PEI Studio ORO Editions

Country: Colombia

Duration: 1996–2022

Location of the projects: Palomino, Guajira, Colombia.

University: School of Architecture and Design, Pontifical Javeriana University, PUJ, Bogotá.

Professors: Carlos Hernández

Correa, Director.

PUJ School of Architecture and Design

Professors: Antonio

Yemail Cortés, Christiaan Job

Neiman, Santiago Pradilla Hossie, Daniel Feldman. Guest faculty: Zoohaus Platform, Juanito Jones, Liz Villalba. Zuloark Collective, Manuel Pascual, Luis Galán, Juan Chacón.

Studio timeline: Research and preparation, one month; Design, one month; Development, one month; Construction one month.

Students: Approximately 300 students over five academic semesters between 2010 and 2012.

Clients or organizations: Communities in the municipality of Palomino.

Donors and financial support: University, students, professors, communities, private companies.

Awards and honors: First Prize, Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism for the project Palomino, Society under Construction, Cádiz, Spain, 2012.

Karl Brunner Prize for Urban and Landscape Design, 23rd Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, for the project Palomino,

The PEI Studio is the International Studies Program of the School of Architecture and Design of the Pontifical Javeriana University in Bogotá, directed by Professor Carlos Hernández. This course, founded in 1996, has an interdisciplinary vocation and operates on the basis of intensive design workshops, led by a group of permanent faculty and national and international visiting faculty, who change in line with the themes addressed.

The PEI receives an average of eighty architecture and design students per semester, who work collaboratively on a range of topics, constantly exploring new territories in the fields of art, architecture, philosophy, new technologies, and ecology.

During the years 2010, 2011, and 2012, the PEI worked in partnership with communities in the municipality of Palomino, in the La Guajira department of Colombia. Through a series of academic courses, visits, and workshops, which involved the participation of the Spanish collectives Zuloark and Zoohaus, and the open research and design platform Inteligencias Colectivas, the International Studies Program proposed a master plan of action, and implemented it with architectural projects of diverse nature and scale.

Palomino, Society under Construction, is the name of this intervention, in which a group of professors, students, community leaders, and advisers organized, de- signed, and built a variety of projects with sustainable qualities, using low-cost local techniques and materials. Thanks to diverse sources of financial support—both institutional and from professors and students—the work team was able to travel more than six times, establish a site presence, and join the community for variable periods of time. This enabled the construction of a network of small-format community and private infrastructures, focused on hygiene, rainwater collection, food security, and cultural and leisure activities: a new house of culture, a sports hall, bleachers for the soccer field, street furniture, water wells, and dry toilets, among others.

Society under Construction, Armenia, Colombia, 2012.

International special mention, Social Habitat and Development Category, Pan-American Architecture Biennial, Quito, Ecuador, 2012.

The PEI Studio believes in an interdisciplinary, international, collaborative, and open education in architecture. Mixing third- and fourth-year students, it places greater emphasis on key contemporary issues—new digital media, and eco-social phenomena—than on curricular and traditional aspects of the field of architecture. Its intervention in Palomino proposes a participatory and long-term teaching model, which involved living, building, and coexisting with vulnerable communities in their territories.