ETHNO
ARCHITECTURE

The image above offers a snapshot of how I carry out my architectural work. It was taken many years ago in the village of San Pablo de Kantesiya, in the Upper Ecuadorian Amazon. The man in the middle of the photo is a traditional builder, and the model he is pointing to is a structural model of the house where the photo was taken. Sieco_pai villagers call this type of house Pa’pa Huë’e—palm house. I stayed in that Pa’pa Huë’e for a few days, carefully measuring it and building the model. As I did so, I took many notes about the particularities I observed about the house’s construction.

In the picture, the two Sieco_pai builders are describing the house’s structural pieces and explaining its construction process. This conversation was part of a larger research project I was conducting on why Sieco_pai villagers were abandoning their traditional housing en masse, preferring instead a modernist structure with a corrugated metal roof.

It was from interactions like this one that I came to understand that, in the context of the Sieco_pai villagers’ lived experience, this change was simply perceived as normal. Thus, a change that sustainability advocates might see as wrong—that is, the villagers abandoning their naturalist housing of palm thatch and bamboo—was for them just one more step in their centuries-old history of change.

From that conversation, I learned that Sieco_pai builders gave traditional Pai coca names to some of the house structural pieces; for example, they called the ridge beam Hue tara pë and the main columns Huëe të pë. By contrast, they named other pieces using Spanish terminology, such as piso for the floor beams and varenga for the wall columns.

From this and other evidence, I learned that the house I had so carefully documented was not strictly an aboriginal Sieco_pai house. Instead, it was a hybrid house that resulted from the Spanish colonization of the Amazon. This process was spearheaded by Christian missionaries; it was, in fact, a form of humanitarian imperialism. Accounts from the 1700s, such as that by Father Chantre y Herrera, explain that religious missionaries often took on the role of architects, adding that some of them were in fact expert builders.

As they built their missions in the forest, the religious missionaries designed houses with both moral and practical intentions. The designs included houses on stilts in order to deal with environmental factors, including flooding. In the process of construction, the missionaries taught indigenous people their European technologies, but they also employed local knowledge and materials.

On the other hand, historical narratives such as Chantre’s also reveal how the indigenous people, including the Sieco_pai, often challenged the missionaries’ conversion agenda and abandoned the missions, carrying with them tools and knowledge that they would then incorporate into their own material cultural practices. This might explain why some of the Pa’pa Huë’e structural pieces were given Spanish names.

Thus, as much as the missionaries intervention was an imperialist endeavor, indigenous people did not bear oppression passively; instead, they resisted. In the interplay between imposition and resistance, there emerged a new hybrid space in which the Sieco_pai and other indigenous people created new knowledge with which to address their own environmental problems. That knowledge has historically included adopting outside resources, such as the metal tools that the missionaries brought to the Amazon in the 1700s, and construction materials such as corrugated metal roofing in the present era.

Ethnoarchitecture as a Form of Research

Interactions like the one depicted in the opening photograph, in which I aim to deeply learn from and with people about their problems and their ways of solving them, are representative of my approach to architecture. I call this approach ethnoarchitecture, as a shortened form of ethnographic architecture.

I adopted this approach in response to a serious limitation I have observed in sustainable design advocacy: It tends to be extremely form-based—for example, too focused on performance and technology. There is a particular issue with such a focus in relation to the common argument that the construction of traditional people like the Sieco_pai is by nature sustainable. That argument relies on the premise that natural construction materials like those used in the Pa’pa Huë’e, such as palm thatch, are by default more environmentally appropriate than modern industrial materials.

This assumption, however, is at odds with the reality that traditional people worldwide are largely abandoning their constructions—the Sieco_pai case that I documented is only one of many. Thus, there seems to exist a disconnection between the common postulates of sustainable design, which idealize traditional construction, and the perspective of traditional villagers, who tend to see that type of construction as less than ideal.

To bridge that disconnection, instead of lamenting or condemning the abandonment of traditional construction a priori, I first endeavor to deeply understand the reasons behind it, as I did in my work with Sieco_pai villagers.

My rationale to withhold a priori judgements is that, if we as designers look at only the formal aspects of traditional construction (e.g., the fact that palm thatch roofs are presumably more responsive to climate fluctuations), then we will be unable to make sense of the abandonment of that type of construction. However, if we also consider the socio-cultural reasons for the abandonment, then a different picture emerges.

The Sieco_pai villagers, for example, had strong reasons to disfavor the construction of Pa’pa Huë’e houses. Palm thatch roofing has low durability, palms presently tend to be scarce due to the wholesale degradation of tropical forests, and building a palm-thatch roof is a highly demanding and time-consuming activity. Therefore, this is a type of housing that has become very onerous to build and maintain, especially for Sieco_pai villagers in poverty.

Based on these considerations, I argue that, in order to engage in assessments of sustainable design that are more reflective of present-day global complexities, we need more than architecture. That is, we need to go beyond the conventional focus of architecture on buildings or building-related aspects. We need to go beyond form.

The notion of ethnoarchitecture brings a socio-cultural, ethnographic perspective to the form-based study of architecture. Moreover, this notion also goes beyond the popular “architecture and culture” perspective made popular by authors such as Bernard Rudofsky in the 1960s. Rudofsky’s work was groundbreaking insofar as it brought traditional construction into the mainstream of global architectural theory. However, Rudofsky was biased towards the exotic aspects of traditional architecture and, just like it is the case with present-day sustainable design advocacy, he also greatly focused on formal aspects, including those related to primitive green technologies. On the other hand, the voices of the makers of that architecture, which offer a more nuanced picture than Rudofsky’s idealized portrayal, never made it into his books.

Responding to this exoticist perspective on traditional architecture that is still constrained by a form-based framework, the notion of ethnoarchitecture instead incorporates a culturally relativist approach, one that aims to understand environmental problems from the perspective of the people experiencing them.

Thus, ethnoarchitecture is more than a combination of architecture and culture: It is a hybrid approach that is more than the sum of its parts—in this case, one plus one equals not two, but three. That is, the outcome of an ethnoarchitectural analysis is synergetic, because it offers a more holistic picture than that offered by conventional paradigms of sustainable design advocacy or by classical theories combining the notions of architecture and culture.

Ethnoarchitecture as a Form of Practice

Importantly, my architectural work goes beyond research. Instead of only diagnosing the problem, I carry out architectural design and construction work that strives for a solution. In my practice of architecture, I also use the ethnoarchitectural approach described above. In fact, in most cases I do not carry out research as a separate activity. My research is tied to my practice; it was in that context that I worked with the Sieco_pai villagers. One of the main goals of my research is to inform and support my practice, helping me to continuously (re)model it in order to adapt it to the particular needs and expectations of the people with whom I am working.

Thus, my research is action-based and is often related to a concrete product in the field—typically housing. The main goal of this research is to learn about the hows and whys of people’s construction practices, as well as their relevance for the housing projects in which we work together.

My architectural research and practice are thus inextricably linked. The connecting element is learning, particularly mutual learning. I explain how this connection works in my teaching statement. In my practice, which is deeply participatory, I teach people the basic design tools and methods that we use in architecture. For example, I teach them how to draw to scale, build architectural models, and use symbols to represent construction elements such as walls and windows. With these tools, people are then able to design—by themselves, and with little intervention on my part—housing that works for them not only from a social and environmental perspective but also from a functional and aesthetic one.

Staying true to the spirit that drives my research, in my participatory work with traditional people I am not biased towards traditionalism—I do not act as a Rudofskyan. Instead, by employing a bottom-up participatory perspective, I am open to whatever outcome the design process might yield, as long as it is true to the villagers’ visions of their ideal home. Normally, the results of this process are hybrid buildings that are simultaneously traditionalist, modernist, and both.

An example is the Guyana hinterland housing project. This is a participatory housing project for Guyanese indigenous people in which I worked between 2009 and 2019. I describe the hybrid buildings outcome of this project in my 2022 book Sustainability and Privilege:

Take for example the discussion about the best alternative for poverty alleviation in traditional environments, whether traditionalism or modernism. The result of an ethnoarchitectural bottom-up intervention would be a hybrid building in the sense that it can be identified at once as traditionalist, modernist, or both. As for how this hybrid building would look, [in the Guyana project, Macushi villagers] designed hybrid homes that combined industrial materials (like metal and cement) with traditional spaces (such as verandas). Their homes also included two kitchens, an interior modernist one to cook with a gas stove, and an exterior traditional one for the making of cassava bread in a wood stove (2022, 230).

Thus, the outcome of an ethnoarchitectural approach to design is a type of housing designed and built on the people’s own terms, including their own visions of space-related and socio-environmental problems and their solutions. Ethnoarchitecture is therefore architecture from below.

In sum, I define ethnoarchitecture as an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates into architectural theory and practice the ethnographic principle of seeing things from the people’s own perspective. I developed this approach progressively over decades of architectural practice with people like the Sieco_pai: people from different Indigenous, Black, and Mestiza communities in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This website explains how I progressively developed this approach—that is, how I progressively distanced myself from conventional perspectives on sustainable design and ended up practicing architecture in this ethnographically-informed way.

If you would like to contact me, feel free to do so here.