Architecture without Architects. Inhabiting without Destroying: Project on Vernacular Dwelling in the Lakeside Population of Nueva Venecia (Cienaga Grande de Santa Marta)

Abstract

As though we were the holders of universal answers, architects play the game of living and recreating Orwellian societies; we give totalitarian and generic answers, but with an omnipresent gaze. Architects dream of giving solutions to a collage architecture, willing to manipulate the actions of a collective for the benefit of Architecture. Before this impertinent thinking, as though everything depended on Architecture, I do not intend to make a collage with my project, nor assume a totalitarian approach as the one and only truth. That is why I named my project Architecture without Architects, borrowing the title from the exhibition by Bernard Rudofsky at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) in 1964, under the reflection of all architectures made throughout history without the intervention of architects. And living without destroying, studying the vernacular dwelling, which provides comfort and sustainability scenarios, using local materials, popular knowledge and inhabitants’ skills in its construction, understanding a lakeside society’s way of living, highlighting the values of a simple community, rescuing the humblest forms of expression from the Caribbean and strengthening the social structures of a native organization.