salazarsequeromedina: ENTRAMADOS MATERIALES

Entramados Materiales (en/tɾaˈ/ma/ðoz/ ma/te/ɾiˈa/les) is a temporary installation developed by salazarsequeromedina for the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, during April of 2025. The work deploys a series of spatial prototypes and architectural models that operate at an ambiguous scale—neither fully furniture nor fully building. Developed through iterative construction exercises, each piece explores how material constraints, processes of assembly, and the use of ordinary components can unpack new spatial relationships, that are non-hierarchichal and interdependent. Conceived as a sequence of ambiguous rooms, the installation tests the capacity of low-cost, off-the-shelf materials—and their discarded counterparts—to give form to adaptable and open-ended structure.

The term entramado has an imperfect translation to English that is perfect to define the work. Entramado lies between a flexible framework and a specific structure, between a non-linear assemblage, somewhat in equilibrium, and a logic, stable field. These frameworks are unfinished and invite both interpretation and participation. They are a starting point, like any plot.

These constructions are built from low-cost, off-the-shelf materials alongside fragments sourced from demolition sites, offcuts, and found objects—a brick, a section of tree, a discarded lamp. Together, they form a vocabulary of the overlooked and the ordinary, where the logic of reuse becomes the driver of form. Dry-assembled and built without adhesives, each structure is designed to be disassembled, inviting future reconfiguration and reinterpretation.

The exhibition is sited in the MFA studios at Pratt Institute, housed in the former Pfizer chemical plant in Brooklyn. These studios—identical, white-walled rooms measuring 8 feet by 17 feet—provide a context of repetition and spatial neutrality. Installed serially across several rooms, the work engages this modular condition, occupying it as a field rather than a singular space. The exhibition holds a dialectic tension between the generic and the site-specific.

The three primary typologies—Shelf/Tower, Table/Canopy, and Bench/Bridge—draw from this material economy to test spatial systems and material frameworks that remain open-ended and abstract. They recall, obliquely, Utzon’s “Platforms and Plateaus” or Noguchi’s “useless architecture”—spaces defined, not by fixed function but by their latent potential. Rather than solutions, they are proposals: materially constrained yet generative, site-specific yet reconfigurable.

Through this experimental process, Entramados Materiales reflects on how scarcity and surplus co-produce new architectural languages. It rehearses a mode of practice attentive to resourcefulness and iteration, proposing spatial systems that are both grounded and speculative—rooms without program, platforms and plateaus for future occupation.

Credits

Project Team: salazarsequeromedina (Laura Salazar, Pablo Sequero, Juan Medina)

Collaborator: Erick Reifer

Special thanks: Pratt Institute MFA Studios at the Pfizer Building, Pratt Institute School of Architecture, Tulane University School of Architecture and Syracuse University School of Architecture.