An odd doughnut-shaped structure, resembling a thatched UFO, rises from a field on the outskirts of a rural town in central Colombia. Bamboo lattice walls curve up from the ground to form its bulging shell, tapering to a central chimney where wisps of smoke waft into the sky. Through the mesh walls, it is possible to make out bodies dancing in a circle around a fire, to the sound of drumming and chanting.
“As architects, we need to unlearn everything we have been taught,” says Ana María Gutiérrez. “Our idea of progress is completely based on colonialist, extractivist practices. People talk about sustainability, but what exactly are we sustaining?”
The woven doughnut, Gutiérrez explains, is The House of Thought – an “intercultural temple” at the heart of her Centre for Regeneration. This is a 30-acre outdoor laboratory for indigenous construction techniques that she’s been building for 16 years. It is a place scattered with experiments, from structures that look like coil pots, to little domed houses built from sandbags. Some of the cavorting bodies inside the thatched temple belong to architects, who have come here for the day to cleanse themselves of their desk jobs, and get their hands dirty in workshops focusing on earth construction, ecological restoration, biodynamic agriculture and the healing properties of medicinal plants.
Like many of the day’s participants, Gutiérrez used to work in a corporate architecture practice in New York. One day, while on holiday back home in Colombia, she took part in a workshop on rammed earth. “The moment I was barefoot,” she says, “working with the earth, I was like, ‘What am I doing sitting at a desk, working on a computer all day, every day?’”
She returned to Colombia in 2008, resolved to create a center for ecologically minded construction and “learning through censorial experiences”. “What if we saw ancestral knowledge not as a romantic past,” she asks, “but as a vivid present that could teach us resilience?”