Eco-Chapel

Elisa Silva is principal and founder of Enlace Arquitectura and Enlace Foundation, established in Caracas, Venezuela. The two entities work in tandem to raise awareness of spatial inequality, advance the integration of informal settlement communities and address the social and environmental challenges of rural landscapes in Venezuela and parts of Mexico. Their work has received awards in numerous design competitions and international architecture and urban design biennials. Recently, in 2019, the Church San Juan María Vianney in Media Legua, Venezuela was selected as a winning project at the XI Iberoamerican Architecture and Urban Design Biennial 2019. Elisa is visiting professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture and has taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Design at the University of Toronto, the Simón Bolívar University and the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas. She is the author of "Pure Space: Expanding the Public Sphere through Public Space Transformations in Latin American Spontaneous Settlements" (Actar, forthcoming in 2020), and co-author of "CABA Cartography of the Caracas Barrios 1966-2014." Elisa grew up between St. Louis and Venezuela.

Rodrigo Quintella Messina Born in São Paulo (Brazil) in 1991. He graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), with academic exchange at Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (2015) and the City School in São Paulo (2017). Intern at architecture office of Solano Benitez and Gloria Cabral in Asuncion, Paraguay. And also at the office of Architect Carla Juaçaba in Rio de Janeiro.

By the end of 2013, PARALELA starts as an architecture and urban design studio with the association of Jose di Girolamo and Ignacio Zañartu, both architects graduated from Pontificia Universidad Católica (UC), synthesizing their work and experience in different fields and scales of architecture, urban design and academic work. The team is completed with other young architects graduated from UC, with relevant working and/or academic experiences. Teamwork inside the studio is based on a horizontal way of working, understanding that all members contribute in a balanced manner, not only from their experiences, but also from the debate of ideas, building proposals and projects from a collective perspective. The work has been mainly focused on the development of housing, urban and facilities projects, in a permanent search of an architecture with social impact, especially for whom experience the projects and their environments daily. Concrete results of this search are Hamlet building, winner of the Urban Contribution Prize in 2017; the winner proposal for the international competition for designing La Pampa de Alto Hospicio masterplan in 2015; and the winner project for San Francisco Chapel in 2018, which prototypes have been built in different Chilean locations entirely by undergraduate volunteer students.