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Maria Jose Fuentes

Maria Jose Fuentes

Philadelphia, PA, US

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The Urban Canyon

Our project proposes to re-create and infiltrate traditional gallery spaces with environmental biomes and art residencies to create a new hybrid typology for the 21st century museum. We define biomes as place-making rooms of environmental change which oscillate between natural and artificial. This is seen through the lens of non-anthropocentric agencies.


These biomes could be Virtual Biomes, plant incubators, or homes to synthetic art. Paola Antonelli’s Broken Nature exhibition influenced the project’s ethos which stresses the positive outcome of museums being curated through a fluid
institutional approach; encompassing both the natural and the imaginative in order to accumulate an applicable data set to mindfully continue conversations surrounding the anthropocene.

Our collection of images reflects on Borasi’s Museum Is not Enough concept of “gray areas”. This allowed us to think of a museum institution more fluidly; as a series of biomes that allow for different natural moments to exist in muddled binaries with the artificial. Overall, the building is one that hopes to set a new precedent for what sort of natures, stories, and ideas deem a space. The urban
canyon sets out to carve out a public space for the pedestrian, as well as informing inhabitants of what could be artificial, what is nature, and how we find ourselves in the mix as humans.

 
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Status: School Project
Location: New York, NY, US
My Role: Partner Project; worked to aid in 50% of the modeling, rendering elevations, drafting floor plans, and photoshopping finished interior and exterior renders.
Additional Credits: Partner: Veronica Rosado
Professor: Miroslava Brooks