Architectural Bio - Gabriel Arboleda

There is a deeply personal reason behind my interest in carrying out my architectural practice as a social practice. As I explain in my personal statement, my family history begins with a handwritten note. It was a note that my grandfather, a white American whom I never met, and who apparently went by his initials F.D., sent to the family of my grandmother, Pastora, a young, black Colombian woman who had just passed away. In the note, F.D. instructed Pastora’s family to deliver their out-of-wedlock son to another woman, who had persuaded F.D. that she would take care of the child if F.D. gave her enough money for the task. Once she got the money, the woman left with my father, but later abandoned him. Unable to go back to his family, my father grew up homeless in a village in the Colombian Andes, far away from the Chocó lowland village of his mother.

The story of my father had a profound effect on my life in many ways, starting with the practical side. I was raised in relative poverty, and ended up in architecture only for convenience: I was looking for job stability. However, the fact that my arrival in this field happened in such a detached way ultimately became the decisive factor that made me see architecture differently. Since my dream was never to become an architect, I did not have any idealized image of an artist-architect to pursue. I had never thought about myself as a “starchitect,” or any architect for that matter. Thus, I was free to explore alternatives within architectural practice that were less fashionable, such as working in sites of poverty.

On the other hand, from the beginning of my architectural education, and continuing for years, I felt socially alienated from the field, which is generally a territory of privilege. I always felt like an outsider in architecture, and even today I continue to feel that way, although I no longer see this as a problem. After a few years in this practice, I realized that the best contribution I could make to architecture should be based on the experiences emerging from my own unique social history. This is why I embraced a socially-engaged design practice: I realized that my own spatial experience had endowed me with an understanding, and with that an ability, to more effectively address the main challenges of this area of work.

Some of the key turning points in my career resulted from still having to deal with my own economic constraints. I left Colombia for Ecuador soon after finishing school because an economic recession prevented me from finding work in my home country.

It was in Ecuador where I had my first exposure to poverty action practice. I received a small architectural commission in an organic agriculture farm that was located in a slum. There was an eerie contrast between the goal of the farm promoters, a group of Australian environmentalists who aimed to restore a piece of rainforest by using organic architecture, and the hunger that the slum families often faced—the food produced on the farm was not intended for them. This disturbing contrast made me deeply aware of a disconnection that often goes unnoticed between sustainability activists’ urgency to deal with environmental problems, and the assumption that the results will automatically solve problems of social inequality.

Time and again, I have found the opposite to be true: The advocacy of sustainability often reflects preconceptions deriving from the advocates’ own social class privilege. There is a pervasive disconnection in sustainability advocacy between the green technology focus and issues of social inequality, where the former often takes precedence over the latter.

Through and after the farm project, I explored a number of standard sustainable design approaches such as alternative climate conditioning, waterless toilet design, and bamboo construction. It was from this direct engagement with sustainable design that I learned how, from a technological standpoint, green alternatives do work, yet in terms of social impact they have inherent limitations.

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How I Ended Up in the United States

Another turning point in my career happened after being confronted with the economic limitations of continuing to do the socially-engaged work that I had begun doing in Ecuador after the farm project. Realizing that I myself needed to improve socio-economically in order for my social work to have a greater impact, I decided to “jump the pond,” as Colombian people call the decision to migrate to the United States.

Ultimately, I came to the United States for the same reason as 22 million other Latin American migrants: looking for the American Dream. The pursuance of that dream would have been my right, had F.D. legally recognized my father as his son. However, I don’t like to dwell on what my father himself used to call “lo que pudo ser y no fue,” how things could have been but weren’t.

The dream I was looking for was mostly academic. As an anecdotal aside, the materialization of this dream actually began as a playful exercise. As I was considering to leave for the United States, I dared myself to apply to the best school I could possibly think of, knowing beforehand that I would neither be able to afford it, nor would I be accepted because probably I was not smart enough for that school.

As it turns out, I was accepted, and this is how I ended up attending MIT. This experience taught me a vital lesson I often highlight when sharing my story with low-income prospective students: to never disqualify oneself a priori. Although this is the obvious rule that entitled people follow, self-disqualification is a major issue preventing low-income people from improving on many levels, and this is a problem that often goes unnoticed among them.

With Reinhard Goethert in a community design session in El Salvador.

At MIT, I was mentored by Reinhard Goethert, one of the world’s key figures in the practice of participatory housing. By then, I had already done quite a bit of participatory work in Ecuador as my portfolio shows. However, from Reinhard I learned a specific method he had pioneered: micro-planning. Apart from the method, one of the main lessons I learned from working with Reinhard had to do with applying participatory principles to low-income housing practice on a comparatively large scale.

Also while at MIT, I developed an interest in critical theory. This interest evolved after identifying the limitations of mainstream, artistic social design practice described under my philosophy of practice statement. They are, in short, its pastronizing bias that ignores the power of human agency, and how architectural art-minded designers tend to benefit more than their project beneficiaries. Those limitations became very evident to me because, coinciding with the time I enrolled at MIT, humanitarian design suddenly became popular in architectural practice.

The reason had to do with a strategy used by Cameron Sinclair, the co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, the most important architectural nonprofit in history. Sinclair’s strategy was very clever: to make social design “cool” by presenting it as something fashionable for young designers to do. However, this strategy came at the cost of partially trivializing the social tenets of social design. Given that social media played a major role in this strategy, I felt like mainstream social design practice had become more about spectacle, and I became very troubled by that. In my eyes, with that shift, social design had ended up mirroring some of the structures of inequality supported by architecture at large, when it was supposed to contest them.

Thus, these considerations made me interested in studying the subject of social design using the lens of critical theory. In order to do this, I enrolled in U.C. Berkeley’s Ph.D. in Architecture program. The Program’s concentration in Environmental Design in Developing Countries gave me the theoretical foundation essential to understand the key issues underlying the most prevalent critique of social design, which largely have to do with imperialism. However, as I read postcolonial theory, I perceived certain disconnections between the interests of the critical theorist and those of the practitioner. The problems might be appropriately diagnosed by the theorist, but sometimes the proposed solutions might not be feasible in practice, so some compromise has to be reached between the purity of theory and the messiness of practice.

Working with villagers in San Pablo de Kantesiya, a Sieco_pai community in the Upper Ecuadorian Amazon.

While at Berkeley, I also consolidated my training in anthropology. I had been interested on this subject for a long time, and more strongly after I became involved in a construction project with Sieco_pai villagers in the Upper Ecuadorian Amazon. I became conversant in the principles of cultural anthropology at Harvard University, where I cross-registered for anthropology courses while doing my Master’s program at MIT. At Berkeley, I was advised by Laura Nader, a highly respected figure in American anthropology. I remember with appreciation Laura’s words of caution that perhaps I liked anthropology too much. “Everybody wants to be an anthropologist, except for the anthropologists,” she would comment ironically, encouraging me to stay in architectural practice.

A community planning sesion in the village of Annai, in Guyana.

While still engaged in theory work at Berkeley, I went back to practice, once again primarily due to personal finance exigencies. Specifically, I began to work in low-income housing, which was the area of participatory practice I had learned from Reinhard Goethert. The most prominent result of that work was the Guyana Hinterland Housing Program, a national-scale housing project catered to Guyanese indigenous communities. In this project, I applied my own bottom-up approach to participation, which I call ethnoarchitecture. I continued to work on this project for many more years after Berkeley.
Ethnoarchitecture: Architecture from Below

The experience gained from my professional practice, added to my theoretical formation at MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley, provided me with the energy and intellectual flexibility to continue on a tireless quest to make architecture a sensible tool for social inclusion.

On the basis of this longstanding engagement with the subject of social design both from theory and practice, I believe that, in order to work successfully in poverty action, architects need more than design skills. In fact, as I demonstrate in my book, Sustainability and Privilege, with a number of striking examples, one can be a talented designer and still create work that is detrimental, both in the infrastructural and social dimensions, to people in a given community.

Thus, I argue, the best way to work as an architect in the area of poverty action is by also embracing skills from social development work. One begins to acquire those skills by studying social science theory, including critical theory, anthropology, and social development literature. Consequently, in order to work successfully in poverty action as an architect, inevitably one must become an interdisciplinary practitioner. My work is interdisciplinary both in the sense that it takes place between the two main architectural sub-fields of theory and practice (with teaching as the link between both), and in the sense that my architectural practice hybridizes architecture with other disciplines.

Arguably, what I do is not architecture as such, but is rather situated between architecture and social development practice, with a strong basis on anthropology’s ethos. That is why I call my approach ethnoarchitecture. My main concern is poverty, and my approach to this issue is ethnographic in the sense of cultural relativity. Thus, I use the prefix -ethno in the anthropological sense of seeing things from the people’s own perspective. I characterize ethnoarchitecture as a type of architecture that relies updon human agency, and people’s own vision of a better life. Ethnoarchitecture is then architecture in the people’s own terms.