TENDAL

Dur­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry the Mex­i­can rope indus­try expe­ri­enced an eco­nom­ic boom, pri­mar­i­ly in the Yucatan penin­su­la. With the advent of plas­tic-based syn­thet­ic ropes the nat­ur­al rope indus­try dwin­dled as is today lead­ing a mar­gin­al­ized exis­tence. In mov­ing to a post-fos­sil world, recon­sid­er­ing pre-fos­sil indus­tri­al tech­nolo­gies and how they can be inte­grat­ed in a mod­ern soci­ety can be a vital route to a more sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion culture.

TENDAL was born from a reflec­tion on cur­rent archi­tec­ture and a wish to explore native mate­ri­als, rope and wood. It ref­er­ences tra­di­tion­al dry­ing of henequen fibres while play­ing with com­mon archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments such as cor­ri­dors, rooms, walls and por­ti­cos to cre­ate an ephemer­al archi­tec­tur­al expe­ri­ence pri­mar­i­ly char­ac­ter­ized by its use of material.

The pavil­ion can be assem­bled and dis­as­sem­bled quick­ly with no need for spe­cial­ized labour nec­es­sary, your own hands and com­mon tools are enough to build it. It is designed to min­i­mize cut­ting and pen­e­tra­tion of the source mate­ri­als. Once the two weeks are over, the mate­ri­als can be eas­i­ly reused or recycled.