Educate ourselves to consciously inhabit our world. Illustrated conversation with Antonio Manrique Gutiérrez

Antonio was born in February 1954, in Bogotá. He studied architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and won a scholarship to study (but did not finish) Urban Design at Stanford University and University of Pennsylvania, in the United States, and the Master’s Degree in Education and Philosophy at the Universidad de los Andes.

He is a rara avis in Colombia. From an early age, Antonio became interested in the relationship between architecture and childhood. During his tenure as a professor at the Universidad de los Andes (from 1988 to 2017), Antonio focused on architecture for children. When working with various urban communities in Bogotá, he applied teaching courses for first-year students, working with groups of professors and within the curricular structure of the faculty’s architecture programme. There are several publications and interviews¹ on the development of this proposal of thought and action. His lessons have been an inspiration to others who have followed in his footsteps. Education for architecture, architecture for education, and architecture as education that shows cause and consequence, which generated an essential twist in his life. Today he shares this with Dearq’s readers in the present issue dedicated to children and their relationship with space.

This illustrated conversation presents a series of relationships between ideas, which seem scattered but are intertwined through Antonio’s words and drawings, creating a complex and rich constructed autobiography. We have talked for several months to write this text. This has not been easy, because Antonio is an active volcano. He opens his travel notebooks, finds a drawing from his album, then remembers himself as a rather happy child, or becomes aware of his adult environment as a teacher.

This is not a traditional interview—one structured through questions and answers—because the subject has made us constantly return to the permanent journey of his life. Experience has led Antonio to know his world with every step: from his home, his neighbourhood, and to other close by and distant houses, and neighbourhoods and cities around the globe. When I have asked questions, he has sent notes on WhatsApp and snapshots of drawings that record episodes of his past life to clarify the intention of his words. During our shot trips and encounters, he has transmitted his feelings from previous experiences. Everything that Antonio considers valuable is worthy of being drawn, painted, or narrated in his notebooks, mainly when traveling. He is always experiencing first hand and looking at new things; the beautiful and exultant of this world that is our home.

Many disciplinary subjects interest him, all directed towards considering time and space and determining concepts about architecture. Antonio highlights the interdisciplinary elements in education as a necessary dialogue that guarantees the interrelation of knowledge and the formation of an idea of the complete world.

Tatiana Urrea (TU): Antonio, you have gradually moved from education for architecture, to architecture as education. This convolution of sentences makes us reflect on an origin and its consequence, because each one has its nature and its moment in the life of your built world. Tell us about the origin of that loop and the relationship between the two concepts.

Antonio Manrique (AM): I must talk about parts of my life. In 1988, I started working in the Department of Architecture at the University of Los Andes, Bogotá, as a part-time professor. By 1994, I was already a full-time professor and fell in love with the idea of education for architecture. I was immersed in the human sciences and felt the need to re-inscribe the fundamental principles of the discipline of architecture. That is, to return its concept, allowing it to transcend beyond a simple instrument to meet a tangible need. This involved, of course, transmitting passion, joy, and enthusiasm to students from an early age, even from childhood. I tried to explore the sense of inhabiting the world, the neighbourhood, the house, and the city, through recognising not only architectural spaces, but the experiences and cultural legacies hidden under shapes. Obviously, the classic Vitruvius’ utilitas-firmitas-venustas was used as content for the basic courses. It acted as an inspiring base, forcing us to interpret it not only to overcome modern issues but also to propose a possible and better future—which is what it is all about. In this period, we used the blackboard to exorcise the mind through schemes, plans and drawings. This was fundamental because collective thought materialised while words—the word—came from both students and teachers in the first architecture courses. I was an interpreter who drew and encouraged conversation to draw more.

Thinking of architecture as education meant moving towards the construction of a possible new citizenship, responsible for duties and aware of rights to build a richer life regarding the public and the collective as maximum values of a society. Architects are in a strategic position as makers of spaces, which invites us to emulate beauty, customs, and habits; while citizens—cultured and aware of their role—are actors and procurators of these imagined places that educate through forms and meanings. Undoubtedly, a more humanistic architectural education is key for this purpose because we are talking about justice, equity, democracy, peace, and values for the communities that live in the cities that we have built. Therefore, we all need to listen to each other to know our needs, desires, thoughts, and dreams. Architecture cannot be imposed, because it is not about attributing burdens, but about joining efforts to get us all involved. It is about citizen participation.

TU: In the series of thought relates to space and education, the idea of working in architecture for children is primary, almost elementary, and therefore powerful. Tell us about the development of that pedagogical impulse to which you have focused.

AM: You and I talked in recent days about that cultural revolution that manifested during the 1950s and 1960s, of which a whole generation of teachers later became protagonists. Note that education in our country—and in general in Latin America, at that time—had common purposes: to overcome illiteracy, avoid school drop-outs, and implement new pedagogies. The governments of our countries were committed to develop policy, and education was a vehicle for achieving the desired progress. For me, who spent my early childhood and adolescence in that cultural stampede, architectural education from the spaces where I lived was fundamental, including the countryside where I travelled to frequently. I was fortunate to receive that education in my house, with my parents, their friends and mine, and the neighbours. We were living in the middle of the city between Chapinero, Quinta Mutis (built by the Central Mortgage Bank as “social housing”) and Quinta Camacho, which were my neighbourhoods. Soon, I got involved in the daily habit of being aware of my historical moment, of my place, of my geography and its values, and in an intuitive, tender and childish way, if you like, of its possibilities towards the future.

Years later, as a young professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, and before embarking on the study trip to the United States, I began to build the idea of experiencing architecture as something typical of active communities. I explain it this way: it was the Greek architects who interpreted the ideal of democracy put forward by politicians. Their urban project, full open squares for walking or just visiting and agoras to hold assemblies, formed the centre of their lives. These spaces (among others such as theatres, ports, temples, and markets) accompanied, supported, and gave sustenance to this ethical-aesthetic model. They added value as an intrinsic part of their culture.

During the 1980s and 1990s—amid difficult conditions for our country, very affected by the violent and despicable context of the time—I decided to focus those concerns (and emotions) into my work as a teacher. How to do it? With the students and with my co-workers and teachers who were committed to these purposes. There were various proposals that highlighted the benefits of architectural education, especially if it was received from an early age.

TU: You mentioned the significant example of the Greek city and culture, side by side, collaborating and sharing responsibility for building democratic cities and society. At the same time, you insist on the importance of undertaking—as soon as possible and naturally—an education based on values and driven, to a large extent, by the built space and by architecture. What is the advantage of this?

AM: Perhaps, the most important thing about architecture is that it is made for people or directed towards people. The experience of space, contained in architecture, is intended for everyone without a difference. While I was teaching, I realised that the content from the first semesters of training as an architecture professional—all what we call basic knowledge— could be the base for citizenship training. If we want to change, it is essential to understand—as soon as possible—everything that is at stake when creating a city and making architecture.

Since education’s origin in Greece, the central objective was to train to be a citizen, consolidating experiential attitudes and behaviors. I have always been disturbed by the way in which the academy and its consequent professional practice have excluded other non-professional manifestations of architecture. For example, the idea of the city connected to migrants and how this idea has formed our peripheries and popular neighborhoods. Most of our urban territory is built by its own inhabitants. There are great lessons (historical, social, and economic, etc.) that reconnect us with the experience of space and time.

I insist that the experience of architecture teaches us to be citizens; that is, to be better people, since it generates customs, and ways of being and living in the world. Architecture is a tool to transform life; it constantly asks us about who we are (based on our actions) and invites us to transform the resources we have and to build a better society and a better world. Imagine if these questions come to life as soon as possible through education, when transformation is possible, at every step, in every game, through every story told, every drawing, every action in the family, in the neighborhood…

I believe academia breaks my spirit, because of the distances it keeps from reality, and often places itself on an exclusive plane of thoughts, ideas … Fortunately, young people are going down another route right now, provoking a strong resistance movement that begins with the understanding of their world and their own lives. It is not too late.

TU: Antonio, I understand your critical attitude towards the distance between ideas and practice. And, at the same time, I admire your passion for notions, terms, and the precision of the ideals built from them. You have stated it in our conversations that: “the word is potential action.” Tell us about spatial concepts on educational architecture and how they relate to the different stages in your life or, if you prefer, our lives.

AM: There would be a lot to say about that. For example, fundamental ideas linked to the language of pedagogical architecture are:

Oikos is the equivalent to house in Ancient Greece. For me, house (my house, your house) is a word that coincides with childhood and also with a “time of unconscious symmetries”. This is observed in the children’s drawings that, fortunately, I kept. In the ancient world, the house was the cornerstone of society and a sacred place; alike malocas. This self-sufficient space sheltered the extended family and all those who contributed to the domestic environment, including the planting and production of food for consumption. This arrangement satisfied the needs and provided personal norms, values, responsibilities, and duties to relate to others, the gods and goddesses and the world. The definition of house is not really standardised. In some way, it contrasts and complements the polis for the Greeks. Remember that there is also another fundamental architectural connotation, mentioned by Alberti, which relates our house with the small city and our city with the great house, the world, and the planet.

Artemis was the goddess of nature and life revolved around her, such as wild animals, water springs, earth, virgin lands, and plants. The female figure as a mother (matter), giver and sentinel of life, is fundamental to understanding nature and its relationship with the protective nest that is linked to the house. That veneration for the feminine has been a constant in my life; a life surrounded and often sustained by women, from the ancient Venus to the presence of current warriors.

I believe that the house contains our entire world, not just the domestic one. We need to become aware of this world, the only one we have. Boys and girls draw it as a female monad, with houses, mountains, roads, parents, animals, trees, suns, and moons.

TU: Let us talk about the city/cities that you refer to regarding educating through space and about that child who grows up and gains experience. Do you think there is a relationship between the ages in which we relate to space and the increasingly complex scales we face to understand territories?

AM: Of course, the city is simultaneous, civitas, city and polis. It is all this because it is the origin, the root of civilisation, culture and all values that take place in physical forms of both natural and human-made territories. It needs to be organised or governed. Again, we return to the Greeks, since the polis, as a form of management, gave rise to democracy. This type of government founded political participation for decision-making, which in fact was born imperfect, because it excluded women, slaves, and children. The city has a body and a soul that we can take care of, feed, and enrich. This is learned very early through experience. The sooner we reflect on this, the better. You learn by accepting differences, and such learning depends, to a large extent, on the spaces and context where you live from childhood. This teaching and learning must be permeated with the respect for the other, the different, the unequal. Likewise, it seeks equality, balance, and dynamic symmetries.

Perhaps these scales converge because there is a greater awareness of inhabiting a larger, more complex house: everyone’s house, the city. For example, adolescence is a period of awakening to everything that is lacking and facing your own nature. We question what we are or want to be. This is a time to reflect in the city: its complexity, size, scale, and diversity. It is also the time to exercise our autonomy.

TU: Under what conditions do these progressive ideas direct you towards a provisional space-time education through a central architecture project?

AM: To connect the last two questions, I must talk about adulthood, which in my case relates to my school and architecture education. Multiple crises, disenchantments, transhumance, and also prospective life projects arose then. It was the end of that happy childhood that I mentioned when hope saved me. I worked at the University of Los Andes, where I started as a tutor in design studio 1 and 2. Then, I went to the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, where I taught a first-year module for one term. That was an illuminating experience, because it focused on landscaping, and the understanding of the place and its people, emphasising on architectural space through all its representations. That trip allowed me to understand that architecture—which contains the word technique—responds to everything that makes us human (Arké).

Back at the university in Bogotá and after an academic reform, I became the coordinator of an area known as the Basic Cycle. We formed a group of friendly professors immersed in disciplinary rigor, despite being overwhelmed by a period of darkness and pessimism due to drug trafficking, corruption, violence, and terrorism in Colombia. It was our goal to raise awareness that architecture cannot be alien to reality. Collectively, we acquired tools, many of them provided by camaraderie with friends like Fabio Restrepo and Ferrán Lobo Serrá. The latter was a Catalan philosopher and biologist, with whom we worked on the topic of habitation, amongst others. We read and discussed authors such as Heidegger, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Nietzsche, and invited philosophers, engineers, astronomers, anthropologists, mathematicians and artists to our seminars. The idea was to provide students with an interdisciplinary and humanistic view of architecture.

We started the courses by listening to the students, involving their concerns into our sessions’ contents. We asked them to talk about architecture. We learned a lot from this alternative method. On the other hand, we were aware of the academy as an ivory tower necessary for refuge, although connected with a country to work on its reality. A fundamental conclusion at that moment was to understand that people who lack resources are the ones who need the best architecture.

TU: Teaching children and teachers the basic elements and principles of architecture and that the city has a vital purpose to improve our quality of life. Tell us about that powerful idea that transcends the academic walls and reflects in our streets.

AM: Educating is guiding and stimulating knowledge and values from an early age that gives continuity to culture. This provides children and young people with life scenarios that allow them to know and develop the best of themselves. From an early childhood, it is about “bringing to light” the natural and intellectual faculties that one must put them at the service of others, within suitable knowledge environments.

Teaching principles is fundamental, because when we inhabit the world immersed in our house, neighborhood and city, architecture and the urban environment educate us, forming part of the general culture that defines who we are, where we come from and where we are going. Spaces affect our behaviours as social individuals who participate in civic life, in the life of differences. I really enjoy knowing that we were teaching the principles and basic elements of architecture in schools and communities. I remember clearly that Rogelio Salmona reflected on the critical conditions of the inhabitants in our cities’ peripheries, where public spaces are everything.

TU: Antonio, I would like to pose a question that Jorge Raedó (2022) asked you in his ANIDAR conversations, because your answer deserves an expanded and more precise transcription, since it highlights a way for potential educators. What are those basic notions and principles that teachers can work on today so that children incorporate them into their understanding and desire for architectures and urbanisms that build civility?

AM: Considering concepts such as house, world, childhood, drawing, words, habits, living, dwelling, public space, materials, ethics, aesthetics, history, scale, measure, proportion, and nature helps us to achieve valid collective and constructive agreements and establish differences and similarities between them. We explore, discover, and apply these notions in children’s workshops, through play and the awareness of their own body. Professor Carlo Federici insisted that, when mathematics is not well taught, violence is exercised on children. A strong statement, isn’t it? Because play and fun are fundamental to understanding the basics: measuring, providing, shaping, molding, and composing.

WHAT TO DO?

Measure the world by steps, quarters, strides, and arms.

Proportion by being aware of the concept of half, third and double, before learning about numbers and series.

Scale or relate my body to the world. The human scale as a form of measurement and representation. A ladder…

Module using geometry and mathematics to achieve more or less complex or variable spatial structures.

Build structures through simple materials that allow joining and assembling spaces.

Shape or mold with your hands using ductile materials.

Materialise an idea into reality through colors, textures and materials.

Locate or limit the habitable. Orient or locate yourself with respect to the sun and the sky.

Learn about history to understand why a building or a built space is the way it is.

HOW TO DO IT?

Visit space or spaces…

Walk, take pictures, write, make notes, talk to people.

Represent space in two and three dimensions. This is very important.

Draw. We have discussed this in depth throughout these conversations.

Make models, which develop our ability to work with our hands. Scale models are tools that allow us to represent and understand the spaces drawn to build them in a relatively short time. It allows us to speak and understand the meanings of the environments we inhabit.

Use other representation languages, including digital ones.

Question and interpret, asking ourselves why we have built this world.

OUR WORLD.

Adding each individual action to collective action teaches us forms of argumentation and management.

Given the extreme complexity of these exercises for children, students, and teachers, we invert hierarchies to form all of us in citizenship. We also must be willing to freely appeal to various means of expression, ideas, and meanings, without aestheticisms, or formalisms, and understanding things rationally and sensitively.

Experimentation is essential by carrying out workshops that allow the exchange with schoolteachers and students, involving learning by doing, playing, molding by hand or creating with words. These pedagogical practices or research actions with communities in the city are extraordinary events where learning is democratized and the architect participates in collective and popular knowledge, thus becoming more sensible about reality.

TU: Play has an introductory and festive role within teaching. Tell us about its pedagogical aspects and needs for the preservation of collective rituals.

AM: Games are representations that we make of reality to understand and transform it. Through them, we generate all kinds of pedagogies and learning. By playing, we can innovate, create, and intervene in the world. In contemporary education, it is essential to introduce pleasure and playfulness, because this produces enthusiasm and connects us with art. Making models and drawings to interpret space allows the introduction of games and toys, helping children’s understanding without the need for prior training. In participatory design processes with communities, these strategies bring the benefit of “creating together” through collective play.

The ritual follows the myth. Rituals support activities that perpetuate and fix ideas. When this happens in the spaces we build, a symbolic value is added because habits, customs and behaviors are determined. That occurs with time, encouraging us to encounter, contemplate and rest. However, this does not imply that when we do architecture, we aim for behaviourism to intervene in the world. Sometimes, architecture oppresses and becomes a powerful tool to exercise power, not always ethical.

TU: There is a drawing that appears in your life many times. There are many versions of it: a world that is formed through experience; a drawing that adds, subtracts, enriches, and expands. Does this graphic narrative—which you have been building since your childhood and perfecting in your adulthood—sum up your experience as an educator?

AM: Yes. This is precisely where the drawing of the planet and our world take shape to summarise diverse ideas. That first word: world (mundus, in Latin) illustrates our relationship with everything that was, is and will be. Therefore, our creations, through a powerful link to architecture, are so important! This reminds me about Joseph Rykwert’s differentiation between the planet (as the natural environment that we are part of) and the world (as the product of what we build on this planet where we live). We originally visualised the planet as sacred, because we see everything we discover as being full of mystery, magic and myths. It seems key to establish that relationship with the planet as the stage of life. In that way, they become cardinal lines through which we construct space-temporalities. We are uncovering the world through art and science.

TU: Antonio, I’ve been lucky enough to talk to you about education/architecture/children/world. You have uncovered parts of your life and showed me drawings and paintings elaborated and treasured since your childhood. I would like you to tell the readers about this process, because I think it is consistent and endearing to the main issues discussed.

AM: Undoubtedly, this conversation has been somehow obsessive and not systematic… But not everything was like that. Since I was a child, I have experienced a strong need to express myself through drawings and the oral and written word. Through reasoning, reading, reflection, formal writing, and arguments, I proposed ideas using those same languages. The obsession with language, languages (including architecture), has always been present in my life. When the creative force of art began to manifest sensibly, the mind expanded. Perhaps the word poetry was the one that connected everything…

I established relationships with the child or teenager that I was and with the way I built my world throughout life. I have drawn and continue to draw my world/our world subjectively and individually, because everything that represents the objective is present in the world of languages.

I admit that by answering your question, I stripped my thoughts. The mind-world and mind-hand relationships, as well as thinking, doing, feeling, and representing, have been vital for me. I consider drawing to be the freest language, most connected with the expression of feeling, because it is made of line, colour, form, emotion, and feeling. When we draw, we return to the expressive forms of childhood, as instead of words, we give all the power of communication to a free, beautiful, and complete form. Let us remember that the act of drawing preceded writing. Why is it important to talk about it right now? Because looking back and exposing my life in this conversation allowed me to review the albums, travel sketchbooks, letters, and postcards and return to my childhood, adolescence, and youth that—in some way—are still present. This has been an intimate way of reporting my life and my time, which reveals through a relationship where all is linked to the idea of architecture that educates.

Additionally, the drawings produced in the neighbourhoods’ workshops with children, young people, adolescents and even adults illustrate where they come from, what world they want and how space has sheltered or repelled them. They show how architecture has left indelible traces on them, which will surely surface when collective building. Their drawings and models are participatory design tools for the construction of democracy and community.

TU: Some final lines, dear Antonio…

AM: I would say that we can begin by generating individual and collective awareness around the characteristics of the world we inhabit, sensibly analysing the successes and failures of our work. Being aware is perhaps the first action we can do. The spaces to exercise democracy are physically represented in buildings, streets, squares, our own homes, the landscape, and public, collective, and open areas. To know these spaces is also to visit them, signify them, value their symbology, and recover lost memories. In doing so, it allows citizens and professionals directly involved in the design and construction of the world to think about the role we best play towards the future. For me, it was key to go to the neighbourhoods and the informal city; for example, in Cazucá or Juan XXIII, on the mountainside in Chapinero. Working shoulder to shoulder with the community and with the students was a great learning.

The future of our world is directly related to the exercise of our citizenship when we test our way of living through our experience. Space is the main protagonist of architecture and the city. The function of these two is to unite communities. When this purpose has been encouraged from an early age–for example by learning to speak, read, write, walk or play–the meaning that cements the architecture of the city is political. All this has to do with “education to consciously inhabit the world”, as a capital issue to build society. Architecture provides the ideal pedagogical grammar for building community.

On the other hand, it is important to know experiences from other places. For example, from Nordic countries, where the formation of respectful, creative, and highly participatory citizens has been decisive in their quality of life and development. The city becomes an experimental classroom, alive, transformable, and respectful. Its inhabitants have shaped it and the spaces have shaped their life habits accordingly. Let us remember the Ciudad Educadora (Educating City) project by Bogotá’s former mayor, Antanas Mockus.

This leads me to better understand why everything in my childhood led me to where I am today. But I had to go back to my childhood in order to know. Maybe I never left.