Kkiioosskkoo
Kkiioosskkoo, designed by Pedro Ceñal Murga, Roberto Michelsen Engell and Adrián Ramírez Siller, is the winning proposal of the Kiosko Pavilion, initiative promoted by Alumnos47. The project synthesizes the tectonics and materiality of a kiosk understood from its two architectural configurations -newsstand and pavilion- and then translates them into a new context: a flat garden surrounded by trees with voluminous crowns and flanked by an old house. Aided by a public program, this new landscape component performs as a meeting point between a series of exhibition elements -publications, objects, pieces of art, commissioned works- and diverse audiences.
Kiosk, from French kiosque, which is (along with German and Polish kiosk) from Turkish koshk, kiöshk “pavilion, summer house,” from Persian kushk “palace, villa; pavilion, portico, has embodied two meanings across different cultures; both coincide in their allusion to small and confined constructions, but differ in their spatial conformation. While the kiosk (1) is delimited by a series of articulated surfaces that work as a support to display merchandise, the kiosk (2), does not have perimeter walls and is rather demarcated by a height change and often by a canopy. Hence, the range of interactions with the kiosk (1) happen around it unlike the kiosk (2) that hosts activities inside.
Just like a kiosk (1) on a sidewalk would be adapted to the palette of the adjacent urban furniture materials and a kiosk (2) in an esplanade would match its volumetry and proportions with the architecture that surrounds it, a kiosk (x) located inside a garden would have to speak the same language through its materiality. Considering the coincidences between the programmatic needs of the Kiosko Pavilion and the typologies described, Kkiioosskkoo departs from reconciling the nature of the kiosks (1) and (2) in a landscape project that is incorporated with and responds to the Alumnos47 garden and that can later be relocated in other points.
feet away from the hectic ambience of Constituyentes Avenue. When crossing the door of the parcel that contains it, a house pops up. Through it, one reaches Kkiioosskkoo, either by walking by it it or across it. The route across the house lets the visitors contemplate the interventions of the artists Alan Sierra (MX), Ana Navas (Ecuador - Venezuela), Carmen Huízar (MX), Luiso Ponce (Guatemala), Manuela García (Colombia), Paloma Contreras Lomas ( MX) and Rodrigo Hernández (MX). When getting to the back of the construction, among vegetation that frames it and hidden from the urban chaos, Kkiioosskkoo becomes visible.
The boundaries of Kkiioosskkoo within the garden are confusing and unrecognizable. Its skin follows the plasticity of the ground of the land, it is an extension of the same, and it rises gradually culminating in a slope of overwhelming scale. Instead of interrupting the green space, this slope reorganizes it by enabling with its same material a fifth facade whose geometry invites to sit, recline and interact with other people and wherein an isoptic is generated that facilitates dynamics that range from the contemplative to the ludic.
The platform is supported by a structure that doubles the living space by containing an internal garden that is at the same time a kind of light and permeable cavern. Composed of materials and prefabricated that are commonly used in gardens and public parks, each of the perimeter columns supports rotating cyclonic mesh panels that allow a multitude of modulations inside, over and outside the edges of Kkiioosskkoo and that give programmatic flexibility. These also work as a support to display material (publications, art pieces, varied objects, references for presentations, among others) which, when organized on surfaces, creates solid planes that give the impression of being suspended and juxtaposed in different forms, show the content of the foundation’s program.
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At the end of its cycle in Alumnos47, Kkiioosskkoo can be relocated to another site, with the possibility of keeping a record of its first location –the grass surface– and leaving a trace of its presence in the garden. In each new site, after carrying more elements, adopting new extensions and wearing new skins, it becomes a testimony of its genesis, as a ruin in constant contingency.
