![]() ![]() You have to travel five hours to buy cement blocks to build your house. We’re working in a community in Oaxaca that’s five hours from the closest urban center. The politics of reconstruction are focused on cards, and the only thing you can do with these cards is buy industrial materials in stores authorized by the government. Most of the affected areas are in states with majority-indigenous populations. Ordóñez Grajales: For example, right now we’re working in an area that was damaged by earthquakes, i n collaboration with an organization called Fundación Haciendas del Mundo Maya. These communities have always worked as a group, and when government support arrives, it tends to promote individual production and consumption, not only of housing but of the entire regional economy. We believe this happens because it’s a way for politicians to maintain control of these regions. ![]() When politicians impose a building style that doesn’t integrate into the environment, they rupture the social fabric, the local economy, the food system, and create more poverty. Luque: These policies are particularly perverse because rural vernacular housing is part of a way of life. We started to visit communities where we had worked in the past and tried to understand the traditional construction methods. We wanted to provide more up-to-date information and conduct a much more rigorous investigation of these typologies. Valeria Prieto published a book on Mexican vernacular housing in 1985, but I wasn’t even born when it came out. ![]() It’s not easy to find good information about this topic. Well, sure, some specific points could be improved, but that doesn’t mean we should throw away everything the people who have been in this country longest know about architecture and construction. The current policy says that vernacular housing is unsafe. Ordóñez Grajales: But today, issues like migration and urban expansion are causing the loss of traditional typologies, and with them our ancestral building culture.Īnd government housing policies are contributing to this loss. The traditional vernacular house isn’t separate from its environment. I went with COMUNAL to do a study of Mayan houses, and we were surprised and amazed by how sophisticated they are-how they relate to the habitat and the land how the builders perfectly understood the cycles of the environment, the seasons, the types of wood available in the nearby hills. The Architectural League’s digital editor, Sarah Wesseler, spoke with Luque and COMUNAL founder Mariana Ordóñez Grajales. For the past two years, Mexico City design firm COMUNAL has collaborated with photographer Onnis Luque to document the nation’s endangered vernacular housing. ![]()
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