David Gouverneur, professor of practice in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Department of City & Regional Planning, and Azarai Hernández (MLA’23), currently a landscape and urban designer with Field Operations, won a recent competition aimed at creating a network of public spaces for the historic district of Pampatar, Margarita Island, in Venezuela.
Hernández, a past president of Weitzman Student Council, previously collaborated with Gouverneur and faculty member Ariel Vazquez in an independent studio focused on Pepillo Salcedo, site of a former banana producer in the Dominican Republic at the Haitian border.
The winning entry described Pampatar, which in the indigenous Guaiquerí language means “House of the Salt,” as a unique place where a Caribbean beach encounters a Spanish Colonial fort, a church and protected historic buildings and plazas beloved by residents and visitors. The proposal notes, “We only need to better integrate these spaces, enhancing their spatial qualities, providing badly needed shade with native and low-water consumption vegetation, making them accessible to all, and diversifying recreational, cultural, and commercial activities.”
The team called their project Atarraya de Encuentros, which translates as a “Fishing Net of Encounters,” bringing together historic, environmental, cultural, and urban attributes.
The design solution addressed the local mestizo culture, juxtaposing two geometries: one Cartesian, aligned with the church and a colonial plaza, speaks of the Spanish Creole heritage. The other, Curvilinear, is used to create the larger public spaces, echoing the shape and the coloration—from white to cream, to red—of the nearby salt flats which were first exploited by the indigenous population, and motivated the Spanish occupation of the site and the construction of the fort, reminding us of the Guaiquerí legacy.
The all-Venezuelan design team included Folco Riccio, Elsa de la Purificación, Fernando Peraza, and Luis Matos. Gouverneur says, “It was a productive and fun intergenerational encounter: Riccio is a former classmate from Universidad Simon Bolivar (USB) in Caracas, Hernández, Peraza and Matos are also from USB but graduated 46 years later, and Purificación is from la Universidad de Zulia (LUZ) in Maracaibo and from an intermediate age group.”
Gouverneur was chair of architecture at USB for 6 years, and a faculty member in the Department of Architecture and Department of City Planning for 26 years before joining Penn.
The competition, called Concurso de Ideas de Arquitectura y Urbanismo para el Centro Historico de Pampatar, was organized by the municipality of Maneiro, the Institute of Cultural Heritage (IPC), and the Association of Engineers of the State of Nueva Esparta.
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