Los Seminarios Montevideo:	| english version
	espacios para la reflexión y la propuesta colectiva a través del proyecto
	Arq. Salvador Schelotto
	Los Seminarios Montevideo en una mirada retrospectiva	| english version
	Arq. Salvador Schelotto
	Inusual confluencia de aportaciones	| english version
	Arq. Mariano Arana
	Una reflexión desde el Comité Académico	| english version
	Arq. Hugo Gilmet
	Los seminarios Montevideo vistos por los invitados extranjeros	| english version

There are several points of view that should be considered at the time of balance; these involve not only purposes and interests, concepts and theoretical orientations in the academic, professional and pedagogic fields, but also different areas and diverse disciplines. Consequently, reflecting on it is a huge task. Under these circumstances, this text is nothing but a brief article about the Montevideo Seminaries, giving the author's personal opinion based on an experience in the Academic Committee representing the Municipality of Montevideo , and is meant to accompany the annual sequence of seminaries, not engaging the opinion of this collegiate organization.

Therefore the reflection discussion is open; I hope this article will be followed by many others and readers' comments are more than welcome.

First of all, I would like to raise three core elements specific to the identity of the Montevideo Seminars: the modality adopted for the work-shops, the constant reference to the Montevideo territorial field and theme urbanism.

The Montevideo Seminars are structured around urban project work-shops conducted by foreign lecturers with outstanding professional or academic careers. Including the sixth Montevideo Seminar, up to 38 invitations to foreign professors were issued with the only exception of the year 2003 when the conduction was in the hands of local professors. Directors are assisted by local teachers and count on the advice of technicians who, for the most part belong to the organizing institutions. The Montevideo Seminars gather very different participants, from graduates of the same School of Architecture and other university institutions, down to advanced students, both local and regional. The only condition established by the Academic Committee is that thos students must have passed a minimum of courses before approaching the urban project.

Before going on with this reflection about the work-shop, we need to point out the cycle of lectures. This relevant event takes place simultaneously with the work-shop and they make up the seminar's régime. Despite its large attendance and its independent nature for many participants, the Academic Committee has conceived this activity as a support to the main tasks carried out at the Urban Project Workshops. However, they have not always succeeded to achieve that, since many lecturers – in particular the workshop directors – are under a lot of pressure by this demanding activity often tend to only show the experience and reflections they bring along in their luggage.

Consequently, the way the work-shop has been set-up – which is tacitly accepted – has become the foundation of the Montevideo Seminars, and it has become part of the identity of the School of Architecture itself. Although the urban-project work-shops and the regular ones in the syllabus are very similar, as a mirror image, they show some variations, as is usually the case with curved mirrors.

Since its foundation in 1915, the School of Architecture, together with engineering studios, adopted the model of the “École des Beaux Arts” in Paris, using architectural project workshops as their axis. The model covers not only the decorative composition but also the great landscape composition as a privileged source of the teaching-learning process.

Despite the changes introduced to the 1952 (1) Syllabus Plan, breaking many of the traditions, the Project Workshop continues to appear as the center of teaching.

The 1952 Plan of Studies, however, introduces a variation called the “vertical work-shop”. It puts the five Architectural Projects courses, considering the territorial planning as a whole. This concept is introduced thanks to the support of the research institutes of investigation, especially by the I.T.U. ( Institute of Architecture Theory and Urbanism) in the development of the urban dossier.

In 1984, at the end of the political intervention, the so-called student “massiveness” breaks forth and consequently the number of faculty members at the work-shops had to be increased. This means that the work-shops had to face new difficulties and it was also the end of the “vertical workshop”. Anyway, during the sixties, when the work-shops were at their peak, people say that this “verticality” was a mere illusion. During the last two decades, however, and despite the important increase in the number of students, the workshop has managed to maintain its vitality as a teaching tool.

The new 2002 Syllabus Plan ratifies the relevance (importance) of the work-shop, which is recognized as an emblem of the University' School of Architecture .

The urban project workshops – just as the “vertical workshop” that are formed with groups of students that come from to different courses – the urban project workshops gather participants with different background. The supporting inputs are also previously developed following the I.T.U. ( Institute of Architecture Theory and Urbanism) guidelines. At the “vertical workshops”, however, the work developed at the initial courses must be prepared at the higher courses. Although in theory there is no such verticality at the workshops of the Montevideo Seminars, the participants' obvious difference in experience result in a certain verticality.

n sum, and keeping the distance from the experience of the Montevideo Seminars and having the same mythical sense as a “modern Phoenix” the “vertical workshop” reappears, due – among other reasons – to the reduced number of participants compared to the “massive” number of students attending the regular courses. The most striking fact is the lack of hierarchies and verticality, so typical of the “vertical workshop”. The Montevideo Seminars could be ranked closer to Walter Gropius's integral concept and the notion of the medieval workshop. On the other hand, the 1952 Syllabus Plan Explanation makes reference to this German architect.

Air view of the low Miguelete watercourse The II Montevideo Seminar, held in 1999, implemented six urban-project work-shops to approach the connectivity and landscape issues concerning the Miguelete watercourse urban borders and basin. The workshops were directed by the international experts Pierre David, Ann Pendlenton, Hiroshi Hara, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Ricard Fayos and Jorge Moscato. Picture: Land Information Service, Municipality of Montevideo , 1998.

The amplitude and heterogeneity of the participants' background has not been challenged nationally. although the lecturers invited have often mentioned the teaching difficulties encountered when conducting a work-shop with so heterogeneous groups. The tendency observed in the last years was to have more homogeneous groups, but with an increasing participation of the students and a reduction in the number of graduates attending; but the Academic Committee is interested in reversing this fact.

On the other hand, although there is no evidence of vertical structures at the School of Architecture workshops today, their directors play a very significant and highly personalized role, so much so that work-shops are named after them. This practice has been a national tradition, going back as far as 1907 when the Uruguayan Government hired Mr. Joseph Pierre Carré, in the understanding that he would act as a key reference for students training in this craft.

The growth experienced by the work-shops actually made them look more like a course or work-shop federation, rendering this personal nomination outdated. The work-shops per se claim to have a collective identity, which tends to be more programme-related than personality-related. The Montevideo Seminars, however, continue to hire foreign directors who, following the academic tradition, give their names to the work-shop, a tradition that arises from the ashes as a phoenix.

Although names are no longer so relevant, the Seminars exhibit a broad range of both attitudes and skills typical of each director in charge of the collective work. Throughout the Seminar's brief history, workshop directors have played a broad range of roles with regard the rest of the faculty, advisors and other collaborators and particularly with regard the group of students who participated. The emphasis given to the educational approach on one side and to the disciplinary and professional approaches on the other, stress this cultural diversity which is not free from conflicts, and emerges as a rich kaleidoscope that identifies the Montevideo Seminars. In this context, the work-shop directors are always considered a benchmark. They become master references that bring along state-of-the-art debates being discussed at other contemporary societies.

These concerns are echoed in the work-shop collective work, including participants and faculty, who get involved in an intense and accelerated commitment, which is also at times playful. In the last editions, advisors have acted as a multidisciplinary team at the disposal of all work-shops.

Finally, the pluralism evidenced in the Architecture Project Department of the School of Architecture show mirroring relations consistent with the organization of the urban projects work-shops of the Montevideo Seminars. The 1952 Plan Motives Exhibition mentioned above included a passage showing the diversity of currents that already co-existed in the local circles at that time: “ several architectural tendencies have arisen in the last decade”. In response to this situation, continuity is granted to the proven model of the parallel work-shop departments.

Two: the land area

In the first version of the Seminar, the Municipality of Montevideo was the other pillar of its institutional construction – directly related with the Montevideo Plan (1998-2005 Land Management Plan) –. The Montevideo Plan was developed in two years at the Municipality and the University, following an agreement signed in 1995 by the Montevideo Municipality and the University of the Republic. Its drafting was completed in the late 1997. The First Montevideo Seminar was held in March, the following year. In September that same year, the Department Council approved the Montevideo Plan. The territory of Montevideo and its metropolitan area were the common denominator.

During the preparation stage of the Montevideo Seminars, the Academic Committee develops, gathers and systematizes the information about the main subject of the seminar. The various territory “windows” are also selected and measured through multiple studies related to land management, social, environmental, technical, urban, sectorial and regional issues and their historiographic, cartographic, statistical and regulatory expressions within which the work-shops are too be developed. These preliminary studies allow participants to start working on the different proposals right from the beginning of the work-shops. The last systematic studies on the territory date back to 1997, when the drafting of the Montevideo Plan was completed. Moreover, significant qualitative changes have also occurred in the social, urban – and land-related structures, mainly after the 2002 crisis. Consequently, these successive updates become especially significant.

The activity provides the setting for the School of Architecture faculty and the municipality experts, as well as the professionals from other public of private institutions, to handle knowledge in an active and creative way. This takes place in a multidisciplinary, inter-institutional context that is quite unusual in the local setting, and it provides the organising institutions and the technicians themselves a chance for continuing training and keeping up. Being handled at a University level, these studies are not constrained by the limitations determined by jurisdictional regulations and represent an additional approach to the knowledge of the city's land planning, through a truly metropolitan look.

The Montevideo Plan, as a governance tool, guides the activity of all those involved in the processes of transforming the territory; the municipal institutions benefit from the fresh air coming from the University. Being that the plan proposes a feedback process including planning and management, the idea is that it should not become a “book plan” – and therefore, it will require constant analysis. The link between the reflexive proposal, the land management plan and the planning resulting in the executive project that materialize in public works are clearly present at the 2 nd Montevideo Seminar “Connectivity and Landscape of the Urban Borders and the Miguelete Watercourse Basin ”. The Seminar contributed with a wealth of ideas and proposals. The Montevideo Plan includes several derived planning figures, among which we can mention the Special Plan for the Miguelete watercourse, a plan with great strategic value and great significance in the city's physical structure. None of the six workshops present at the 2 nd Montevideo Seminar challenged the unity of the Special Plan as a strategic project and the results the project finally had were the first academic validation of the Montevideo Plan. The newly inaugurated works of the Linear Park constitute the political and administrative validation of this dialectic relationship between the plan and the project.

A Paulo Mendes da Rocha Sketch At the 2 nd Montevideo Seminar, the Mendes da Rocha work-shop ( Sao Paulo ) deletes the Miguelete watercourse, as if it did not exist in the city. Consequently, the plan is to “build nature”, where the brook is a hydraulic piece of machinery and at the same time to sketch its course “as a piece of architecture”, re-developing its urban borders. Although the Miguelete Watercourse Special Plan does not agree with this proposal, the drastic changes in the proposal presented by Mendes da Rocha's workshop are a reference to clarify the concepts sustaining the Special Plan. Extracted from: Various authors: : II Seminario Montevideo . Conectividad y Paisaje en los bordes urbanos y cuenca del arroyo Miguelete, Montevideo, 1999:43

Three: Theme Urbanism

If Montevideo is the vision from the ports of Guadarrama – as stated by José Ortega y Gasset - its universal vision is introduced by the subjects considered herewith. We are not talking here about the Montevideo Bay , but of its urban borders and its waterfront; nor are we dealing here with the Miguelete watercourse, but with the urban rivers; nor are we referring to three Montevideo parks, but to the leisure open areas of the contemporary – and particularly – Latin-American metropolis. Etcetera. The subjects of the subsequent seminars keep the same criteria and aspiration: the land doors to a city, the opportunities and challenges of the changes in the large metropolitan area, voids and urban stretches and centralities and in the next edition: the metropolitan tourism settings.

In an article about his comments as a member of the 3 rd Montevideo Seminar jury, architecture critic Yorgos Simcoforidis (2), an outstanding contributor to the Montevideo Seminars, said, speaking about the future “ Montevideo should become the capital of theme urbanism in the international scenery”. This clear ambition has also become an identification of this experience among other national and regional experiences.

We are not talking about the professional development of a perfect and final design in the framework of a budget and an execution schedule. Nor are we talking about solutions that following that “professional” orientation, will not be defined so deeply, pressed by the two-week term imposed by the seminary. However, there is a claim for solutions to the land and regional problems in the Municipality of Montevideo and the metropolitan area, exploring the project possibilities that are feasible in such a limited time and under the conduction of a foreign professor, who may not succeed not because of his being a foreigner, but because he/she is not familiar with Montevideo, since in most cases this is their first visit.

The Academic Committee identifies the areas of Montevideo in the process of transformation, to explore the subject of the seminar. These areas serve as a kind of active windows into the territory, and are usually shared by two work-shops. The groups are organised in pairs totally at random, and this allows the confrontation of different approaches that show the researchers' diversity, not precisely antagonistic, but in many cases, rather complementary. On the other hand the proposals of the different work-shops have been generally heterogeneous.

The last days, the work-shops thus confronted transfer their leading role to the theme seminar, when the results are exhibited and presented in front of an informal jury for debate. At a round table, the jury makes comments and promotes collective reflection.

It is at this time of joint evaluation in plenary sessions – with the support of qualified critics-, that the event becomes a true seminar, a training body that shares the work previously discussed at informal meetings in the corridors, which concludes at the time of the most formal presentation in front of the jury and the heterogeneous group of participants. At its best times, there is a f avourable atmosphere for debate and exchange of ideas about subjects requiring discussion, the establishment of exchange networks which will set the basis for the construction of future inter-institutional consensus.

The 4 th Montevideo Seminar incorporated a new module, called the “Conceptual Module”, which precedes the “Project Module”. This module includes lectures, panels and debates on the processes that will later on be handled at the urban project workshops. At this point there is a tension between the conventional modality of the university seminars and acknowledgement of creative energy, and the tension between the attitude of proposal and the ability to communicate the ideas of the project. In the following editions, although the Conceptual Module is still present in the structure of the seminar, the duration of this introdution has been reduced, and work is again focused around the work-shop, and its epilogue, with the jury's performance, acquires an even greater interest.

The benefits are not limited only to the aspects mentioned above. The School of Architecture will use this work as a support of the curricular teaching-learning processes the following school year. The other institutions involved in the organization of these seminars can in turn benefit from these source of ideas when programming future developments, as has been shown in the case of Miguelte Watercourse Special Plan. Contact of local university students and professionals with new streams of thought originated in other areas of the world is of no less importance.

Opening one's house also offers an occasion for an institutional critical self-evaluation, opening one's doors to international work and I endorse Simeoforides's view, of positioning our city in the midst of disciplinary debate.

Epilogue: nomads in the metropolis

Tourist activity in the contemporary societies is characterized by a wandering life with no domicile or settlement during the person's period as a tourist. In terms of the individual, this is a temporary circumstance. However, for the society receiving masses of tourists, these are nomad masses, since it becomes an on-going or seasonal practice, always recurrent and periodical. Tourists do not necessarily constitute a family – or another social grouping – but are usually homogeneous and socio-culturally cohesive groups that have incorporated nomad practices.

In this sense, in contemporary societies, tourism constitutes a social behaviour that has adopted nomad practices. Today, at an even larger scale, the development of tourist practice per se has no firm settlement; tourists follow a course, draw itineraries joining relevant spots, milestones or tourist attractions in the country. Since the historical beginning of tourism in the 19 th Century, tourists may indeed adopt a more sedentary practice, where the trip itself has one single objective and its practice can be compared to a pilgrim's journey. However, this tendency to nomad behaviours raises the greatest challenges.

If a more metaphoric and less literal sense is preferred for classifying tourist activities as nomad, the figurative expression based on the traditional nomad sense also suggests new outlooks. In the real nomad societies, the human group survives by hunting or collecting and does not cultivate the land, in other words, the group does not produce, it only consumes. The balance with the environment is achieved thanks to the vastness of the territories they transit. This metaphor expresses a singular aspect of the proposed reflection that we will present below.

Left border of the linear park in the stretch Agraciada Avenue – Railway, constructed in 2004 . The contribution of the Montevideo Seminars to the local urban culture in its cumulative process started in 1998, continuing to the present. It, envisages the conceptualization of problems, the discussion on new land management approaches, the re-design of public policies and it finally nourishes the construction of the city itself. Photo: Carlos Contreras, 2004

The critical reflection on the characteristics of the activity, describing it as nomad– considered from the perspective of our “marginality” vis-a-vis the so called “First World”, becomes more relevant because of the lack of commitment nomad tourists have with places and their people, because this distance cahllenges and jeopardizes the economic, social and environmental stability of the territories covered by the flow of tourists.

Another characteristic of contemporary tourist practice is the increase in the speed of the transfers. This increases the gap between visitors and hosts, with their very different timing. One of the paradigms of those challenges and threats, we find the tourist coming from rich countries, who in general prefers to avoid any contact with expressions of marginality and poverty. Consequently, tourist agents choose or create tourist products that exclude certain social groups in the receiving country.

The answer has been the creation of the “no-places” or anonymous spaces – as Marc Augé puts it – shopping malls, a certain typology of luxury hotels, petrol stations, airports and the means of transportation themselves. These are the reception spaces for nomad tourists in their journey through the globe, a journey they transit with familiarity, as if these places were their own, since they are identical all over the world.

Nevertheless, the development of the tourist industry also offers strengths and opportunities for the receiving country. Being an economic activity that requires service consumption, it has a “spilling” effect in the distribution of income among the different social groups. On the other hand, the land management systems and structures developed to cover the tourist needs may also offer recreation and leisure opportunities to large sectors of the receiving society.

Montevideo is the contry's main receptor of non-resident tourists. In 2003 Montevideo received a 32.4% share of the incoming foreign visitors. Besides, Montevideo receives a very significant share of domestic and internal visitors. Although “sun and beach” continue to be the predominant product, there are other tourist options not affected by seasonal variation, such as cultural tourism, congresses and conventions that have Montevideo as their main destination. These options, however are meant for a brief stay and they are incorporated to a much broader nomad route across the country or the region.

At the same time, in a broad sense Montevideo constitutes a metropolis, like other large Latin American cities, with a strong re-organization of space activities, and especially of certain services. It also presents a very significant demographic growth in the periphery of the metropolitan area originated by internal migrations. From a social standpoint, this structure has consolidated the space location of an increasingly fragmented society. The practice of the nomad tourism can either worsen this tendency, or on the contrary, contribute to social inclusion, environmental viability and culture industries in the metropolis.

In consequence, we are interested in analysing the proposals promoting tourist activities from the point of view of the receptor facing this new nomad practice in the metropolis.

In this context, the 7 th edition of the Montevideo Seminar is working on the proposals of the urban project required to reach a sustainable development of tourism, analysing social inclusion, the environment and the cultural industries. We the question we pose is: Which is the most pertinent and adequate construction of the urban space, particularly of the public space, required to welcome the new generation tourists in the peripheral metropolis and in the metropolis periphery?