Editorial BAc Boletín Académico, volume 13 (2023)
This article addresses the need to contemplate the spatial nature of the urban phenomenon: what characterizes the urban phenomenon from the perspective of spatial delineation? What distinguishes urban planning from architecture in spatial terms? Can we establish bridges, points of contact, or equivalences between urban space and architectural space? This reflection does not intend to exhaust itself in an academic and self-absorbed rhetoric. Rather, it aims to establish the foundation for a fundamental and well-founded thinking that restores the architect to a leading role in the conception of the urban phenomenon. Today, cities and territories face numerous and challenging issues, where it is common and necessary for urban planning to draw upon other areas of knowledge. However, one must not forget the inseparable spatial nature of the urban phenomenon.
In the midst of the effervescence of psychedelic art in the 1960s and 1970s, a series of staging projects were relevant for their ability to generate new non-linear spaces in which the viewer would become a “temporary builder of the experience and master of his own enjoyment”. Thus, a set of projects in which interactive spaces coexisted with all kinds of inflatable structures will be studied; this will be joined by music and melodies that would allow the users to immerse themselves in a kind of hallucinatory ‘journey’, similar to psychotropic experiences.
What was intended with these playful-festive environments was not so much to comfort the viewer, but to show these strategies as a new field for environmental games, experimentation in all its senses and the exploration of a new and unexpected perceptive reality through the superposition of multiple stimuli.