An annotated list of selected journal and other articles.
The following is an annotated list of selected journal and other articles I have had published, in chronological descending order.
Separately, I am listing book chapters and other book-format publications, as well as professional reports.
Beyond Participation
“Beyond Participation: Rethinking Social Design,” JAE: Journal of Architectural Education 74, no. 1 (March 2020): 15–25.
I open this paper by describing the outcomes of several famous projects in the social design world. These projects—including Kunlé Adeyemi’s Makoko Floating School, Shigeru Ban’s paper log house for Ecuador, and the Make It Right project in New Orleans—reflect what the paper calls the humanitarian starchitect canon. Even though they are continuously touted as great success stories, some of those projects do not currently even exist, having collapsed or never been delivered, and all of them were problematic in terms of cost, structural risk, durability, and limited or even negative social impact, among other issues.
As I explain in the paper, the main reason for the failure of those projects was the designers’ decision to address poverty-related issues by using a conventional high architectural design framework emphasizing spectacular, creative, and iconic design gestures.
After introducing the high-design problem of social design in those terms, I elaborate upon a paradigmatic solution that, since the early 2010s, has been enthusiastically proposed in social design literature to deal with this problem. This solution prescribes that architectural designers should not design for populations in poverty, but rather with them. This no-nonsense paradigm thus advocates for community participation in social design practice.
In this paper, I take exception to that premise and argue that participation in and of itself is not sufficient to tackle the issues posed by the high-design approach to social design. The reason for this is that participation can be easily manipulated to mask strategies of control and to ultimately justify the imposition of the designer’s own ideas. In the paper, I identify six of those control-by-participation strategies (which I study in detail in my 2022 book): participation as labor, participation as information provision, deceptive participation, manipulative participation, anodyne participation, and participation as everything.
Considering that the use of community participation in social design is so essentially limited, in this paper I argue that, rather than focusing on whether to design “for” or “with” people, architects should instead advocate for design by people. For social design work to have its greatest impact, it is necessary to adopt a positional change in which the architect is neither the driver nor the co-designer of the project. Instead, the architect should become the project supporter, while the key design-related and other decisions should be made by the people the project is primarily supposed to serve.
If such a positional change is adopted, then the role of the architect becomes that of a facilitator: a consultant, a technical support professional, and an advocate of people’s ideas. This is the essence of the “architecture from below” principle that drives my own architectural practice.
To illustrate this point, in this paper I use the example of the Guyana Hinterland Housing project, which I designed and for which I wrote the operating regulations. In particular, I detail the role that water scarcity played in shaping this project’s priorities as well as in determining the people-based participatory design approach employed. (I describe that approach in detail in an earlier paper, “Participation Practice and Its Criticism,” which is described later in this page).
In general terms, using the case of the Guyana project, in this “Beyond Participation” paper I offer a clear explanation of how I carry out my participation-from-below work, as well as the ethno-architectural philosophy underlying it. In a way, this paper can be read as a manifesto of my own practice, and as such it is a useful reference for understanding my work.
This paper won the 2021 JAE Scholarship of Design Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), whose members include all the institutions that offer accredited professional architectural programs in the United States and Canada, as well as other international schools. The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), is published by Taylor & Francis and is the oldest and most important architectural pedagogy journal in the United States.
Book Review: Lessons from Vernacular Architecture
Review of Lessons from Vernacular Architecture, by Willi Weber and Simos Yannas, eds., Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 27, no. 1 (2015): 85–86.
This is a review of Lessons from Vernacular Architecture, an edited volume that aims to prove, from a quantitative standpoint, that so-called vernacular construction (traditional buildings erected in non-industrial materials) is more efficient than its modernist industrial counterpart, especially from a climate standpoint.
The claim that environmental advantages exist in vernacular architecture is an old one—it has been made since as early as Vitruvius’ time, about 2,000 years ago. However, as the book editors correctly observe, this has been mostly an anecdotal claim. Thus, the editors set out to prove this claim quantitatively.
In reality, however, as I explain it in this review, the book unfortunately does not fully live up to this promise. It actually contains little quantitative data analysis, and the comparisons are biased towards favoring vernacular over modernist architecture. Thus, in terms of quantitative evidence, the book’s contributions are ultimately modest.
In the review, I also question the relevance of such a technology-focused inquiry when the creators and main users of vernacular architectural structures are brought into consideration. Worldwide, indigenous and other traditional populations are actually abandoning this type of architecture in masse, due to economic and other serious social constraints (I explain this issue in many of my own publications; e.g., 2008, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2020, and 2022).
This situation of abandonment of traditional vernacular architecture by its poorest users is unintentionally confirmed by Lessons from Vernacular Architecture itself: Paradoxically, most of the book’s examples are of vernacular constructions used by comparatively wealthy people (British tradesmen in colonial India, famous architects in Japan, plantation owners in Mexico, etc.).
Considering that issue, I conclude the review as follows:
The critical question in traditional environments today is not whether vernacular constructions are environmentally efficient. It is for whom [emphasis added] that notion is relevant. With regard to the title of this book, we must ask: Who are the ‘lessons from vernacular architecture’ for? They are for ‘us,’ the editors explain (p.2). But their ‘us’ is an unmarked one, which presents the findings as universally applicable. It is, however, a positional ‘us.’
This review was published in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, a bi-annual, blind peer-reviewed journal published by the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE).
Participation Practice and Its Criticism
“Participation Practice and Its Criticism: Can They Be Bridged? A Field Report from the Guyana Hinterland,” Housing and Society 41, no. 2 (2014): 195–227.
This paper explores a longstanding disconnection between community participation theory and practice. In particular, the paper elaborates upon divergent visions that tend to exist between participation critical theorists and field practitioners in general. This discrepancy has been described by Robert Chambers, a prominent advocate of participatory practice, as a contentious one: “academics look for what goes wrong, practitioners for what might go right” (1983). In this paper, I pose the question of whether that disconnection can be bridged—that is, whether a practitioner can tackle participatory practice in a way that still takes into account the cautionary lessons offered by theory critics.
The paper reports on the results of such a bridging attempt with the case of the Guyana Hinterland Housing project. It offers details about the execution of this project, emphasizing the participatory methods used for the project’s planning, design, construction, and delivery phases. The paper then describes the results of applying a participatory methodology within a framework of human agency. Although this was a project catering to the families in greatest need in Guyana, it did not adopt a patronizing approach of simply providing houses as charitable act. Instead, the project acknowledged the existence of local resources, including materials, skilled labor, and knowledge, and it paid beneficiaries for the use of those resources.
The results of the participatory assessments initially carried out for this project provided evidence that community members themselves would be able to carry out the task of designing the houses for the project. They would also be able to carry out the management, budgeting, construction, and other aspects of the project execution, even including the selection of beneficiaries and monitoring of the whole operation.
Consequently, the Guyana project used a very comprehensive approach to participation—an unusual one in the sense that it covered all aspects of the project, from planning and design to building and delivery.
The use of such an encompassing participatory approach was highly beneficial for this project. As described in the paper:
[T]he project delivered a number of full and upgraded housing units that was above the initial target (214, above the original 200). The houses turned out to be more affordable than those built by Georgetown contractors. This made it feasible to build houses that are twice as large (four times in the Region One case, after users complete the self-built increments), and of far better structural quality. Besides, the project was concluded before the deadline, despite using an approach that was not as efficient in terms of delivery—participation is a slow process.
By considering the outcome of the Guyana project, which offers a good example of the promise of using participation in housing practice, I close this paper by reflecting upon the notion of participation. I relate this notion to those of empowerment and agency, arguing that, regardless of its potential, participation should always be considered by practitioners as a transitional tool, with human agency (defined by Anthony Giddens as the capacity of a human group to control its own history) being the ultimate goal of a social development project.
On the other hand, I describe empowerment as the connecting element that allows for the transition from participation to agency. In the case of a project like the Guyana Hinterland project, I describe empowerment as a non-tangible, but perhaps the most important, outcome of the process of working with people in such a way that they are able to carry out, as much as possible by themselves, a housing or any other social development project.
This paper was published in Housing and Society, a tri-annual, blind peer-reviewed journal. Housing and Society is published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Housing Education and Research Association (HERA), formerly known as the American Association of Housing Educators (AAHE).
House Form and What?
“House Form and What? Assessing the ‘Culture’ Premise Among Guyanese Traditional Peoples,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 26, no. 1 (2014): 44.
The title of this conference paper offers a commentary on Amos Rapoport’s influential “House Form and Culture” (1969). The paper places a question mark on the “culture” premise that Rapoport championed in connection to traditional environments.
The notion of culture is a complicated one, yet architectural literature typically treats it as a universal category. This exploratory paper was based on an extensive inquiry I carried out with people from different ethno-cultural groups in Guyana about what was “culture” for them. Based on the lessons learned from this inquiry, in the paper I call for relativizing the notion of culture in architectural studies: “It is about time we put the notion of culture in architecture into crisis.”
“Ethnoengineering”
“Ethnoengineering,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 24, no. 1 (2012): 42–43.
This conference paper summarizes the findings from my Berkeley PhD dissertation research, which I describe here.
The ‘Architecturally Noble Savage’
“The ‘Architecturally Noble Savage:’ On the Sustainable Nature of Indigenous Building,” Identity Politics and the Reinscription of Space: Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Working Paper Series 216 (2008): 67–89.
This paper dwells upon the findings from my MIT Masters’ thesis research (2004), highlighting the lessons on sustainability to be learned from the case of the Sieco_pai people of the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon. In particular, the paper describes how Sieco_pai people rapidly and massively modernized their traditional construction, particularly after having had to deal with oil companies in the late 1990s. In the paper, I explain the reasons behind this architectural shift, which were mainly related to affordability and environmental depletion factors.
After describing the form-related change in the Sieco_pai traditional construction, in this paper I argue that the Sieco_pai case defies popular assumptions about sustainability in traditional architecture. Just as I did in my MIT thesis, I focus on six assumptions: immutability, naturalness, productiveness, infallibility (reworded from “holism,” the term used in the thesis), nostalgia, and absoluteness.
I then take the thesis argument further by giving these assumptions a collective name: “the architecturally noble savage myth.” This name mirrors the “ecologically noble savage myth” proposed by Kent Redford in 1990 to strongly critique a popular narrative in the environmental activism movement directly connecting indigenous life with harmonious coexistence with the natural environment. In the paper, I offer a brief historical context of the development of the architecturally noble savage myth.
Traditional Architecture in the Era of the Web 2.0
“Traditional Architecture in the Era of the Web 2.0: Using Online Participative Tools to Develop an Internet Database of Traditional Buildings,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 18, no. 1 (2006): 17–18.
I delivered this paper at the Tenth IASTE Conference, held in Bangkok, Thailand. In the paper, I introduce Ethnoarchitecture.com (later renamed Ethnoarchitecture.org), an online database of traditional building types that I published between 2004 and 2009. As the abstract explains, “the project responds to both the increasing availability and growing necessity for information on traditional architecture.” The paper focuses on explaining the structure and scope of this project, as well as its potential limitations.
The Infinite Kaleidoscope
“The Infinite Kaleidoscope: Architectural Patterns in the Amazon Rainforest,” in Architecture, Culture, and the Challenges of Globalization: Proceedings of the 2002 ACSA International Conference, edited by John Loomis and Maria Oliver (Washington, DC: ACSA, 2002), 24–33.
This was my first academic publication in English, written as I was concluding my five-year experience of work in Ecuador.
In this paper, I carry out a formal analysis of the maloca, the most traditional building type of the Amazon rainforest. Most of the observations for this analysis emerged from virtually reconstructing, using 3D software, a few malocas that I had measured onsite.
The goal behind those reconstructions was to understand the building logic of a maloca. I compared what I learned from the reconstructions to descriptions of building-related cultural practices in anthropological literature, and I analyzed this information in light of the lessons learned during my building and research-related work with Upper Amazon Sieco_pai traditional builders.
The formal analysis for this paper includes a description of a traditional maloca’s geometry, structure, function, symbolism, orientation, and gender-related aspects, among other aspects of this unique building form. In particular, this paper focuses on the aspect of change—that is, how this building type has been subject to constant change over time due to environmental, social, cultural, and other circumstances. By highlighting change, this paper intends to offer an important contribution to architectural literature, given that it challenges conventional understandings of Amazonian traditional architecture as frozen in the past.
I believe this paper is also significant because of the research method I employed. It was an ethnoarchitectural method in the sense that I (virtually) built the studied malocas as a traditional builder would have done in real life: I followed the steps in the building process I learned from speaking with traditional builders and from reading classical ethnographies. The process of virtually re-building the studied malocas allowed me not only to confirm observations made in the literature but also to contribute new observations, including details about the significance of the maloca construction, especially those related to building change.
PUBLICATIONS IN THE POPULAR PRESS
40th Anniversary of ‘Architecture Without Architects’
“40th Anniversary of ‘Architecture Without Architects,’” Archinect, November 9, 2004, http://web.archive.org/web/20041209223737/http://www.archinect.com/views/view.php?id=10082_0_36_0_C.
I published this Archinect article forty years after the opening day of Bernard Rudofsky’s groundbreaking MOMA exhibit, Architecture without Architects (November 9, 1964; the article was published on November 9, 2004).
The exhibit’s anniversary received little attention from the architectural press, and I believed it was important to highlight it for the purpose of reflection. The book accompanying that exhibition has been tremendously influential in contemporary architectural thinking, leading several superficial assumptions made by Rudofsky to become dogma in this discipline. One of these appears in the first line of the book: “vernacular architecture [ . . . ] is nearly immutable.”
This article brings attention to the problem with Rudofsky’s proclamation regarding timelessness, as well as the need to shift away from Rudofsky’s focus on the visual aspect of traditional vernacular architectures to also consider the “complex socio- environmental phenomena that shape this [kind of] building.”
Like the Beyond Participation article described earlier, this article can also be read as a public manifesto of my own practice. In the process of writing it, I considered my own experience working with Sieco_pai traditional builders in Ecuador (which, as mentioned above, also informed my paper on the maloca and architectural change). From that experience, I had learned that one of the key features characterizing Sieco_pai architecture was in fact constant change, rather than immutability.
By the time of this publication, acknowledging change in traditional communities was already a central principle I had adopted in my own architectural practice in those communities. Acknowledging change is a way to acknowledge the agency of traditional people and, thus, to acknowledge that they are—or should be—in control of their own future. Therefore, acknowledging change is a way to distance oneself from a patronizing and charity-based attitude that is still prevalent in architectural practice in regard to working in traditional communities.
OCCIDENTE PUBLICATIONS
The following are three of a series of Spanish-language articles I published in the Sunday edition of Occidente, a Colombian newspaper. Two of the articles (no. 1 on mangrove and no. 3 on six propositions) include my own images, while the images accompanying article no. 2 (ecologism) are stock images chosen by the newspaper editors.
These articles, published when I was just starting my architectural career, reflect my early position on the topic of sustainability in architecture. As the articles show, even then I was already thinking about a different way to engage in ecologism (as in pro- nature environmental activism)—a more “practical” one, as described in one of the articles. In particular, I was considering an alternative approach that would take into account the economic benefits of ecological activism.
Years later, that alternative approach would end up becoming mainstream and, ultimately, co-opted, as I explain below in discussing the third article. Reacting to that situation, I shifted instead to working with those people who are left out of—or taken advantage by—the so-called green economy.
Mangrove
“El Mangle: Un Problema Ecológico Típico” [Mangrove: A typical ecological problem],” Occidente (April 27, 1997): 10–11.
“Mangrove,” my first Occidente article, was my first publication on the topic of architecture and also the first piece I wrote based on field observations. In this case, the observations were based on the environment where I was working at the time: San Lorenzo, a small port in Northwestern Ecuador that is located in an endangered environmental hotspot, at the convergence between a rainforest and a mangrove forest environment.
In this article, I use the case of San Lorenzo’s mangrove forest to make a point about a common disconnection between ecologism and economy (as in economic concerns): often, environmental preservation initiatives in a given geographic area clash with the economic development interests in that area.
In the article, I highlight the uniqueness of mangrove as a tree species, which makes it deserving of great preservation efforts. I also describe the economic interests, mostly from the shrimp industry, in San Lorenzo’s mangrove bio-geographic area (which extends throughout Colombia and Ecuador’s Pacific Coast). I explain how sections of the mangrove forest are intentionally left to die so they can be later turned into pools for shrimp farming, with the shrimp then being exported to the United States and other countries. This was a very serious problem at the time I wrote this article.
I use the mangrove case to explain the greatest challenge faced by the ecological activism movement (one that remains even today [2024]): Bluntly put, “in normal situations, nobody is going to make any sacrifices on behalf of nature if their pockets are compromised.”
In closing this article, I make an assertion that is truer now than ever: “behind every great ecological problem, there remains a great economic problem.”
My descriptions of the mangrove in this article come from both having experienced the mangrove forest around San Lorenzo in its own grandiosity during my years working there and having witnessed what shrimp farm industrialists were sadly doing at that time in portions of this forest.
A More Realistic Ecologism
“Construcción y Medio Ambiente: Una Ecología más Real, más Posible, más Práctica... [Building and environment: A more realistic, more feasible and more practical ecologism…],” Occidente (May 4, 1997): 8–9.
In this article, I continue the discussion introduced in the previous one by historicizing the prior thirty years of global environmental activism in three periods: the idealism of the 1960s, the “paranoia” of the 1970s and part of the 1980s, and the pragmatism of the 1990s (and up to the present).
I offer this historical outline to highlight the importance of the last period, which I date as beginning in 1992, the year of Rio de Janeiro’s Earth Summit and other significant gatherings at which the question of the economic dimensions of ecological activism was raised.
By highlighting this period, the goal of this article was to stress that the environmental activism world had entered a new stage in its understanding of ecologism vis-á-vis economic concerns. After doing so, in the article I pose the question of how to embrace that new economically-minded paradigm in ecological activism, particularly in architectural practice. I tackle that question in the third article of the series, described below.
Six Economic Propositions for an Ecological (Architectural) Project
“Seis Propuestas Económicas para un Proyecto Ecológico [Six economic propositions for an ecological (architectural) project],” Occidente (May 11, 1997): 11, 16.
In this article, I conclude the two previous articles’ discussion of the relationship between economic concerns and ecologism as a form of environmental activism. Regarding the question of how to establish a balance between both, the answer proposed in this article boils down to competition: “An open, business-based, and fair competition with traditional systems, which we could call non-environmental.”
In the article, I propose six principles to succeed in such competition in the context of building and other industries. The first is an overall principle: remaining objective or non- passionate about the environmental alternatives that are proposed. The remaining principles, pertaining to the products themselves in terms of their design and manufacturing processes, are as follows: the operation of these ecological products should be simple, the products should be beautiful, they should not require too much maintenance, they should not unleash other environmental problems, and they should be less expensive than their non-environmental competition.
Although these are no-nonsense principles even today (almost three decades after I published these articles), I ended up distancing myself from this type of enterprise- based environmental advocacy, which ended up becoming very popular in architecture later on, especially starting in the 2010s. As a result of that popularity, I was able to witness what the dream of economy + ecology would look like if it were to massively materialize. I did not like what I saw. In my view, the composite of economy and ecology has ultimately done very little to subvert the historically predominant structures of global inequality. Thus, in the end, the popularity of that dream has resulted in the cooptation of ecological activism for the purposes of a global economic project whose main benefits have remained exclusive to only a few.
In response to that disappointing outcome of the economy/ecology global project, my architectural practice now fully focuses on aspects directly related to poverty alleviation, specifically those involving the people in greatest poverty worldwide. These are indigenous and other ethnic traditional people who often find themselves threatened not only by regular development projects but now also by the so-called “green development” ones.