The quality of Fragility

While the pandemic creates a worldwide emergency, where Italy has been hit extremely hard, the PRRS_3 by puertoricorestart.org offered an invitation to its partners in Italy to participate and develop proposals for the Island. The project site is the municipality of Cabo Rojo, defined by the presence of a protected natural area, where a nineteenth-century lighthouse stands guarding the ancient salt flats, for which the architects have designed a light intervention where small elements raise the quality of the experience of an already extraordinary place. The aim is to rethink the tourism approach on the island, addressing the specificity and weakness of the area and using them to create a proposal attentive to the climate, environmental resources and economic and social impact. The project wants to promote recreational and cultural enjoyment of natural areas introducing adequate minimum infrastructures that establish an harmonic relationship with the landscape. The new interventions refer to local vernacular architecture, also investigating some of the architectural archetypes: a monumental staircase leading to a Semperian hut (Tribe by Associates), a straw-covered salt tolos that acts as core (The Heart by Lorenzo Guzzini Architecture ) and three thin poles that bend in/by the wind become a totem from which observing the landscape (Totem by Studiospazio). Using the fragility of this territory as a quality for buildings and spaces, the project proposes an image that can change over time, accepting the risks and the possibility of being destroyed, and then rebuilt, starting from some fixed points, but leaving a wide degree of formal freedom. The proposed project is poetically flexible, designed to face the specificity of this particular historical moment, where uncertainty permeates the collective feeling; and thinking on fragility can become an opportunity for critical redefinition of the fundamental components of architecture.