Design Build Studios in Latin America: Teaching through a social agenda

This publication documents the work carried out by fourteen Design-Build Studios in Latin America over the past twenty years, compiling a total of thirty-nine projects that place an emphasis on teaching with a social agenda and the impact that the construction experience has on students and communities.

In contrast to architecture teaching around the world that places the emphasis on individual work, competition, and representation, these studios stimulate collaborative work and produce small-format buildings with flexible programs that have an immediate impact on their context. While global architecture often feels remote from people, the courses that take this approach manage resources sustainably and build projects with a high intensity of use.

In the context of the most unequal region on the planet, this kind of studio enables students to interact positively in response to social, environmental, and architectural constraints. Design-Build Studios in Latin America asks questions about what matters in the present-day training and practice of architecture if we want our discipline to play a leading role in the ecological and social challenges of our time.

Felipe Mesa is a founding partner of Plan:b Arquitectos, an architecture studio based in Medellín, Colombia―www.planbarq.com―and is assistant professor at The Design School―Architecture Program―of Arizona State University. In 2013 and 2018 he co-directed the Design-Build Studio Nubes de Madera at the School of Architecture of the Pontifical Bolivarian University, Medellín. Felipe Mesa conceives of the architectural project as a provisional pact, permeable configuration, and positive expression of the ecological and social forces around us. His projects and research into the practice and teaching of architecture have been published by Mesaestándar in four books: Acuerdos Parciales (2005), Arquitectura en espera (2007), Permeabilidad (2013), and Arquitectura a la inversa (2017); and the book 12 Projects in 120 Constraints (2021), published by AR+D publishing.

Ana Valderrama is co-founder of Matéricos Periféricos, a collective that works for social and environmental justice based in Rosario, Argentina. She is director of the Master’s in Landscape Architecture and associate professor of the School of Architecture at the National University of Rosario. Ana Valderrama conceives of architecture as congealed emergences of a multiple and dialogical framework of human and non-human vitalities through time. She is currently completing a doctorate in Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois. Her projects, works, and research have appeared in specialist journals and books, including Poéticas colectivas, published by Bisman Ediciones (2019).

Gustavo Diéguez forms part of the a77 architecture team based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he develops projects relating to auto-construction, the reuse of industrial waste and recycling applied to experimental housing, the creation of ephemeral institutions, the activation of social dynamics in the public space, and the self-management of cultural spaces. He is Associate Professor of the a77 Studio seminar in Architecture and Urban Design at the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of the University of Buenos Aires, and Professor at the Institute for Architecture and Urbanism of the National University of San Martín, Argentina.