What my practice is about and what motivates it from an architect-as-learner perspective.
My work is located at the intersection of architectural theory and practice. Although I began my career as an architectural practitioner, I later realized that critical theory could help me pose more complex questions about the practice of architecture.
My theory and practice nurture each other: I write based on lessons learned from my practice, and I apply to my practice what I learn from engaging with theory.
Although my architectural work deals with poverty, it is distinct from the mainstream view concerning this phenomenon in the profession of architecture. Poverty-related work is now quite fashionable in architecture through the practice of social design. Emergency shelters are featured at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and social designers receive prestigious architectural awards and see their work spotlighted in the most important architectural magazines.
I am critical of this present-day social design paradigm of bringing artistic designs to populations in poverty. As I have confirmed through field research of social design projects, including those studied in my book Sustainability and Privilege, the emphasis on the beauty of the designs often comes at the cost of diminishing the projects’ social impact. Moreover, this emphasis on beauty often serves the designers’ interests more than those of their targeted beneficiaries. Not uncommonly, the designers obtain praise and awards, while the supposed beneficiaries are left with sophisticated buildings that are under-utilized or abandoned because they don’t really fulfill the users’ needs, fall into disrepair as they require expensive and continuous maintenance, or sometimes even collapse because the designers have employed untested experimental technologies.
Initially, my career had a strong focus on design, particularly green design, but it has now shifted to a point at which I no longer design by myself. Instead, I facilitate design processes driven by people. The people I work with—villagers who live in marginalized rural communities mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean—design for and by themselves following a participatory design process I call ethnoarchitecture, which I developed over years of work. I explain architectural representation to the villagers, some of whom do not know how to read or write. Thereafter, I teach them how to draw architectural plans to scale and how to create architectural models based on those plans.
With that knowledge, the villagers are able—and eager—to design their own housing. I act as their architectural consultant and digitize their sketch plans using CAD (computer-aided design) software, and I then work with engineers to turn these plans into construction documents. Thus, in the end, the villagers’ crude drawings become technical architectural and engineering plans just like those of a professional firm. With those documents, village contractors build the homes, and the villagers get to live in the homes that they themselves have designed.
I believe this approach is more than a small step towards democratizing the profession of architecture, and it is intentionally different from the often-patronizing bias of artistic social design practice. As an alternative to the patronizing paradigm of “designing for” and the easy-to-coopt “designing with,” my work advocates instead for “designing by.” I support local people’s perspectives on their own conditions of poverty, their own visions of a solution, and their own ideas for materializing those visions.
Architecture as a Process of Learning
My architectural practice is deeply connected to my research work, as my writing is based on lessons learned from what I learn as a practitioner. Both my practice and research are, in turn, deeply connected to my teaching, with the three forming a loop as I describe in my teaching philosophy statement.
The question of the role of learning is the common thread that connects my practice, research, and teaching. I am deeply invested in challenging a key assumption about learning in professional architectural practice. In architecture school, we are taught that architects must educate their clients in what is more convenient for the latter—in fact, the notion that architects know better is almost a mantra in architectural practice. In response to this architect-as-educator dictum, I ask instead, what about the architect as a learner?
Although my main clients ostensibly are organizations that provide funding for very low-income rural housing, ultimately the clients are the villagers themselves. In my view, which I convey to the founding organizations, villagers should be the ultimate agents in deciding how their housing should be planned, designed, and managed.
Thus, I pursue the goal of removing myself from a position of educating the other, which is a position of power, and instead aim to learn from and with others, in a general spirit of education as a shared experience and a conversation of equals. In this way, education becomes the ultimate act of democracy.
As an architect, this goal poses a challenge, because it means doing away with some notions about the role of architects that are deeply ingrained in our profession. The results, however, are quite fascinating. One example is the Guyana Hinterland Housing project, which started in 2009 as a housing initiative catering to indigenous Guyanese families from the Arawak, Macushi, Wapishana, and other ethnicities.
Historically speaking, indigenous groups constitute the poorest segment in Guyana overall. From the beginning of this project, I proposed to both the funding institution and the government office in charge that the project should be carried out as much as possible by villagers themselves. By doing so, I was proposing to restrict my involvement as the project’s designer to that of a facilitator and an advocate of locally-driven processes. This was an intentional stand in response to the aforementioned artistic approaches to working with underprivileged communities.
The main premise of the Guyana project was to carry out an architectural intervention that placed the highest value on human agency, so the villagers would be enabled to reclaim their autonomy over their living conditions. The premise, then, was that the project should be carried out on the villagers’ own terms, even if those terms did not agree with conventional architectural design wisdom.
For example, at one point in the community design process, I believed certain design decisions that the villagers were making—for example, regarding the height and roof pitch of the houses—might not work from a climate comfort perspective. We were expected to build with corrugated metal roofing, not only because it allowed for the collection of rainwater but also, and very importantly, because the villagers preferred this material over their traditional materials. However, the immediate concern in architectural terms when using metal roofing in the tropics is that this material increases the temperature inside the constructions.
With this in mind, during the community process I mentioned passive design solutions, such as raising the roof by building taller walls and increasing the roof pitch. However, the villagers considered these changes too awkward for their personal taste. They wanted a conventional house form—one that was not too “architectural” so to speak; not too highly designed.
In their desire for conventionalism, the villagers seemingly downplayed my concerns about the interior temperature of the house. Motivated by respect for their decisions as well as a great interest in learning, I supported their decision regarding the walls and roof.
Surprisingly, in terms of internal temperature, the prototype house turned out to be quite comfortable. The reason for this was that, although the villagers did design a formally conservative house, they were careful to orient the prototype towards the predominant breeze, and their design included enough doors and windows for the structure to attract a fresh breeze that would ensure the house would be comfortable inside.
These decisions of the villagers challenged what I knew professionally about climate conditioning vis-à-vis materials and dimensions. In so doing, they made me realize that, in architectural practice, we sometimes fall into a pattern of thinking only in terms of the parts (height or pitch in this case) while missing the whole—that is, how these parts come together and interact. In other words, our thinking as designers tends to be that each separate part must work perfectly, but in reality the whole might ultimately work efficiently even if its constitutive parts might not work in isolation.
This is only one example of the fascinating lessons I normally learn as I carry out an architectural practice based on learning from others rather than engaging in the grand project of educating them. Ultimately, the beauty I look for in architecture is the beauty of mutual learning and, with that, the beauty of mutual understanding.