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London / Buenos Aires / Caracas
ALL
SELECTED
ARCHITECTURE
URBAN
ART
PUBLICATIONS
ACADEMIC
ABOUT
Coastal Lookout / Structural Artifact / Academic Project
Best Academic Project
La Guaira, Venezuela, 2010
The Punker is conceived as a vertical coastal artifact: a small lookout cabin exposed to wind, salt and horizon.
Located on the Caribbean edge of La Guaira, the project explores the encounter between body, structure and sea. Its vertical sequence rises as a light steel framework, creating a place for climbing, pausing and looking — a suspended cabin from which the ocean is experienced through height, air and material exposure.
The structure is imagined in weathering steel, close to the logic of corten: a material that oxidises as a form of protection. In contact with salt, humidity and time, the surface slowly changes colour, texture and density. Rust becomes both wound and shield — the visible trace of a material resisting the same atmosphere that transforms it.
The project turns corrosion into an architectural condition. The salitre does not simply damage the object; it writes on it. The lookout becomes a living register of the coast, a structure that ages with the sea and reveals the passage of time through its skin.
Between cabin, scaffold and ruin, The Punker proposes a raw architecture of exposure: a place where structure, weather and horizon become part of the same experience.
Institution: Universidad Central de Venezuela — FAU-UCV
Design unit: Unidad Docente Nueve
Type: Academic project
Location: La Guaira, Venezuela
Year: 2010
Design: Karla Montauti and Javier Cáceres
Tutors: Edwing Otero and José Alejandro Santana
Team assistance: José Jraige and Pablo Zapata