapalapa are often stigmatized as delinquents and face a dire reality of unemployment, as the area holds one of the highest delinquency rates among the 16 delegations of Mexico City.

Home-for-All is a framework to help in the recovery of coastal communities in Northeast Japan. Post-tsunami Satoyama is a proposal to restore productive conditions to the landscape while integrating infrastructure that is implemented to have impact from the community scale to the regional ecosystems scale.

On March 11th, 2011, the town of Unosumai, located in the Tohoku region, was destroyed by a surge of 19.2 meter high tsunami waves. The Tsunami Protection Breakwater infrastructure and levees were immediately crippled and flooded the town 2.3 kilometers inland. In the bay area, the only remnants of the former homes are the foundations and debris that were carried upstream. The surviving residents were relocated into nine fragmented temporary housing clusters along the river, starting 2.5 kilometers upstream of the bay, just past the point that the tsunami water reached. The events of March 11th also resulted in the destruction of 319 fishing ports along 600 km of Japan’s Northeast coast, with several residing in Ootsuchi Bay, where Unosumai is located.

Exploring the satoyama landscape condition potential for Unosumai. In Japanese, ‘sato’ means arable and ‘yama’ means mountain. In Japan the connections from mountain to sea were acknowledged and used in the past. It is a human managed landscape where wood from the forests was used as fuel, the dry foothills for housing and agriculture, the floodplains for rice paddies and the river for fishing. These conditions can be embedded in the cross section of Unosumai River.

In 2005 the breakwater infrastructure in the bay made an obstacle for returning fish. The 2011 tsunami opened the bay and river for the returning fish. The project site can play an important role in the river ecology by reconnecting the bay to the river to restore fish habitat.

Biodiversity of fish habitat can be optimized in the various sectional changes that happen (depth, vegetation, salinity, etc) from the estuary to upstream Unosumai River. This approach can help salmon return to these waters to spawn and grow naturally. Biodiversity of fish habitat can be optimized in the various sectional changes that happen (depth, vegetation, salinity, etc) from the estuary to upstream Unosumai River. This approach can help salmon return to these waters to spawn and grow naturally.

Unosumai River.
The Unosumai River is a dynamic river that needs room to meander and connect to the floodplains. Its soils are soft and good for fish habitat. The forest is also connected to the health of a river, since the water that drains from the mountains give nutrients from the fallen leaves and sediments. The current forest cover is dominated by coniferous evergreens that do not drop their leaves. This and
the fact that berms disrupt that connection make most of the nutrient pool to come only from the wetlands.

Temporary housing communities along the Unosumai River.
The river can serve as the main artery that connects the 9 displaced communities to their surroundings in order to offer a better living situation. The use of prefab temporary housing units has been the primary focus in rethinking the future of housing in Unosumai. With approx. 70 housing units situated on 9 sites along 3km of Unosumai River, the proposed masterplan addresses the issue of connections and re-establishment of communities.

Improving the degraded Satoyama condition.
The Satoyama cultural landscape has the power connect and engage a wide and disparate group of working people from the deep mountain to sea. Putting human hands back into the this primordial landscape. Flood mitigation infrastructure at multiple levels accommodates for flooding events without disrupting the  ommunity. Water flow is managed to work with the land use from the mountain to the rice paddies, to the river, to the bay and flood patterns.

Tokyo GSDHome-for-All studio, Toyo Ito
Project team: Marc Pomarico, Ruyi Igiehon, and Judith Rodríguez

Jurors 講評者

Toyo Ito 伊東豊雄

Riken Yamamoto 山本理顕

Kengo Kuma 隈研吾

Kumiko Inui 乾久美子

Sou Fujimoto 藤本壮介

Akihisa Hirata 平田晃久

Taira Nishizawa 西沢大良

Masashi Sogabe 曽我部昌史

Toshiko Mori 森俊子

Ken Tadashi Oshima ケン・タダシ・大島

Yusuke Obuchi 小渕祐介

Kaz Yoneda カズ米田

Exhibitions:
Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture, Ehime, Japan

GSD Tokyo works, Takenaka Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

Platform 5 Exhibition, Harvard University GSD, Cambridge

Living Anatomy: An Exhibition about Housing, Harvard University GSD, Cambridge

Publication:
Ibanez, Maria. GSD Platform 5: A year of research through studio work... Cambridge: ACTAR , 2013

Research on waterways changes driven by historical events and consumption patterns of the Kanto region habitants- from the first settlement into contemporary Tokyo.

Flux city explores development of urban form as a process correlated with the ecological conditions of existing tidal variations in the site. Tidal flats city is allowed to be influenced by ebb and flood tides.