One of the primary themes that have been very present... architectural studies and subconsciously during my life has been

The Phenomena of Simultaneity, The City and The Everyday Life
By Luis Miguel Ortiz Barragan
Advisor: Neil Minuk
“Social space is not a thing among another things, not a product among other products: rather it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationship in their coexistence and simultaneity – their (relative) order and/or their (relative) disorder. It is the outcome of a sequence and set of operations,
and thus cannot be reduced to the rank of a simple object. At the same time there is nothing imagined, unreal or ‘ideal’ about it as compared, for example,
with science, representations, ideas or dreams. Itself the outcome of past action, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others
and prohibiting yet others…Social space implies a great diversity of knowledge.” Henri Lefebvre
One of the primary themes that have been very present in all my
architectural studies and subconsciously during my life has been
the relation between humans and the built environment. More than
a theme, it is the desire to understand the phenomenological behavioural aspects of people in the built environment, and the phenomena of the everyday life, in respect to the role of architecture in
society and culture, and how the ideas of space and space itself
are produced.
The basis of the observations on the sites selected throughout the
architectural interventions has been psychological conflicts I have
perceived of space and their use in the North American conditions,
while contrasting these observations to a Latin American context.
This Latin American context comes from the phenomenological observations retrieved from memory, which reference the way of life
and the reflection of the built environments to the society and culture I embraced when I lived in Colombia.
The investigation starts out with the intention of reflecting over the
studies done in previous ideas that dealt with the idea of crossbreeding and crosspollination through architecture within certain
neighbourhoods in the city of Winnipeg, and the social and cultural
consequences produced over time by the interventions created.
The site of study during the first semester is the city of Winnipeg
and its everyday life looked from a sociological point of view. The
result for this investigation was a deep understanding of the actual
role architecture plays in our daily life, while critiquing an “architecture” whose sole concern is to fit in into a market that does not
really support the average people living in the cities. This not only
revealed the role of architecture but it also showed the importance
of people in the creation of space or like Henri Lefebvre would
name it, “Social Space.”