Project Descriptions

Early in my architectural career, I became interested in sustainable design as a way to overcome the dogmatism of modernist architecture. Historically, the modernism movement remained strongly paradigmatic in Latin American architecture schools even after falling out of favor in Europe and the United States. The specific sustainable design area that first captured my interest was based on the principles of geo-biology.

My first built project took place in Ecuador. It involved the redesign of the volunteers’ house in a permaculture farm called Madreselva. The main feature of that project was its roof, which I redesigned using passive ventilation principles to reduce the house’s inside temperature.

While working on the Madreselva project, I noticed a problematic divide between the environmental restoration goals of the permaculture farm and the dismaying levels of poverty in the San Martín barrio where this farm was located. Troubled by that disconnection, Toria Arboleda (my work partner at the time) and I shifted toward working in the barrio instead. There, we partnered with residents in the design and implementation of a community development plan that employed a strong community participation focus.

One of the main issues that residents identified through the participatory needs assessments of the San Martín project was related to safe sanitation access: there was no sewage in the neighborhood. Working collaboratively with residents, we designed composting toilets as a contingency measure to immediately deal with the sanitation issue, while a more permanent solution could be provided by the municipality. Since then, I have engaged with alternative sanitation activism as part of my housing-related community work.

In connection with the composting toilets initiative, the San Martín community development project also included a small infrastructure construction component. I worked with a native species of bamboo called Guadua angustifolia in the construction of two temporary structures in the barrio. This project sought to achieve several goals, including, first, to provide a contingency infrastructural solution to current needs (the composting toilets) while a more permanent infrastructure was secured from the town. The second goal was to use, for demonstrative purposes, a type of bamboo that residents did not trust as structurally sound. The third goal was to offer local builders training in construction with an alternative material, and the fourth was to explore a model of income generation through promoting the harvesting and use of bamboo as a building material.

While still in Ecuador, Toria and I collaborated with a Canadian environmentalist who was doing activism work in support of three Amazonian Sieco_pai communities. Villagers in these communities were struggling with the exploration activities of an American oil company in their traditional lands. Although the villagers’ response to the environmentalist’s support was not what she expected (they ended up negotiating with the company), this was nonetheless one of the most deeply influential projects in my professional career. My experience of working with the Sieco_pai villagers, including learning about their struggles and how they chose to address them, was deeply formative. This experience made me aware of critical, yet sometimes unnoticed, issues related to traditional people’s own understanding of the interplay between poverty, modernity, and sustainability, as well as the necessity for architects to deeply consider the people’s perspectives, especially when working in traditional communities.

My experience working in Sieco_pai communities was not new to me in the sense that I had been interested in the subject of indigenous architectures since I was in architecture school. Based on that interest, and as another important outcome of the experience, I developed a formal analysis method to carry out research on indigenous architectures. This method starts with virtually re-building the studied traditional structure using 3D computer software. The method works as a tool to ask building-related questions that emerge during the virtual reconstruction process.

In the United States, while attending the Master of Science in Architecture Studies program at MIT, I became involved in several small initiatives. These included social design competitions and service learning projects catering to sites in Haiti, Laos, and the Sub-Saharan African region.

After receiving my master’s from MIT, I worked with my mentor at the Institute, Reinhard Goethert, in a neighborhood planning project in El Salvador. In this project, we used the micro-planning participatory planning methodology that Reinhard had pioneered. Although I had already done a good deal of participatory work of my own, working with a world-renowned participatory practitioner like Reinhard was another pivotal experience in my career. Among many other valuable lessons, I learned from Reinhard how to design and implement participatory housing projects on a large scale while working with the support of international organizations.

After MIT, I joined the Ph.D. in Architecture program at U.C. Berkeley. For my dissertation, I explored ethnoengineering, a social design project in Ecuador that made comprehensive use of community participation. Deeply researching this project in the field made me acutely aware of the limitations of participation even when this principle is applied comprehensively, as in the case of the ethnoengineering project. My field research on ethnoengineering became another decisive experience in my career as a social design practitioner. The opportunity to carefully explore, in close conversation with villagers, the reasons why the ethnoengineering intervention did not work for them taught me invaluable lessons that I was later able to apply to my own participatory design work.

The longstanding experience that I had accrued in the theory and practice of participation led me to consult for an international organization on a low-income housing project catering to Maroon traditional people in Suriname. My role in this consultancy was to assess the viability of a supposedly “culturally appropriate” participatory approach that the project promoters were proposing.

I also fully applied the unique experience I had acquired with participation practice and theory to a housing project supporting Guyanese indigenous people. Based on my previous professional experience regarding what works and what does not, as well as my academic knowledge of the social, political, cultural, and other implications of participatory work, in this project I implemented a bottom-up approach to participation that I call ethnoarchitecture.

As the environmental crisis worsens globally, problems of poverty are becoming not only more critical but also more evidently linked to environmental problems. For this reason, in my present work (as of 2024), I am increasingly finding that projects previously deemed as strictly poverty alleviation projects now inevitably involve issues related to climate change. This is the case in the main project with which I am presently engaged—a climate-resilient housing project involving indigenous and ethnic populations living in conditions of socioeconomic vulnerability in rural areas of Nicaragua. Those conditions are being exacerbated by climate-related phenomena including hurricanes and prolonged drought. Working with villagers in a bottom-up participatory way, we are designing housing alternatives that enable them to get back on their feet as quickly as possible after their communities are hit by such phenomena.

In conclusion, over time, the focus of my social design practice has progressively shifted from heavily emphasizing green technologies (geobiology, natural ventilation, composting, bamboo construction, etc.) to engaging in a people-centered practice that is deeply rooted in the principles of bottom-up community participation. This shift happened because, in my green design work, I repeatedly saw evidence that sustainability has largely become a tool for the self-perpetuation of existing structures of inequality. This situation became evident to me as I worked on the above-described Madreselva, Sieco_pai, and Suriname projects, as well as others. Acting upon that key finding regarding the limitations of sustainability advocacy, I no longer design by myself. Instead, the people who are intended to benefit from the construction projects on which I work design the projects by and for themselves. Therefore, my current work proposes a different way to tackle sustainability practice, one based less on designing architectural objects and more on facilitating community-based processes.