Architecture of Remittances |
Central America
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Problem
How can trends in architecture and urbanization in the daily lives of people respond to the forced migrations in Central America and everywhere through a recognition that they don't happen in a vacuum but rather stem from root causes that force them? Why are so many people from Central America looking for a better life somewhere else and what do these conceptions mean to architecture? |
Solution
Houses built with money earned by migrants in the U.S who sends dollars back to their native country for the construction of their dream house. In the process (of building in small increments over extended periods of time), it creates new architectural typologies that represent both imported construction techniques and architectural styles of other cultures in the vernacular landscapes of their hometowns. |
Description
As people are forced to migrate legally - and illegally- for the American dream and aim to support their families back in their Central American homes, the values and architectural styles that result from such exchange become a mixed typology of self-built Americanized dwellings that highlight a tangible mesh between informality and formality.
Yet, architecture can arise from the global processes that we have set in place, and not from a formalized elevation and construction plan from the drafting table. According to the World Bank, in 2007 the developing world received $251 billion in remittances sent by migrants to their home countries. Of that total, migrants living in the United States, the world’s top remittance-sending country, sent over $40 billion overseas. This fast-growing sector of the economy is spearheading social and cultural changes for migrants and their families that are manifested in the material world, and especially here, in the architecture. The houses mostly seem to follow local contemporary vernacular styles, although they inflict some Southern California subdivision, suggesting a diffusion of style and commenting on a broader idea that architecture is sound but never static. |
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Remittance Architecture represents a trend that has taken place over many decades of forced migrations from Central American countries to the U.S
██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ Immigrants that illegally enter the U.S in search for jobs and a better live, Family members living in home countries who receive remittances, global financial systems. Social: new modes of building are shared across cultures and transformed through context and building practices, creating an architectural communication flow. Economic: money flows allow changing relationships of the built environment New architectural typologies that merge building practices with Latin aesthetics, customization of building form and architectural elements, represents and merging of the rural vs urban strategies. Architecture without architects, the architecture of systems, |
Benefits
Exchange of goods create new architectural typologies that help express, and compromise the relationships of migration and hometown ties. New and creative ways to instill a sociocultural process into the architectural practice of housing and urban planning. They symbolically deal with effort of the people that are part of the social conceptions of an immigration system. Allows modern/contemporary architecture merge with other vernacular practices to produce unique hybrid. Creativity and adaptation of architecture without architects. |
Negatives
The architectural hybrid is often viewed negatively as it clashes with the aesthetic built and nurtured from from both cultures. Ambiguous typology of space that reminds neither as a part of one or the other culture. A clash between creativity and imitation. Westernized Approach |
LEssons
- Migrants who set out on their journeys to the North, are filled with hopes for better lives and self-sufficiency; they quickly learn the risks and uncertainties associated with the dangerous crossing and the lack of legal status in the U.S. They cannot depend on state services such as police protection or health care and yet they are incredibly changing the places they come from. However, that transaction is barely ever one sided. As much as these remittances have impacted its motherland, immigrants in the U.S bring aesthetically choices that should be celebrated as opposed to standardized.
- Recognize the buying power of the immigrant to successfully create new and creative ways of building that are outside the U.S-canon, but address similar (even the same) cultural objectives. Incentivize a housing stock that is more diverse and expressive, one which gives immigrants autonomy of their dwellings.
Links
http://arquitecturadelasremesas.blogspot.com/
https://thomaslockehobbs.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/walterio-iraheta-the-architecture-of-remittances/
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bdl/summary/v017/17.2.lopez.html
http://arquitecturadelasremesas.blogspot.com/
https://thomaslockehobbs.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/walterio-iraheta-the-architecture-of-remittances/
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bdl/summary/v017/17.2.lopez.html