Marjetica Potrč
Caracas: Growing Houses, 2012
Building materials, energy, communications, and water-supply infrastructure
Caracas: Growing Houses

Caracas: Growing Houses is an architectural case study of two buildings in the informal city of Caracas. It shows the negotiations between the built structure and the infrastructure (energy, communications, and water supply). Unlike the urban culture of the modernist formal city of Caracas, the informal city represents a rural culture, which consists of small, self-built neighbourhoods that form village-like communities. Here, community space prevails over public space, and oral regulations, negotiated through discussion, are more important than written regulations. The rural culture of the Caracas barrios has proved resilient to changes from the outside, particularly from the neighbouring urban culture. The barrio residents prefer to live in a city of communities and not in the modernist city of individualism. Today, around the world, the informal city is one of the two fastest-growing forms of residential organization in cities (the other is the gated community).

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Marjetica Potrč

Marjetica Potrč (b. 1953) is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Potrč's interdisciplinary practice includes on-site projects, research, architectural case studies, and series of drawings. Her work documents and interprets contemporary architectural practices (in particular, with regard to energy infrastructure and water use) and the ways people live together.

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