I struggled for several months thinking about the right approach to this article. I wanted it short, sharp, and provocative. I also wanted it with the right decolonial tone. Do we need really another Eurocentric piece judging our architecture from afar? Are we not fed up with double standards, the use of foreign concepts, and foreign rules to measure our built environment?
These questions are at the core of my current research. In attempting to understand the built environment of the Americas, I struggle with the fact that an overwhelming majority of our knowledge comes from another continent. There is a dislocation between space and knowledge: Despite our deep belief that space matters, our judgment is hardly ever influenced by our own knowledge. As reminded by Edward Said in the classic Orientalism (1974), European culture developed narratives about all other societies on Earth and, as a result, established itself as the center of human knowledge. Instead of asking how Latin American architectures can fit in histories of the discipline written by others, this essay asks what can we learn from Colombia in order to understand the place of the Americas in a global history of the built environment?
One possible answer is given by Roberto Fernández in his seminal book, El Laboratório Americano (1997). Fernández discusses how architectural theory, to this day, treats the Americas as a special kind of periphery that turns into an eternal laboratory, in which old experiences are systematically abandoned to explore new ones. America, thus, becomes the place of modernity par excellence, of eternal novelty, a perpetual state of infancy — to use an ethnocentric Hegelian concept that should be outdated but insists in framing our narrative. Adrian Gorelik reinforces the idea of a laboratory, and specifically attributes to the city in Latin America the role of “a machine to invent modernity”.1 Gorelik’s assertion raises a number of questions: Which modernity are we talking about, and what are its real consequences? How can we ever develop a theory for our own modernity? Would it be a “modernidad apropriada”, as discussed by Marina Waisman and Chistian Fernandez Cox in the first Seminarios de Arquitetura Latinoamerica in the 1980s? But as the argument of coloniality goes, could modernity have ever been appropriate if we had no choice but to accept it? Why have we not written our own history, in our own terms yet? A few years ago, the MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericana de Buenos Aires - organized an exhibition that attempted to answer the last question. Verboamerica, an exhibition curated by Andrea Giunta and Agustín Pérez Rubio reorganized the whole permanent collection of the museum using Latin American concepts instead of Eurocentric ones. The result was staggering and makes me wonder why we have not done the same in architecture?
I struggle with this question a lot because I live between Texas and Brazil, two peripheries of the Gran Colombia that suffer from the same colonial insecurity, always comparing themselves with the “developed” North. Indeed, I learned from Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar that our modernization is intimately connected to our colonization, an important conceptual framework that I will develop later.
For now, allow me to go back a few centuries to look at the history of this beautiful space we now call Colombia. I am venturing here far from my scholarship comfort zone, but I think we can agree that the Northern edges of the Andes were home to several sophisticated — knowledgeable and technically advanced — cultures such as the Muiscas and the Taironas, along with the Quimbayas and the Calimas (Caribs). All of those were almost completely exterminated by the Amerindian holocaust, their population dropping from 3.5 million in the 16th century to 800,000 by the end of 18th century, rising to 1.3 million in 2005. In relative terms, the indigenous population dropped from 100% to 3.4% while the non-indigenous went from 0 to 40 million (0 to 96%). Meanwhile, a little over 1 million Africans were sold into slavery and brought to Colombia to substitute the indigenous population providing hard labor. It is, to me, impossible to talk about space, in general, or the built environment, in particular, without taking those numbers into consideration, the annihilation of several million indigenous people by the Europeans should always frame our discussion.
Readers must have realized by now that I am referring to the history of the whole American continent and not simply to the southern part. Give and take a few local details, our spaces hold the histories of the Amerindian holocaust, as well as the history of various forms of serfdom and slavery, all of which form the basis of our modernization. For decades Jürgen Habermas has been a major scholarly reference to discuss the notion of modernity and the processes of modernization that it entails. In his writings such processes are transformative and empowering. Such an optimistic approach to modernity and modernization may explain why we are still very much enchanted by these concepts in architecture: we love our modernist buildings, we plan modernizing infrastructures, we strive to modernity as a synonym for building. Or better yet, we strive to development as a synonym of architecture.
I propose that, here, every architect, inside and outside Colombia, read the work of Arturo Escobar, and the sooner the better. Escobar has devoted his life to showing that modernization has a dark side called colonization — the idea that the ways of life of one population are better and, therefore, should be imposed on other populations. According to Escobar:
"…por casi cincuenta años, en América Latina, Asia y África se ha predicado un peculiar evangelio con un fervor intenso: el “desarrollo”. Formulado inicialmente en Estados Unidos y Europa durante los años que siguieron al fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y ansiosamente aceptado y mejorado por las elites y gobernantes del Tercer Mundo a partir de entonces, el modelo del desarrollo desde sus inicios contenía una propuesta históricamente inusitada desde un punto de vista antropológico: la transformación total de las culturas y formaciones sociales de tres continentes de acuerdo con los dictados del llamado Primer Mundo. Se confiaba en que, casi que por fiat tecnológico y económico y gracias a algo llamado planificación, de la noche a la mañana milenarias y complejas culturas se convirtieran en clones de los racionales occidentales de los países considerados económicamente avanzados." 2
Escobar’s contribution to 21st century scholarship is to stitch modernization and colonization together as faces of the same coin. We have been trained to abhor colonization and to worship modernization. Only when we understand that they are elements of the same process, can we understand the crisis of the contemporary world as the crisis of white, heterosexual, males, the ones who have always been favored by modernization and development as we know it. Both our contemporary crisis of inequality and our struggle with so called “identity politics” are the result of this long process of modernization/colonization. The process of constructing this unequal modernization was tested first in the Americas, and architecture has been instrumental in its construction. However, modernization was only possible because multiple histories were erased, symbolic barriers raised and exclusions naturalized, as reminded by Roberto Fernandez’ book, El Laboratório Americano (1997).
This applies in varying degrees to Colombia and to Brazil, as well as to the United States and Canada. Perhaps that is why I feel so at home in Colombia; I know the invisible codes, its modernization process, the stratification of its society, and the spatial logic of its cities. The cognitive reading of urban space is such that I can inhabit Bogota, Medellin, and Cartagena (the cities I have visited) with almost exactly the same body-space relationship that I develop from my decades in Brazil. The relational engagement that I establish with the built environment of Colombian cities is very familiar because the layers of significance derived from such encounter are very similar to what I experience in Brazil.
I could, therefore, read the amazing architecture of Rogelio Salmona, Fernando Martinez Sanabria, and German Samper with the same lenses that I use to read Niemeyer, Costa, and Mendes da Rocha. Following my previous scholarship, I could, perhaps, write about the dissemination3 of Martinez Sanabria’s ideas to a broader public (Bogota does look like a brick city from above) or the incomplete utopias4 of Salmona and Samper. Or I could read the architecture of Giancarlo Mazzanti, Daniel Bonilla, Felipe Mesa, and Ana Elvira Velez with the same lenses that I use to read Angelo Bucci, Arquitetos Associados or Carla Juaçaba5. But again, using the same framework would give me very similar results. In an essay written with Kevin Alter many years ago, we took the challenge of discussing buildings from all over the Americas in search of precision and authenticity, denouncing its double standards: The North is always celebrated by its high level of precision and the south by its authenticity. It is very much like the knowledge/culture paradox of NATO-centrism: The North has knowledge and the South has culture.6
In this short essay, I hope to invert that equation by looking not at authenticity, or rawness, in Colombian architecture; we have plenty of foreigners writing about that. They organize exhibitions about our modern architectures in New York and publish books trying to fit our buildings into their account of an architectural history. That is fine, they can boost their careers and get promotions at their universities. But why do we need to do the same? Why do Colombian and Brazilian architects and architectural historians need to study their buildings in relation to architectural production in other parts of the world? Instead, I propose to call your attention to Colombian institutions that make such architecture possible. Institutions that, I am not at all shy to say, are the best in the Americas right now.
To elaborate on this, allow me to start with the story of a random encounter. I was at El Dorado airport one rainy afternoon, waiting for a flight to Medellin that was delayed. Scanning the walls of the room for an electrical plug to charge my computer (much probably because I was late on a writing assignment, as I am now), I sat by a gentleman that was doing the same, alone on a remote corner where a plug was left to save computer-dependent travelers. When I approached the seat and connected my charger to the available plug, the gentleman raised his eyes from his screen and looked up to acknowledge me. It was Sergio Fajardo, the former mayor of Medellin, who had been recently elected governor of Antioquia. I could not avoid introducing myself as an architect/urbanist on its mandatory pilgrimage to Medellin, the city of eternal spring and amazing urban policies. Two minutes into the conversation, Fajardo said that he does not deserve any credit for Medellin’s urban wonders, “it was all there before, you know, I just took advantage of the strong institutions of the city and stirred them up”. His flight was called, our twenty-minute conversation was over, and a question remained with me for years: Which institutions was Fajardo talking about? According to most accounts found in architectural media, it was all because of his leadership, and the talent of Giancarlo Mazzanti, Felipe Mesa, Camilo Restrepo, Felipe Uribe, and Ana Elvira Velez, guided by visionaries such as Alejandro Echeverry and Jorge Perez Jaramillo. Not a single architectural magazine talked about the magic acronyms: EPM – Empresas Publicas Municipales - and EDU – Empresa de Dessarollo Urbano. To be fair, an article at the New York Times (May 18, 2012) by Michael Kimmelman gives credit the EPM for its main role on the transformation of Medellin. But it is not only Medellin; Colombia has the Ley 80, from 1993, that dictates design competition for major public buildings. In Bogota, the Instituto de Desarrollo Urbano (IDU) works in a similar way as the EDU in Medellin. Why is this important? Because other countries in the Americas do not have such legal framework or institutions. I was appalled to realize that a large majority of my fellow architects and architectural scholars from all over the Americas had no clue of the importance of institutional design in the success of Colombian contemporary urban policies. We have insisted in portraying current design wonders as the result of genial architects and bold politicians. We seem stuck on the myth of Kubitcheck/Niemeyer, PRI/Pani, or Perez Jimenez/Villanueva, but we have not understood that cities today are different, more complex and heterogeneous than they were during the first half of the twentieth century. The dream of twentieth-century modernization did not materialize, at least not fully, either in Colombia or in order parts of the Global South — indeed modernization never materialized fully anywhere. What Fajardo told me was very revealing: that Colombia has been able to develop an institutional framework than can support a creative approach to the urban realities of its cities. We just need to learn to study them from within, understand their challenges and, then, capitalize on those existing frameworks that allow positive transformations.
To start a broad and un-scientific survey on the role that legal and institutional structures play in urban design and architecture excellence, I interviewed 17 architects7 from 7 different Latin American countries in 2011. To all of them, I asked the same three questions: 1) What are the most common processes for appointing design teams to undertake government projects? 2) What are the limitations and problems with the current process of design selection? And 3) what would be the best way to commission good quality design of public spaces in your opinion? The answers to the first question were as different as the slang used on the streets of those 7 countries, but a strong consensus emerged on the other two: we need to include design criteria into the selection process.
It was clear from the interviews that healthy and strong municipal institutions are one of the main attractors (positive inducers) of good public space. Apart from Colombia, no other country in Latin American has a national (or federal) law mandating architectural competitions for major public buildings. The absence of a strong design-based legislation creates a series of distortions and the end result is, despite few exceptions, mediocre. Brazil, for instance, has a law that forces the government to hire the cheapest bid, based only on quantitative construction criteria and “expertise” measured by counting only the number of square meters built by a practice. There is no qualitative design consideration anywhere in the process. In Mexico, an antiquated system of 3 bids allow politicians and their favorite architects to easily manipulate design contracts. Architects help their friends with higher bids here and get rewarded later when their friends return the favor. Over the past 25 years in Colombia, the Ley 80 brought about the mechanisms to judge architectural and urban design, thus raising the bar for the entire country: That is why Colombian architecture has attracted so much international attention.
Yet, before a competition is drafted, public institutions need to decide what to build and where. From Colombia, we learn that both the IDU in Bogota, and the EDU in Medellin, play those roles quite well. They are strong municipal offices in charge of, on the one hand, developing an urban strategy for the city and, on the other, executing that strategy in order to guarantee positive urban transformations. All design projects are then assigned by competition, and these are administered by the relevant regulatory body, architectural competitions, as well as some large-scale urban projects, are often run by the Colombian Society of Architects. There is, therefore, an opportunity to integrate knowledges, to seek a balance between decision-making at the urban and architectural level through design, which allows architects to assess design quality more critically while the inter-disciplinary institutions address urban challenges.
Liliana Ricardo, deputy director of the IDU in Bogota, told me about how different offices (transportation, health, drainage, electricity) work together in project teams organized around areas of the city. In Argentina, my interviewees told me how difficult it is for them to even communicate between different municipal offices, let alone cooperate in the implementation of projects. Indeed, that is also the case in Curitiba, the most famous of Brazil, where the integration of transport and public space is essential, as is the possibility of maintaining planning continuity beyond the short cycle of mayoral elections.
Last but not least, cities need money to invest in infrastructure. After strong developmental decades between the 1950s and the 1970s, Latin America experienced a deep financial crisis in the 1980s and a dismantling of public infrastructure projects after the 1990s. The privatization of public utilities (servicios públicos) left the cities of the region starved of funds that should be used in re-investment. With weak regulation and weaker enforcement, private utility companies decided to distribute their profits between stockholders (short-term return) instead of investing in better infrastructure for a sustainable future.
The case of Sabesp in São Paulo is exemplar. Privatized in 2002, the company responsible for providing water and sewage for 20 million inhabitants of the largest city in South America, distributed 2 billion USD in dividends in the following 10 years. In 2014, after two years of lower precipitation, the reservoirs around São Paulo were operating at 5% capacity and water was rationed in several areas of the metropolis — coincidentally, the poorest neighborhoods.
In that scenario, is it remarkable that EPM survived the privatization frenzy of the 1980s and 1990s, which, in that city, coincides with the worse crisis of public safety and violence? Controlled by the municipality, which still owns the majority of shares of the company, the EPM projects an investment budget of 6 billion COP (2 billion dollars) for 2018–2021. It may not sound like much, but think this: it is equivalent to the amount spent in Rio de Janeiro over a period of three years (between 2012–2015, in preparation for the Olympic Games), a city with 3 times the population of the capital of Antioquia.
Not that everything is perfect in the Colombian context. Fajardo himself is part of a broad political articulation that crushes the left and assures that the centerright and far-right have a virtual monopoly at the national level. It is well known abroad that Antioquia holds the core of Uribismo. It is also well established in the literature that the social stratification by law ends up stigmatizing the poor and becomes the greatest barrier to social mobility. In fact, not everything that EPM does is wise and/or responsible (vide Hidroituango failures).
As reminded by Arturo Escobar, there is a nasty colonialism intertwined with Colombia’s modernization process. Nevertheless, the country built something remarkable in its institutional embrace of design quality.8
Looking at Colombian architecture from abroad should not be about the beautiful buildings designed by talented architects since the turn of the millennium. Yes, they are important and they deserve praise, but they are the tip of much larger structures, legal and institutional — the ones that really matter. The lesson that all of us in the periphery of Gran Colombia need to learn is how to build like you.