An Imperfect Corpse

The city and its architecture form a living melting pot, where history, memory, and imagination are interwoven. Its layout and buildings embody traditions, social practices, and collective meaning. Personally, I have always seen it as something constantly in motion. A city grows and shrinks, becomes dirty and clean, fills up and empties out. It's alive. It’s a complex and ever-changing system.

The topic that brings us together today—The City as a Solution—compels us to reframe the question: A solution to what? This question opens up a range of ideas and possible directions. Is it a solution to climate change, to inequality, to isolation? Or is it rather a starting point for imagining new ways of living?

Throughout history, various cultures have sought to answer these questions through urban form. From the forums of classical Greece and Roman basilicas to modern and contemporary experiments, such as Christian de Portzamparc’s La Ville Ouverte in Paris, cities have been both the testing ground and the result of collective visions. In all cases, they were attempts to build community through space.

In the twentieth century, Team X sought to revise the principles of CIAM and redefine the role of “the street,” not as a channel for circulation, but as a vital stage, a meeting place, a space where architecture becomes social. This notion is still relevant today, as is Aldo Rossi’s concept of the locus: the city as a form rooted in collective memory, in urban archetypes that express identity.

These visions help us rethink what it means to design the city as a solution today. In a time when challenges have become increasingly complex, new concepts emerge to guide reflection. One of them is the contemporary triad: compact, connected, and clean cities. This model proposes to condense urban lifestyles without sprawl, to reconstruct urban fragments through integrative infrastructures, and to replace polluting with sustainable practices.

At the same time, the 15-minute city model, championed in Paris by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, is gaining momentum. This concept aims to reconfigure urban centers so that housing, work, shops and services, nature, and recreation coexist in close proximity. More public space, fewer cars. More urban life, less commuting.

And there is another factor, less theoretical but essential: the urban scale. It's the dimension that defines our relationship with space. It enables buildings to engage in dialogue with the human body. Scale is what transforms design into experience, a layout into atmosphere. It’s what brings the urban realm to life and reflects a renewed urban vision that integrates public space, infrastructure, nature, and community guided by an understanding of the city as a collective framework rather than a collection of isolated objects.

In this context, the project for the Edificio Estación Ferroviaria Derecho in Buenos Aires—which we won through a national competition—is worth mentioning. The idea was to transform a strategic hub in the south of the city, bringing together mobility, neighborhood fabric, public space, and university functions.

The proposal went beyond designing a station: it aimed to reconnect what was fragmented, integrate the periphery, and generate urban identity. The building functions as a bridge—both literally and symbolically—linking various sectors while providing continuity, accessibility, and a sense of belonging. It's not just infrastructure: it's architecture as urban policy, as a civic gesture.

Designing from this perspective means seeing the city through a different lens. Not from the logic of an aerial photo—which can sometimes reduce the city to a lifeless image—but as an urban tapestry, a network of overlapping layers that reveal tensions, traces, memories, and routes. Looking closely allows us to discover these signs, then to map, theorize and reinterpret them.

The city can also be seen as an imperfect corpse. Not in a negative sense, but as an open structure that must be dissected, read in parts, and understood in its complexity. Each fragment contains a partial truth. And it’s through the integration of these layers that we find new ways to design. Because only by knowing its organs, scars, flaws, and strengths can we respond meaningfully.

The page is never blank: there are always clues, signs, and traces that guide us. All it takes is to stop, to pause. The urgency to make proposals often overshadows the need to reflect. But it’s precisely in that pause for reflection that the urban ceases to be merely a backdrop and becomes a methodology, an inspiration, a starting point.

I remember, as a student, a phrase by Rem Koolhaas that stayed with me:

“More than ever, the city is all we have.”

And if that is true—and it is—then The City as a Solution is more than just a topic. It’s a call to act with clarity and commitment. It’s a declaration of principles. It’s both a critical tool and a field for imagination.

Because in the end, if we learn to listen to the pulse of the urban tapestry, if we understand that this imperfect corpse is still beating, then, and only then, will our architecture have the power to become a city. And with it, perhaps, to transform the world.

Main image: National Ideas Competition, Edificio Estación Ferroviaria Derecho, Buenos Aires, 2025. Image © Juan Martín Flores/SMF Arquitectos, Nicolás Guerra/ONA