Ancestral techniques innovate avant-garde architecture

Its next application will be in the construction of housing solutions in the coastal area of ​​Canoa and in the rural parish of Paccha in Cuenca. Santiago Vanegas, Diego Proaño and Alejandro Vanegas, professors at the UDA, School of Architecture, Faculty of Design, together with some experimental cubes of ancestral materials and techniques and others.

Experimental cubes of materials and constructive elements where ancestrally known techniques and materials are fused with avant-garde proposals for their use. In the foreground you can see one made with a mat as a covering and full of wood strips; another of adobe, another of reed with plaster, only reed, among others.

Teachers of the UDA along with the dean of Design (c), Fabián Landívar.

Three are the points that give value and for which the vernacular architecture has great representativeness in the contemporaneity, according to Santiago Vanegas, professor at the University of Azuay: the first is that it helps to affirm the identity of a people, the second is which is closer to the needs of local communities and the third is that there is knowledge that has gone through many years of tests, failures, errors and improvements.
"It's a proven system, which has been tested by several generations. Then, its innovation has been the product of dozens of years, which has achieved a fairly broad position ", emphasizes Vanegas, who is one of the nine teachers of the School of Architecture, Faculty of Design, of the UDA, who carry out the Minga Lab institutional project.
Specifically, already in the Azuay, the vernacular architecture responds much to the construction on land, with systems, shapes and sizes, uses and operations suitable for the areas, explains Vanegas, highlighting: we have a great presence of vernacular architecture above all in the areas of the field, because they have not been altered and their construction has not been changed or modified. "

Minga Lab

According to Diego Proaño, director of the Architecture career of this university, Minga Lab is a project that was born as an effective and concrete response to the need to fulfill pre-professional practices with materials and live, on the part of its students, then of certain gaps detected in the first promotions.

In this framework, with the aim of carrying out research related to the construction techniques and ancestral materials and the delivery of effective solutions to the current requirements of the peoples, within the program of Linking with the Collective, three years ago training, workshops and visits to rural parishes, especially.

"At first we directly attacked issues such as brick construction, concrete, wood and other materials. But then, when we had a first experience, we saw in that a potential to generate more things, such as the research that corresponds to us as a university, says the director of the Architecture career of the UDA.

And then, with the first experiences of Minga Lab, the spectrum opened, with the theme of Community Engagement, because there they experienced economic issues, above all, that could then be applied in the construction of social housing and recovery of heritage buildings, whose costs are lower than those of current use.

So far, after these processes have been developed around 40 building systems that merge materials and ancestral techniques with others of a contemporary type, which are proposed for the construction of social housing plans, whose implementation will be fulfilled soon in the coastal area of Canoa, that was devastated after the last earthquake that supported the Ecuadorian coast and the north of the country.

Another project managed by the School of Architecture within the framework of the Bonding with the Collective, is the recovery of a patrimonial property built in the rural parish of Paccha, whose studies at the preliminary level have already been delivered to the Decentralized Autonomous Government of that place.

According to Diego Proaño, for the architectural restoration of this patrimonial building in Paccha, it is foreseen to elaborate panelas that mix ancestral materials and techniques, such as the earth, the reed, the cabuya and others, like the one extracted after the recovery of ceramic waste.

According to this professor, the costs of recovering this patrimonial property, due to its size and complexity, with the current architecture would be impossible to be covered by the parish GAD, however, with the use of the ancestral technique in the new proposed panels , these decrease in a remarkable way.

Currently, it is known that this draft is in the hands of the Municipal Office of Urban Control, whose owner Carlos Alvarez, UDA executives expect an agile response. According to Fabián Landívar, these are ways in which the UDA, its directors, teachers and students experience and manifest their commitment to society, to the communities to which they owe.

THE PHRASE

"The vernacular architecture means all those traditional local construction systems of the areas in which they are located.
Santiago Vanegas

Value our own in front of "invasion of architectures"

Alejandro Vanegas, a professor at the School of Architecture and a member of the Minga Lab project, argues that the city and rural areas are currently experiencing "an invasion of architectures."

"There are a lot of architectures and people have different interests. It depends a lot on the things that people value. The exterior is full of architectural work, because of that it is built, but, nevertheless, there are things that are more valuable than another, "says Vanegas.

"In that sense, we also little understand that we are in a certain way, being invaded by a quantity of architecture, that a little tries to open market from the commercial point of view nothing more and does not value certain things and are an intrinsic part of a city" , emphasizes the professor. "Put in value" is the work of the academy in this case.

For Alejandro Vanegas, before materially intervening a building, UDA's professors are focused on rescuing vernacular architecture and doing research related to what they call "pre-existence", that is, a series of knowledge and traditions that are intrinsic to the places and the people who inhabit them.

DETAILS

An academic requirement of the current Higher Education System prior to the graduation of the university students, in all the careers, is that they fulfill tasks of Linkage with the Collective, for what the UDA and other entities put emphasis in this management.

According to the professors of the UDA, of the School of Architecture, the ancestral building systems are millenary systems that have been tested and tested for generations, hence their use and effectiveness in avant-garde architecture.

In the Azuay, the vernacular architecture is evident in the constructions on land, with systems, shapes and sizes, uses and proper functioning for the different zones. In these dwellings, adobe, bahareque, tapial and wood prevail.

The professors who carry out the Minga Lab Program are among others, Diego Proaño, Pedro Espinosa, Rubén Culcay, Francisco Coronel, Carlos Contreras, Luis Barrera, Carla Hermida, Gabriela Moyano and Pablo Ochoa,