Fundación Organizmo turns the very definition of what an architect does on its head. Working with the constructed setting, it’s not an structure agency however reasonably a “provoker of horizontal dialogue”, its founder, Ana María Gutiérrez, tells The Artwork Newspaper. Collaborating primarily with Indigenous communities, Gutiérrez believes her place is to “orchestrate”, to not educate. With an eye fixed in the direction of sustainability, the Colombia-based organisation hopes to assist take away the stigma related to utilizing vernacular traditions and to deconstruct colonialism within the course of—the specialists listed below are individuals who intimately know the land, the vegetation and how one can construct with what’s already there.
Fundación Organizmo’s first step when taking up a brand new venture is facilitating dialogue with the group about what it wants—higher cooking circumstances, a spot for gatherings, a constructing to facilitate storytelling, something. As soon as the wants are clarified, native craftspeople, specialists and leaders take the helm. Fundación Organizmo is there for concepts and help, and its focus is on empowering communities to work with their very own conventional information and vernacular structure. Gutiérrez says that necessary issues embrace “understanding life cycles of the supplies they could use and taking steerage from the ecological calendar of the territory”.
The location that Fundación Organizmo calls dwelling, dubbed the Centre, is an hour outdoors Bogotá and a little bit of an architectural fantasyland. It’s a place the place Gutiérrez and her staff collect what they’ve realized from Indigenous communities and share that information to others. On the Centre, group leaders congregate and focus on shared issues, and outsiders uncover and find out about precolonial constructing methods.
The Centre sits on farmland beforehand owned by Gutiérrez’s grandfather. Over the previous 14 years, the farm has been replanted right into a forest and meadowland with distinctive, fantastical constructions dotting the panorama. There are small earthbag buildings that appear like huge coil pots—Gutiérrez realized the method from the Iranian American architectural pioneer Nader Khalili. Different constructions are made with earthen bricks and thatched roofs. These are absolutely purposeful dwellings, full with composting bathrooms, safety from the weather and delightful frescoes inside. The Centre additionally has a self-built greywater system, a geodesic-domed workplace area and a sweeping bamboo construction with a sand ground and burning hearth within the center. Gutiérrez refers to it as a “home of thought”, the place guests can cathartically scatter tobacco leaves into the fireplace.
Along with the edifices dotting the panorama, Fundación Organizmo is reintroducing native plant species in a bid to enhance the ecological techniques of the positioning. This course of is an instance of what Gutiérrez describes as “listening to completely different eloquences”, not solely human and architectural imperatives. It is usually an instance of how holistically Gutiérrez and her staff deal with the idea of regeneration.
Gutiérrez appears unconvinced that there might be business functions for what she has been studying and disseminating at Fundación Organizmo. She is, nevertheless, a classically educated architect who as soon as practiced in New York Metropolis, so maybe there may be nonetheless hope for a sustainable-architecture revolution.