Working in the context of the best-known Puerto Rican informal community, La Perla, this thesis explores the possibility of creating informal walls as a strategy for simultaneously generating events and defining the spaces that contain them. Building from the precedent of the existing 16th century fortification wall, this project develops a series of surface and sensorial wall fields based on, among others light, sound, and texture.

The informal community of La Perla is isolated outside the fortification wall of the traditionally planned colonial city of Old San Juan. The proposed informal walls are aimed at generating the emerging event-spaces demanded by new tourist-resident interaction, which paradoxically maintain the spatial, and cultural separation La Perla requires. In this case preservation is sought not by isolation but by transmutation, by dissolving and eventually scaping the wall into a series of temporary boundaries that stretch over and through the barrio of La Perla.