New Interiors for a New World!

Thinking in the future spaces I began to reflect about what we are facing as Human Being and our responsibility as a designers. The COVID-19 pandemic has been just a small evidence of what is happening on the Earth, we’re finishing with our natural resources… with our cosmos…with our home and the way we live is part of the problem. I do think that we need to go back to our roots in order to think in The Future Space, we need to understand our relationships with nature and our environment, urge begin to create our spaces as the Amazon indigenous build the maloca, creating a model of the cosmos that allows our relationships with time and space defined by our culture. In few words we need to reconnect with nature.

Since many years ago I’ve been interesting in my indigenous roots, their spirituality and cosmology. That’s why one of my source of inspiration as an architect and a designer is the book: Chiribiquete. La maloka cósmica de los hombres jaguar (2020) -Chiribiquete. The Cosmic maloka of the jaguar men- written by Carlos Castaño-Uribe, an Anthropologist at the University of the Andes, with a doctorate in American Anthropology from Madrid´s Complutense University. He was a member of the expedition which, during the 1990s, “discovered” the Serranía de Chiribiquete in the departments of Guaviare and Caquetá, today an Amazonian biodiversity hotspot and site of some major cave paintings findings of continental importance.

During my reflection I found myself with an article at VOGUE -online issue October 27, 2020- talking about Julia Watson and her new book, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, published by Tashen in 2020. Julia Watson is an architect, landscape designer, and Harvard and Columbia professor who traveled 18 countries for six years to visit these communities and document their ways of life such as the regenerative agriculture, zero-waste living, and nature-based solutions to environmental problems. Watson illustrates -in her book- how indigenous methods actually benefit the planet-and how they might be adopted worldwide in the face of climate crisis. So if our ancestors have understood long before colonization times, why we haven’t been capable to do that?

Why we continue producing architecture which uses glazed outer skin at all costs instead of give to walls their strength and autonomy as the architecture of the Mexico´s Modern Master Luis Barragán and why we are producing interior spaces more for social media and being photographed instead for Human Beings? We need more spaces that become a metaphor for our existence, we need give back the rituality to our domestic existence, the religiosity of living with the sinful eradication of the city and the indifference of the contemporary era.

As technology continues to progress, the way we interact with our environment will likely only grow more and more futuristic. However, in my opinion dwellings should be a place of refuge, comfort and indulgence, our homes are integral to our health and wellbeing, an ultimate sanctuary.

Maybe the future is the combination of ancient building techniques and ways of life with modern technology to propose recyclable, low-carbon and climate-adaptable spaces.