Materials I have published in book format.
The following is an annotated list of materials I have published in book format. The listed works are organized first thematically (books, book-length monographs, encyclopedia entries, and chapters in books) and then in chronological descending order.
Separately, I am listing journal and other articles, as well as professional reports.
Sustainability and Privilege
Sustainability and Privilege: A Critique of Social Design Practice (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022).
In this book, published by the University of Virginia Press, I further the argument of my Ph.D. dissertation on ethnoengineering by focusing on the connection between sustainability advocacy and social class privilege. Based on studies of six high-profile and/or large-scale social design interventions across three continents, in the book I show how the privilege-related issues the ethnoengineering project faced were not unique to that project. Instead, there exists a pattern of class positionality in social design’s sustainability advocacy—that type of advocacy tends to be informed and driven by specific social class interests and concerns.
The book’s thesis focuses on another argument I introduced in the dissertation: the problem of understanding the notion of “community” as a homogeneous and harmonious body (i.e., “the community”). I explore this argument in connection to community participation in social design’s sustainability advocacy; specifically, I study the limitations of the participatory approach as commonly used in social design, and, responding to those limitations, I introduce the basic principles of ethnoarchitecture as a bottom-up approach to participation in social design practice.
Click here for a more detailed description of the book contents and argument.
Second book project
I am currently (as of 2024) working on the draft of my second book project. In this project, I continue to explore the topic of sustainability vis-a-vis social issues. In particular, this book will explore the question of how to make the paradigm of achieving climate efficiency also one of achieving social equality.
BOOK-LENGTH MONOGRAPHS
Ethnoengineering (Ph.D. Dissertation)
“Ethnoengineering: Negotiating the Modern in a ‘Culturally Appropriate’ Government Program in Ecuador” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012), ProQuest (1666449202) (357 pages).
This U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation studies ethnoengineering, an Ecuadorian government project of public infrastructure construction. The project took into consideration the cultural and environmental characteristics of beneficiary communities—mostly indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian, and Montuvio peasant communities—rather than building standard modernist infrastructure as was common government practice.
The dissertation studies the paradoxical outcome of the ethnoengineering project: Despite its well-meant effort to cater to traditional people’s cultural characteristics, the project met with almost absolute rejection from traditional people themselves. Put simply, the response that the culturally-sensible architects who designed buildings for the project received from their beneficiaries was that, even though they were indeed traditional people, they did not want traditional houses. Instead, they preferred plain modernist houses like those in which the architects lived.
In the dissertation, I use the case of ethnoengineering to study sustainable design advocacy, in particular the form of advocacy that involves traditional culture considerations. The notion of so-called “cultural sustainability” advocates for technologically-improved traditional constructions as the most sustainable alternative for traditional communities. I summarize this premise with the equation modern + culture = sustainable.
The dissertation explores that premise in detail: its historical origins, its rationale, and its outcome when applied to a real-life scenario. The latter is the focus of the field research I carried out on the ethnoengineering project, which spanned two summer seasons. By observing how acceptance of or opposition to ethnoengineering among the project beneficiaries occurred along social class lines (i.e., elite community members tended to agree with the project implementation, while lower-income members opposed it), I consider the extent to which the advocacy on behalf of sustainable design (and sustainability in general) is mediated by social class concerns.
In making that argument, I also observe a pitfall in both the praiseful and the critical literature currently published on sustainability. Both types of literature tend to describe the low-income beneficiary communities of bona-fide sustainable development interventions as homogeneous and monolithic. A consequence of that stereotype is the well-known but often fallacious argument that the architect consulted with the community and the community agreed with the architect’s vision. Often, “the” community to which such statements refer is limited to sub-groups representing the more empowered and better-off members of that community.
I readdress some of these topics in my Sustainability and Privilege book, where I compile the findings of the ethnoengineering case into one chapter.
Read / Download the dissertation
Houses in Heaven Are Made of Steel (Master’s Thesis)
“Houses in Heaven Are Made of Steel: Understanding Change in Ecuadorian Amazon Secoya Structures” (master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004) (136 pages).
This MIT Master of Science thesis describes, explains, and endeavors to learn from the phenomenon of architectural change among the Sieco_pai people of the Upper Ecuadorian Amazon.
The thesis describes Sieco_pai housing change across three historical periods. During the first period, which concluded around the 1940s, the prevailing housing type used in Sieco_pai communities was the Tui’que Huë’e, a monumental maloca or extended family house. In the second period, the prevailing housing type shifted to the Pa’pa Huë’e, which was, like the former, also a palm-based structure but built for nuclear families. That type of house was common in Sieco_pai settlements until about the late 1990s.
The third, and current, historical period of Sieco_pai housing is that of zinc houses, which are built with corrugated metal and other industrial materials. They use very basic construction technologies—nothing like the sophisticated craftsmanship of the Tui’que Huë’e and Pa’pa Huë’e houses.
In studying the case of Sieco_pai’s shifting housing typology, the thesis identifies a few crucial lessons related to the scope of the notion of sustainability in architecture. I present these lessons in the form of debunking popular myths or prevailing assumptions in this discipline regarding the role of traditional construction in sustainable design. I identify the following myths and assumptions, with the response to each being “not necessarily:”
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Immutability: If traditional indigenous groups such as the Sieco_pai did not change, they would be able to continue to live under completely sustainable conditions.
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Naturalness: Natural building materials, like palm, are inherently more sustainable than industrial ones, like zinc.
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Productiveness: Sustainable construction is all about performance and resource saving.
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Holism [I changed this term to “infallibility” in a later paper]: Sustainable technologies are one hundred percent sustainable.
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Nostalgia: “Sustainable” means to be respectful of tradition.
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Absoluteness: “Sustainable” in construction is an absolute standard. (In reality, the notion of what is sustainable is relative to place and time.)
In writing this thesis, I relied upon prior experience working in three Sieco_pai villages, as well as on field research I carried out specifically for the thesis, including interviews with Cesáreo, a well-respected octogenarian Sieco_pai traditional builder. Lastly, I engaged in a comprehensive reading of ethnographic and other social science literature, as well as historical literature, on the Sieco_pai people, including sources dating back to the 1500s. I carefully studied the descriptions in this literature of Sieco_pai architecture throughout history, in order to identify the three moments of change that the thesis studies.
ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES
The following are two encyclopedia entries to be published in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (EVAW). The EVAW is the most comprehensive compendium of descriptive knowledge on vernacular architecture in the scholarly world. Originally edited by Paul Oliver and published by Cambridge University Press in 1997, the second edition is edited by Marcel Vellinga and will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025.
Earthquake (Ecuador)
“Earthquake (Ecuador),” in Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, second edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).
This encyclopedia entry discusses the devastating impact of earthquakes on traditional vernacular architecture. Because of the nature of their materials and technologies, some traditional building types are not sufficiently resilient to earthquake events. That is the case of mud brick construction: In 1996, an earthquake in Ecuador’s Cotopaxi province destroyed thousands of those constructions.
During the process of reconstruction following devastating events like the Cotopaxi earthquake, affected families tend to prefer modern industrial technologies—for instance, those using concrete blocks, which might be more resilient to earthquakes. However, this shift to modernist construction often happens even in areas where traditional technologies are more resilient to earthquakes. That was the case with bamboo constructions in the Manabí province, which in general received comparatively little damage after an earthquake in 2016. Nonetheless, families still shifted to concrete blocks in that case as well.
In closing this entry, I explain that, although the modernization of the built landscape in a traditional community after an earthquake might be visually impactful for an outside observer, it actually offers an opportunity for people to engage in the development of new architectural languages. These are hybrid languages that combine, for example, traditional space uses with modern industrial materials. Thus, instead of threatening the existence of vernacular architectural expressions, the adoption of modernism often enriches the landscape of global vernacular architecture through the invention of new forms.
Global Warming (Colombia)
“Global Warming (Colombia),” in Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, second edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).
This encyclopedia entry explores the impact of global warming on traditional vernacular architecture. In an earlier publication (2011), Nezar AlSayyad and I elaborated upon this impact, discussing, for instance, the effects of rainfall and floods on the collapse of traditional mud constructions.
In this entry, I use a different example—that of the traditional coffee plantation house in the Quindío department in Colombia. This is a traditional architectural type built with bamboo and wooden boards and profusely painted with vibrant colors.
A paradoxical outcome of the Quindío’s now warmer climate has been an increase in tourism, while another has been the collapsing local economy of coffee production.
Given that it fulfills the tourists’ appetite for the picturesque, an architectural form like that of the Quindío coffee house can actually become widely reproduced throughout a territory, rather than facing the threat of disappearance.
I conclude this entry by observing how the impact of global warming on the preservation of vernacular architecture can be complex: It can bring about the preservation and expansion of a vernacular building type, but it can also bring about drastic economic consequences that lead to unemployment and outmigration.
CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
Forgetting is Banned
“Forgetting Is Banned: Memory and the Possibilities of Design-Build for Social Design Practice,” in DesignBuild in Postcolonial Contexts: A Critical Interrogation, edited by Vera Simone Bader (Essen, Germany: Sto-Stiftung, 2024), 177–201.
This chapter studies the role of memory in social design practice. In particular, the chapter explores two contrasting perspectives on memory with regard to traumatic events caused by gun violence in barrios or informal settlements. These are a “top- down” (high-design) and a “bottom-up” (community-design) perspective.
I study the role of high design (artistic, iconic design in this case) in erasing the memory of traumatic events vis-à-vis the barrio residents’ resistance to that erasure. I also consider the support that social designers can offer to those processes of resistance, particularly through the use of design-build methods.
In the chapter, I examine issues of conflict over memory and memory erasure. I also consider the importance of memorializing traumatic events and study the cooptation of memory for artistic design projects. Finally, after contrasting the top-down and bottom- up perspectives, I close with a number of observations on memory that are relevant for the practice of architecture in sites of poverty.
To carry out this exploration, I study three social design interventions in Medellín, Colombia. The first is Social Urbanism, a large-scale governmental initiative that uses iconic architectural design as a catalyst for social improvement, with poverty alleviation as the final goal. Studying this project is relevant both to explain social design’s high design approach and to illustrate the potential disconnections resulting from two encountered perspectives on the role of memory in social design practice.
To provide an example of how memory is usually regarded in social design, I study a second intervention, a public art project run by an artists’ collective called “Trash Art.” I study this project to assess a popular social design genre: that of artists painting murals in sites of poverty, portraying their residents. In theory, the rationale for preserving community memories through murals makes sense. However, it is important to consider who might primarily benefit from these artistic interventions—the residents or the artists?
Third, as an alternative to the shortcomings of “artistic” approaches to poverty like those of Social Urbanism and Trash Art, I explore the process-oriented work of the Global Seminar – Medellín Practicum, a design-build endeavor at the University of Colorado Boulder. I explore the Practicum’s approach to design and memory as a viable model for architects to carry out social design work in sites of poverty, while taking memory into consideration.
The three studied interventions are located in Santo Domingo and Carpinelo, two very low-income barrios in Medellín’s Northeastern Comuna 1, one of the areas in greatest poverty in this Colombian city. In the chapter, I first reflect upon the Santo Domingo residents’ experience with two of the most iconic Social Urbanism pieces, the Biblioteca España library and the local station of Metrocable, a cable car system. Next, I analyze Trash Art’s presumably more conscious approach to memory, highlighting its limitations. Last, I reflect on the Medellín Practicum’s method of working with Carpinelo residents on the construction of social infrastructure. The Practicum uses a bottom-up participatory approach that radically contrasts with those used by the city of Medellín and Trash Art in their art-oriented social endeavors.
This chapter expands on the argument I made in my book, Sustainability and Privilege, about social design practice using the case of Medellín, Colombia. In the book, I study aspects of green gentrification involved in the displacement of vulnerable people for the construction of artistic, high design infrastructure. In this chapter, I explore the impact that such displacement has on the erasure of processes of memory, as well as the residents’ reaction to that erasure.
This chapter was published in DesignBuild in Postcolonial Contexts: A Critical Interrogation. This is an edited volume by Vera Simone Bader, published by Sto- Stiftung, a German nonprofit focused on the promotion and support of design-build practice.
Prologue to Naturaleza y Espacio
Prologue to Naturaleza y Espacio: La Arquitectura de Harold Martínez Espinal [Nature and space: The architecture of Harold Martínez Espinal], by Hilda Graciela Ortíz and Verónica Iglesias (Cali, Colombia: Universidad del Valle Press, 2016), 11–17.
This is a prologue written for Naturaleza y Espacio (Nature and Space), a Spanish- language book by Verónica Iglesias and Hilda Graciela Ortíz. The book studies the work of Harold Martínez, a Colombian architect whose decades-long built and written work has focused on aspects of cultural identity and the natural environment in architecture. (I was asked to write this prologue because Martínez was one of my academic mentors and I am closely familiar with his work). The book was published by the Universidad del Valle Press in 2016, with a second edition published in 2019.
In the prologue, I consider Martínez’s architectural work vis-à-vis his written production, in which he has been a strong critic of the modern architecture movement for two main reasons. The first reason is the negative environmental impact of modernist construction. The second reason is political and relates to what modernism has historically symbolized in Latin America: the imposition of the developmental economics model of the World Bank and other Breton Woods institutions. According to authors in a wide range of disciplines, this imposition has led to greater overall poverty in this region.
There seems to be a contradiction between Martínez’s critique of modernism and the fact that his architecture has had a very prominent modernist component. In the prologue, I deconstruct this apparent contradiction by arguing that Harold Martínez’s architecture is a hybrid insofar as he has never ignored the perils, both environmental and social, of the blind adoption of modernist languages. However, he is still open to learning from the modern. The lessons he has learned include embracing the initial social concerns of the movement (which were all but abandoned by the early 1970s) and also embracing the flexibility of modernism’s minimalism, which allows Martínez to implement design solutions that are adaptive to climate fluctuations.
Thus, as I observe in this prologue, Harold Martínez’s architecture neither denies nor affirms the modern. Instead, it is an architecture that defies a popular dichotomy—that of the modern vs. its criticism and having to choose between them.
In formal terms, although Harold Martínez’s architecture might look on the surface like an example of critical regionalism, it actually goes beyond what Kenneth Frampton called “the poetics of construction.” That is, although it embraces the possibilities of the combination between modern and place, it does so without losing sight of the troubling socio-political history of the modernist movement. This is a history that should never be forgotten or ignored.
Universidad del Valle Press is a Colombian university press. The Universidad del Valle is the third largest public university in the country and the main research institution in Colombia’s Suroccidente (Southwest) region.
The Sustainable Indigenous Vernacular: Interrogating a Myth
AlSayyad, Nezar, and Gabriel Arboleda. “The Sustainable Indigenous Vernacular: Interrogating a Myth,” in Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture, edited by Sang Lee (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), 134–151.
This chapter, cowritten with Nezar AlSayyad, expands upon the last of the six “myths” I identified in previous work (see 2004 and 2008).
The myth is that sustainability is an absolute standard that should be applied invariably, regardless of place and historical time shifts. The chapter responds to that “timelessness” idea by arguing, based on evidence from literature, that the notion of what is sustainable in architecture is relative to time.
To support this assertion, AlSayyad and I first consider the prevailing understanding of sustainability in architectural literature, highlighting four key attributes usually invoked to characterize this notion: material and site appropriateness, climate responsiveness, socio-economic advantages, and adaptability.
We offer a wealth of significant counter-examples to each of these premises, with the goal of demonstrating that, if indigenous vernacular forms of architecture used to have attributes that could have made them what we today call sustainable, this is no longer the case. The reason for this is that most of the harshest situations affecting the world today, from climate change to wars, have particularly and brutally affected indigenous traditional people. Those situations have radically altered traditional ways of life that could have been sustainable in the past but are no longer feasible today.
By contrasting the above four attributes of sustainability against the case of indigenous vernacular architecture today, AlSayyad and I identify a set of myths that add to and/or expand upon the six I had already identified in the previous work. The myths that we study here fall under one very popular assumption in architectural and other literature: that indigenous vernacular architecture is inherently sustainable.
In testing that assumption against a wide range of cases from around the world, this chapter goes far beyond my previous two research works on the topic of sustainability myths, as those were based on comprehensively studying the case of a single group, the Ecuadorian Sieco_pai. By considering many other cases, this chapter provides evidence that the situation experienced by the Sieco_pai people, which resulted in an inevitable process of architectural change that challenged sustainability myths, is hardly unique.