Final Remarks ORO Editions

Design-build studios in Latin America have evident educational and curricular qualities for the teaching of architecture: collaboration rather than competition between students; teamwork together with changing responsibilities that draws on the individual skills of each participant; a greater balance with regard to architectural representation activities by permitting direct intervention in specific contexts; management of financial and material resources; building social relations; and group or dispersed authorship, among other educational elements. However, we often take it as a given that all of these properties are desirable in our teaching processes, while ignoring the architectural qualities of the projects built under these conditions.

Two questions arise: what are the dominant features of these architectural projects, and why is this architecture important today? The processes deployed in these courses lead to projects that are both necessary—required and desired—and lightweight; transformable and open; participatory rather than imposed. They are shaped by flexible and complementary geometries, by available materials, and by mixed technology, where almost nothing goes to waste. These methodologies are directed towards an architecture of contingent forms without clear styles, one that is small-scale, with great intensity of use and permeability. They lead to projects that express various facets of sustainability in architecture: the recycling and reuse of spaces and materials; implementation of bioclimatic strategies; and the use of local techniques, renewable resources, and strategies of social inclusion. In general, we can say they are naked, usable, and perform well in difficult conditions. This cluster of qualities, generated in the Latin American social and academic context, is of great importance, not only because it questions and complements largescale, robust, and lasting public or institutional architecture by auteurs or well-known architects, but also because it responds in a sympathetic, inclusive, and forward-looking manner to the great twenty-first-century challenges of social inequality and environmental crisis.

Finally, the processes of these Latin American design-build studios differ from classic architectural studios with their extensive output of drawings, diagrams, and models; the stratified organization of firms and their commercial responsibilities and interests; and the experimental or research studios with their products aimed at publications, galleries, or specialist biennials. The methodologies and strategies they implement open up and support a new format for the production of architecture that is midway between academia and professional practice, one that strengthens the discipline and serves community interests.