From Costa Rica, architect Bruno Stagno not only reflects on how responses to the environment can be the main basis for inspiration and identity in architecture but also proposes going a little further, with contemporary tropical architecture for an entire latitude.
What happens when these limits are extended? What happens when these motivations escape outside of the tropical context? Bruno Stagno presents here the project "A Mangrove for Berlin", his participation in the 1995 competition for the Reconstruction of the Berlin Academy of Architecture, "Berliner Bauakademie", an emblematic work of the architect Friedrich Schinkel.
"They are still thinking about what to do in that area of Berlin, and our project came back into the conversation a few years ago," Stagno tells us. "The projects selected by the competition jury, including ours, were exhibited in various exhibitions; in the Berlin Museum Staatsratsgebäude, in the Berlinische Galerie, and in the Glastec Gallery in Düsseldorf. The newspaper Die Zeitz, which participated in promoting the competition, dedicated an entire issue of its weekly magazine Zeit - magazine to showcasing the selected projects. The Altes Museum in Berlin requested that we donate the plans and perspectives of the project to be preserved in the Berlin drawing archive, 'The Hands of Architects.'
Bruno Stagno, in his article "Architecture for a Latitude, Designing and Building in the Tropics," one of the foundational texts that explains the approach they gave to their professional practice when he settled in Costa Rica, writes about this particular project:
In an international competition for a new building in Berlin, Germany, which would occupy the site of the old Bauakademie, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, I proposed a "powerful urban landscape" with a "Mangrove for Berlin" that impressed the jury and provoked the following comment: "Aquatic garden. Bruno Stagno, from San José, the distant capital of Costa Rica, inspired by the Bauakademie competition, designed a surprising architecture. Stagno widens the Spree River canal, covering the triangular Schinkel square with water and turning it into an aquatic garden in which, in a rigorous architectural order, he creates an orchard by planting trees protected from the water with planters. A brick building that, according to the competition rules, takes the measures of Schinkel's original building, although compositionally different, appropriates a corner of this pond..."
The project, which was selected, proposes a new relationship with water and trees, something like that found in the mangroves of the tropical forest. I took the risk of bringing my simple ideas to a complex and developed condition; nevertheless, my project represented a solution that can be appreciated and understood outside the tropical context. This is the creation of a contemporary architecture of syncretism that does not imitate or simulate, and that allows various civilizations to find their own voices.
