Constraints and Agreements

This publication presents the work of fourteen design-build studios from across Latin America: Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. It assembles thirty-nine small-format constructions with social programs—classrooms, pavilions, platforms, refuges, community centers, libraries, cafeterias, stages, dry toilets, pergolas—on which professors, students, community leaders, municipal representatives, nongovernmental organizations, and private companies worked together. Today, these spaces are maintained and used by communities of students, farmers, local residents, fishers, female heads of household, or sportspeople. Drawing on the case studies, this book makes clear the complexity involved in the design-build process in partnership with communities, rejecting the notion that this is a purely formal matter.

The investigation considers the various constraints in play—whether inherent, imposed, or self-imposed1—as elements beneficial to the discipline that serve to generate positive and unexpected situations, rather than external limitations on creative freedom. It employs concrete examples to reinforce the idea that good buildings needn’t necessarily be large, long-lasting, unique, expensive, imposing, or high-tech. To the contrary, it showcases small, ephemeral, ordinary, low-cost, and subtle constructions that use mixed technology to have a positive impact on their communities. It proposes that a quality education in architecture does not have to be individual, elitist, isolated, and competitive, but can be socially committed, connected to its context, and collaborative. In this sense, Design-Build Studios in Latin America: Teaching through a Social Agenda not only puts forward necessary positions and urgent strategies for education and the contemporary practice of architecture, but also offers new tools to bring our discipline closer to society and its growing problems, without abandoning the considered search for innovative aesthetic qualities.