Divide 13 - Manos: A Craft Market Built to Bridge Two Lima Neighbourhoods Split by Wealth

Most proposals for divided cities start with infrastructure: a road, a bridge, a gate that opens. This one starts with a woven textile, a carved object, a stall with a striped awning. Its wager is that the quickest route across a social fault line runs through the things people make with their hands, and through the transaction of someone buying them.

Divide 13 - Manos, by Salman Cassimally with co-author Erlend Birkeland, is set in Lima, Peru, between the wealthy Las Casuarinas community and the disfavored Pamplona Alta. The project received an Editor's Choice at Divide 13, and its strengths and blind spots are both worth taking seriously.

Crafts as the Currency of the Encounter

The brief the designers set themselves is direct: Pamplona Alta's community uses its ingenuity to produce local and regional crafts, and those crafts can be sold to Las Casuarinas, linking a wealthy community back to its Peruvian identity. The architecture is less a monument than a stage for that exchange. Across the renderings, the same kit of parts recurs: timber posts, sagging fabric canopies in yellow, white and blue, strings of round bulbs stretched overhead, and people lingering rather than passing through.

That softness is deliberate. The drawings read like a festival rather than a facility, which suits a programme whose success depends on visitors choosing to stay. Whether a palette of fabric and lights can carry the weight of a social bridge is the question the rest of the scheme has to answer.

A Plaza Where the Canopy Line Meets Open Ground

One rendering shows a long, low pavilion of glazed bays framed in rust red, fronted by a broad, paved plaza. A row of timber poles carries coloured cloth and bulbs out from the building edge, so the threshold between inside and outside becomes a shaded strip rather than a wall. Children fly a kite, a couple embraces under the trees, and a woman walks past in heels: the image argues for a public room generous enough to hold several kinds of people at once.

The spatial move is simple and effective. By pushing the canopy line beyond the facade, the pavilion lends its shade to the open ground and turns the plaza into an extension of the market, not a gap in front of it.

Stalls That Fold Away When the Market Closes

The market is where the project is most convincing. Between the larger buildings sit many small markets with their own public spaces, self built by locals, and the exterior stalls can be flatpacked and stored. In the rendering, a grassy lane runs between a brick wall and a low edge, a Peruvian flag snaps on a timber pole, and a blue and orange awning shades a table. Nothing here is fixed for good; the market can appear and disappear with the trading day.

Cynthia Seinfeld Lemlig, who judged the competition, singled out exactly this logic of removable modules, while arguing that it should have governed the whole scheme rather than a single part of it:

- It has not been defined a guiding idea of the project, beyond the programmatic relationship itself. For example, the parts of the proposal are felt to be disjointed with each other and in their relationship to the slope and topography.
- The relationship of the project with its location and the relationship with the entire extension of the land must be strengthened. Likewise, it would be interesting to work on the idea of edges, which should be permeable to ensure an open relationship.
- There is an interesting job of flexible and removable modules like how local markets and stands work. It would have been interesting for this to be a common thread in a general proposal, as a unit from which other spaces can be born by their multiplication or engagement. This would have allowed working through a more bounded scale, like how the people who live in the hills in Lima adapt. They do it in an organic way with a compact structure with high density.
- The tour is somewhat forced, there is a lack of the study of more flexible and versatile proposal that better adapts to the topography, as do the residents of Pamplona and, in general, the population that settle informally in the hills, achieving an organic and agile urban planning, with high interaction. It would allow a better relationship with the activities.Cynthia Seinfeld Lemlig, Co-Founder / Main Architect, Seinfeld arquitectos/ Tandem Arquitectura, Lima, Peru

A Sunken Stage at the Heart of the Site

At the centre sits an auditorium meant for traditional dances and as a podium where people can express themselves to each other. The rendering looks down a short flight of steps between two heavy, earthen drums planted with trees, toward a pair of dancers framed by draped fabric and lights. The thick walls and the descent give the space a sense of enclosure that the open plaza and market lanes lack, as if the project gathers its energy into one point before letting it spill outward again.

It is a smart choice to put performance, not commerce, at the heart. Buying a craft keeps people in roles of seller and customer; watching a dance together lets them simply be an audience.

Decks, Trusses and the Unresolved Slope

Higher up, the language shifts. An elevated deck with steel railings runs along salmon-coloured volumes, a timber truss roof fans overhead, and a separate bridge structure crosses the background. The scene is lively, with a guitarist by a doorway and visitors waiting under the canopies, but it also exposes the scheme's central weakness: the buildings sit on platforms that step down the hill without quite belonging to it.

Rodolfo Jaime Cortegana Morgan, who also judged the competition, pressed hard on this point, noting that the productive programme's potential is not carried into the design of its container and that the discontinuous platforms contradict the stated intent to work with the slope:

El planteamiento de recurrir a un programa productivo tiene un potencial que no es aprovechado al momento de proyectar el contenedor de los mismos.
Las plantas no tiene relación a un planteamiento de ladera y se contradice en sus intenciones de tener en cuenta la pendiente proponiendo plataformas discontinuas e inconexasRodolfo Jaime Cortegana Morgan, Lead architect, Llosa Cortegana Arquitectos, Lima, Peru

Why This Project Matters

Divide 13 - Manos makes a case that many bridging projects skip: that economic exchange and cultural pride can be the glue between neighbours who share a city but not a life. Its folding stalls, shaded lanes and central stage give that idea a credible, low-cost form, and its renderings put people, not objects, at the centre of every frame.

The jury's critique is just as instructive. Both jurors point toward the hillside settlements themselves, compact, adaptive and organic, as the better model for how such a place should meet the terrain. The project's most promising element, the flexible market module, hints at that answer. Had it been allowed to multiply across the slope, the bridge between Las Casuarinas and Pamplona Alta might have grown the way the hills of Lima already do.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Salman Cassimally, Erlend Birkeland

Competition and award

Editor's Choice, Divide 13

Jury

Cynthia Seinfeld Lemlig, Co-Founder / Main Architect, Seinfeld arquitectos/ Tandem Arquitectura, Lima, PeruRodolfo Jaime Cortegana Morgan, Lead architect, Llosa Cortegana Arquitectos, Lima, Peru

Location

Lima, Peru

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