Chapter 4 The impact of liberation theology in the Latin American built environment

Participatory processes rising in the 1960s

There is a significant temporal coincidence between liberation theology and participatory design processes around the 1960s. While other chapters of this book elaborate on the roots of liberation theology, as their authors have much deeper knowledge of the movement and the motivations of its proponents within the Catholic Church, I instead focus on what was happening in architectural circles.

The idea of participatory design is often associated with self-help and ‘architecture without architects’ as it reached the public realm in the 1960s in response to the exhaustion of the Modern Movement heterodoxy. In the Global North, those ideas are usually linked to Bernard Rudofsky’s MoMA exhibition Architecture without Architects of 1964, John F. C. Turner’s publications after 1967 and Giancarlo De Carlo’s book An Architecture of Participation from 1972. Nonetheless, the beginning of the trend can be located in writings by Italian historian Manfredo Tafuri, whose Marxist framework explained architectural design as a peg in the big wheel of capitalism, and, indeed, one which contributed to separating ideas (design) from matter (construction). Later in this chapter, I will discuss this process of abstraction as another stitch binding liberation theology to architecture. However, allow me to point out here that, before elaborating on his Marxist critique of architecture and alienation, Tafuri was a Renaissance scholar who wrote about the roots of the separation between design and construction that facilitates the capitalist sequestering of architecture as a tool for exclusion and territorial control. The architectural establishment on both sides of the Atlantic did not embrace Tafuri’s Marxist critique, insisting instead on celebrating form and image as the basis for design, something clearly visible also in Rudofsky’s MoMA exhibition. Sociology, economics and politics were pushed aside as variables that should not dictate architectural decisions. This denial – because such factors do dictate design decisions whether we like it or not – explains why any attempt to reposition the perceived centrality of the architect in shaping the built environment was resisted and labeled as ‘radical’.

Nonetheless, participation would continue influencing many designers, some of whom would in turn become influential in their own right. In the early 1970s Giancarlo De Carlo wrote An Architecture of Participation, Nigel Cross organised a conference on Design Participation and Ralph Erskine completed the Byker Wall complex, all of which strongly promoted participatory design. But, as is well known in architectural circles, this movement was relegated to the periphery of architectural education while the movement for autonomy of form, whose avant-garde was led by then by Peter Eisenman and his journal Oppositions, took the day. As De Carlo himself wrote:

professionals are against participation because it destroys the arcane privileges of specialization, unveils the professional secret, strips bare incompetence, multiplies responsibilities, and converts them from the private into the social. Academic communities are against it because participation nullifies all the schemes on which teaching and research are based. (De Carlo 1980, 79)

Abstraction as a tool for privilege

As a necessary preamble to explain the importance of the present chapter, let us first consider the epistemological underpinnings of architectural design which, of course, emerged simultaneously with architecture as a distinct profession. It is a disciplinary consensus that abstraction is the main component of the modern process of architectural design and students of architecture are taught that the process of design abstraction was developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As I will go on to argue, it is no coincidence that the European occupation of the Americas happened at exactly the same time, given that the very process of slicing an object into plan, section and elevation is a process of abstraction, understood here as reduction (Lara 2020; 2021).

To expand on the point: abstraction, as the definition goes, is the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events, or with something that exists only as an idea. The key question here is which facts have been elevated to the realm of ideas and which facts have been discarded in the process? Ultimately, it is my contention that spatial abstraction has been a tool of coloniality and inequality since the world-system took shape in the sixteenth century, and architecture is deeply embedded in this process (Lara 2023). This is to say that modernity was created when we abandoned relational knowledge and adopted a superficial understanding of space (focusing only on the surface) in which the white man is not situated in space but rather has mastery over it, while non-white, non-male and non-human beings are reduced to objects to be plotted and therefore controlled.

Thus, the importance of the task becomes clear. Within architectural pedagogy, we use abstraction to separate our design students from everything they knew before and immerse them in a new set of values, architectural values. Once delinked from any previous spatial relations, our studio pedagogy teaches them to master abstraction, almost always discarding any site context or content in order to manipulate only geometry. Site plans do not register community life. Contours do not tell the history of the land. Plans and sections are arbitrary narratives that force behaviours on people. These are the Janus-faced powers of architecture: it could be used to envision a better world, but 95 percent of the time it is used to reinforce the status quo. If we want to mitigate the erasures embedded in spatial inequality to keep moving toward more inclusive design processes, we need to understand the history of the relationship between design and exclusion. The historical roots of abstraction are intertwined with the historical roots of architectural design, and the Americas played a central role in that development.

Architectural scholarship defines the late fifteenth century as the time in which abstraction took over building practice, defining architecture as a separate discipline altogether. As we are reminded by Dalia Judovitz, ‘the scenographic depiction of rationalized space became the impetus for a combined approach to mathematics and philosophy, as figurative science of measure, order, and proportion’ (1993, 66). In practical terms, the design techniques of the early Renaissance were optimised to a higher degree of efficiency, giving us the plans, sections and elevations we used until a few decades ago (before the rise of BIM [Building Information Modelling] and fully three-dimensional software capabilities). For most architectural scholars it was Filippo Brunelleschi who achieved this in fifteenth-century Florence, and it was soon to be systematised by Leon Battista Alberti a few decades later. That simplified narrative is once again a Eurocentric construction. Back in the 1970s, Samuel Edgerton showed that Brunelleschi did not invent linear perspective. More accurate would be the understanding that Brunelleschi revisited Ptolemy and ‘rediscovered’ the technique (see Edgerton 1975). In addition, as discussed by all the latest surveys of architecture (see Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash 2017; James-Chakraborty 2014), the technology of the two-layered dome was used in Islamic mosques centuries before Brunelleschi. The answer to why the Florentine’s perspective became so important for Western civilisation was discussed by Edgerton almost fifty years ago: it was developed in parallel to cartographic techniques that allowed Europeans to both cross open oceans and to control territories very far from their homelands. At the heart of those innovations is a new concept of space that is less about Brunelleschi and Alberti and more about the conquistadores. Alberti, as explained by Mark Jarzombek, was deeply rooted in medieval thought. His work, so important for us, ‘could perhaps be considered a neo-medieval critique of mainstream humanism’ (1989, 59). The real change in the concept of space came when the Spanish and Portuguese engaged the Atlantic Ocean and occupied the territories beyond. Patricia Seed reminds us that the Portuguese used points located by observing the skies as both a mapping device and an argument for possession (Seed 1995, 111), while Ricardo Padrón tells us that the new conception of abstract space ‘rationalized the known world according to the principles of Euclidean geometry’ (Padrón 2004, 32). This process of abstraction allowed the European powers to make the world apprehensible in ways that it had never been before.

As previously discussed, the very process of slicing an object into plan, section and elevation is a process of reduction. By extension, as David Leatherbarrow reminds us, ‘abstraction works itself out through a series of filters and distillations – the flat is made flatter, the black blacker. Abstraction tends toward an ideal or an essence’ (1987, 9). Ultimately, we discard information in order to be able to manipulate what we consider the essence. But what if the treasure lies in the information discarded? We would never know that we were throwing the baby out with the bath water if we never accepted that there was a baby in the bath. The point here, learned from contemporary scholars who engage Indigenous knowledge in an act of epistemic decolonisation, is that the rise of abstraction in the sixteenth century killed relational processes that we urgently need to bring back to the table.

One of the most cited theories of abstraction in the arts was written by Wilhelm Worringer and uses a scale gradation between abstraction on one end and empathy on the other. According to Anselm Treichler, Worringer’s theory of abstraction is:

a universalist attempt to explain and redefine art history via the opposing poles of the human urge to abstraction and urge to empathy. Empathetic art stands for the happiness that stems from a harmonious relationship with the world, and abstraction stands for mastering welt angst or anxiety about the world. Abstraction and empathy form the poles of an all-encompassing spectrum of artistic creation within which forms relate to one another in shifting forms. Therefore, abstraction is not just absolute abstraction; rather it especially reveals itself as a process of abstracting, which in works of art becomes manifest in their charged relationship with nature. (2020, 34)

Following the words of Worringer, then, the important question becomes: are we discarding empathy in the process of distilling the essence or ideal which has been the architectural goal for 500 years?

The geographer Doreen Massey goes some way to answering that question by opening her book For Space with a description of the encounter between Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés in Tenochtitlan, some 500 years ago. Massey explains that after the European occupation of the Americas, the idea of space overlaps precisely with the sliding scale hypothesised by Worringer, moving from a deep, relational experience to an abstracted collection of mathematical notations plotted on a flat surface. It is in this context that we should understand Patricia Seed’s observation that the Portuguese plotted such a collection of points guided by the sky, not by the territory, and Ricardo Padrón’s rediscovery of the notion of the itinerary (in which the narrator is inscribed into the landscape) and its differentiation from modern maps (in which the narrator is removed from the landscape). Read in this way, the geographers Massey, Seed and Padrón join the decolonial theorists Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar and Aníbal Quijano in helping us understand that Descartes’ cogito ergo sum was both a consequence of, and a tool for, the European occupation of the Americas.

For the present discussion, however, the key point is that, in the case of the built and the natural environment, the rise of abstraction as the only possible process of analysis removed any empathy from the design process by removing a relational and situated understanding of space. This dual removal ultimately resulted in a world in which white male homo sapiens rule and everything not-white, not-male and, worse, not-sapiens should be at their disposal. Nonetheless, while architectural scholarship has scores of books and articles about abstraction, almost all enthusiastically defending it as a core component of design, the vast majority of our scholarship until very recently completely ignored the Atlantic encounter or minimised its role in European developments.¹ This is to say that architectural scholarship has not yet dealt properly with the impact of this encounter.

Participatory processes in Latin American architecture

With a rooted history of exclusion and erasure, Latin American architects have developed in the last fifty years a tradition of participation and activism that, despite some notable successes, has been mostly invisible in the global design scholarship. Despite this omission, the rise of participatory design and construction processes provides a collection of concepts and experiences that could contribute significantly to the crises of ecology and inequality that the world faces today. Regarding the historical development of this trend, however, departing from the Latin American context of the 1960s, I argue that current participatory design processes have their roots in liberation theology and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but were also influenced by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (Comisión Económica para América Latina, CEPAL).²

For fourteen years after the end of World War II, Latin American nations were struggling to find a place in the new world order. The proximity to (and the long shadow of) the United States made more difficult any attempt at independent development. The region seemed destined to export raw materials and suffer the political instability of ‘banana republics’. In Santiago, Chile, CEPAL has been working since 1948 on analysis and proposals to escape the region’s dependency, as theorised two decades later by Enzo Faletto and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1967). During the same period, in Bogotá, Colombia, the Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento Urbano/Interamerican Center for Housing and Urban Planning (CINVA) was created in 1952 by the Organization of American States with the initiative focused specifically on housing development. Notably, the CINVA was already working with self-help and incremental design as early as 1958. Nonetheless, all of the initiatives above were using developmental tools of the North to ‘fix’ poverty and underdevelopment in the South. Poverty was perceived as a problem, but the solution proposed would only bring more inequality because development was indeed the cause of such inequality, not a side effect, as Arturo Escobar explained (1995).

The equation experienced further dramatic change on New Year’s Day 1959 when dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Havana, accepting the victory of the armed revolutionary Cubans led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. Unfortunately, the Cuban revolutionary government would soon be pushed into the arms (both the limbs and the war industry) of the Soviet Union, pulling the entire region under the blanket of the Cold War. In response, John F. Kennedy’s government proposed the Alliance for Progress and ramped up expenditure in consulting and infrastructure loans to alleviate the urban problems of Latin America (see Gyger 2019; Zoumanas 1986).

In the Anglo-architectural scholarship, British architect John F. C. Turner is credited with elevating self-help and incremental construction to a worthy scholarly topic. Turner arrived in Lima, Peru, in 1957, wrote his first report on housing in 1959, and published his first scholarly article in 1963. In his eight years in Peru, Turner grew from a young architect working for a large international bureaucracy in the developing world to a major reference on self-help and incremental construction processes in the field of architecture and planning. As discussed by Richard Harris, none of those concepts that Turner became famous for were his creations. Some were proposed by Jacob Crane (for example, slums are the solution, not the problem), others by Charles Stokes (for example, slums of hope), and many aspects of his analysis of barriadas and pueblos jóvenes in Peru were proposed by José Matos Mar and Eduardo Neira (see Gyger 2019). Moreover, all of them were in accordance with Jane Jacobs’ classic Death and Life of Great American Cities of 1961 in the sense that the modernist tabula rasa was creating more despair than improvement. According to Ray Bromley,

Turner works hit mainstream architecture and anthropology in the United States and other Anglophone countries just as interest in Third World shanty towns was mushrooming. Theirs were not the first studies, or the experiences which formed United Nations, World Bank or Alliance for Progress policy, but they were timely, brief and highly graphic. They supported what seemed a new academic discovery at the time, that the rapidly expanding shanty towns of third world cities were mainly neighborhoods of optimism and progress, rather than festering slums of despair. (2003, 289)

My hypothesis on why Turner became the main reference of self-help for architects is the word ‘graphic’ as written by Bromley in the previous quote. Turner had the design skills to translate economic and sociological ideas into diagrams and illustrations that resonate with architects, and the connections to publish them in influential journals. An example of that is the fact that architects cite the Architectural Design edition of 1963, edited by Turner and entitled ‘Dwelling Resources in South America’, not the long list of reports and policy papers published by him and so many others. Daniel Kozak adds that John Turner’s defence of self-help and incremental construction was instrumental for proponents of postmodernism in the 1970s, such as Charles Jenks, to support the idea that modern architecture was out of sync with contemporary problems (2016).

Less known are the works of Brazilians, Uruguayans and Mexicans in the 1960s and 1970s that were much more participatory in their proposals. In Brazil, Sérgio Ferro, Rodrigo Lefevre and Flávio Império created the group Arquitetura Nova in the early 1960s, arguing that architects should be present in the building site, labouring alongside construction workers in order to overcome the alienation brought forward by capitalist specialisation (see Koury 2003). Their work was interrupted by the 1964 military coup in Brazil that sent Lefevre and Ferro into exile, but their influence is still strong in São Paulo, all the way into the twenty-first century. When Ferro theorised their experiences years later, he zeroed in on the relationship between abstraction in the design process and alienation in the Marxist lexicography, two sides of the same process of removing relational knowledge and empathy from the task of building homes (see Ferro 1982). In Mexico, a group of faculty and students launched Autogobierno in 1972, proposing to change the way we practice and teach architecture around six points: total knowledge, praxis, architecture to the people, dialogue pedagogy, self-government and self-criticism. For eight years they held studios in which the hierarchy between professor and student and between architect and construction worker was challenged (see Montes 2012). In Uruguay, the housing law of 1968 created a fund to support self-help, sweat-equity initiatives, and in 1972 the Uruguayan Federation of Housing Cooperatives for Mutual Aid (Federación Uruguaya de Cooperativas de Vivienda por Ayuda Mutua, FUCVAM) was created to coordinate housing cooperatives around the whole country, building thousands of units for the Uruguayan working class on a highly participatory process of design and construction. All of the above were challenging traditional construction methods but still preserving most design decisions for the trained architect. Nonetheless, any attempt toward a participatory design process, either in the North with De Carlo or Erskine, or in the South with Arquitetura Nova or Autogobierno, was pushed out of mainstream architectural scholarship and labeled radical for indeed it threatened the fiction of the architect’s power to shape the built environment.

More recently, the rise of colectivos of architects working with participatory design and participatory construction processes demonstrate how rooted liberation theology and Freire’s ideas are in the continent and how they can be instrumental in the twenty-first century.

Liberation theology and Paulo Freire as antidotes to abstraction

Architecture as we know it was born from Leon Battista Alberti’s idea of design as something separated from construction. In the Latin languages, the concept of design is expressed by the words proyecto, projeto, progetto, from the Latin projetare, meaning to launch forward (in English we were left with projectile, a fancy word for bullet). Before Alberti, architecture was all about how to select the best design based on how we built in the past. After Alberti, architecture became about how we should build in the future. Intellectual concepts now mattered more than construction experience. In a recent publication, I discussed the fact that the rise of architecture as an independent discipline and the European occupation of the Americas are two sides of the same process of modernisation/colonisation of a planet tied together in the sixteenth century as we learn from Walter Mignolo and liberation theology scholar Enrique Dussel (see Lara 2020a). Within this tradition, the cogito ergo sum of Descartes has been extensively discussed as the root of both our crisis of inequality (only white men have minds) and ecology (every non-white, non-male is reduced to nature and therefore a resource to be explored), and it, too, is further connected with the epistemology of architectural design.

The act of building used to be a more experiential workshop in which there was, of course, a clear hierarchy, but nonetheless there was plenty of exchange between clients, workers and master builders, soon to be called architects. The growing specialisation of the modernisation processes created a drastic separation among parts of the construction process, reinforcing the narrative that the architect works with his/her mind and everybody else works with their bodies.

Let us depart from the understanding that abstraction, as synthesised by Descartes as the separation between the mind and everything else, lies at the core of the processes of exclusion and erasure that produced the staggering inequalities of the late twentieth century. All non-white, non-male beings were reduced to ‘nature’ and therefore available for exploitation and abuse. People’s lives become data points even under the best intentions of the developmentalist economists of CEPAL and the World Bank (see Escobar 1995). The writings of Enrique Dussel are key here because he is the main link between decolonial theories and liberation theology. In The Invention of the Americas (1995), Dussel explained how the world-system as theorised by Aníbal Quijano was a consequence of colonisation, not the other way around. In several books criticising Eurocentrism and the myth of modernity, Dussel elaborated on the modernity/coloniality dichotomy as proposed by himself, Mignolo and Escobar (see Allen and Mendieta 2021). The main point that I take from Dussel, however, is that liberation theology challenged the rule of abstraction by engaging with the concrete, by resorting to empathy. I am no expert in religious studies and have a minimal knowledge of theological theories, but it is clear to me that promising a better life after death is a process of abstraction, while improving your daily life is precisely the opposite. In that sense Paulo Freire did exactly the same with his literacy method: forget the abstract rules of grammar and syntax, and engage the quotidian vocabulary of the hoe and the washbasin. Empathise with your own environment.

Here we have a clear alignment between a participatory architectural practice with liberation theology for both call for a direct engagement with reality, with less mediation from higher authority. I would also like to say that it is difficult to separate the impact of liberation theology from the impact of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for those very same reasons – in each the relational and contextual realms work as an antidote for abstraction’s power system.

Colectivos and the heritage of liberation theology

In the 1970s the Catholic clergy aligned with liberation theology (always a minority within the Church) organised thousands of ecclesial base communities, discussion groups in which passages of the Bible were debated alongside community struggles, politics and the roots of inequality (see Betto 1985). With most of Latin America under dictatorship in the 1970s, the ecclesial base communities used whatever small protection the Church could provide to discuss topics that were brutally repressed in the public realm (see Bustamante 2009).

As noted previously, attempts to develop meaningful participatory design processes, wherever encountered in the world, were deemed to be radical and rejected by the architectural mainstream. Nonetheless, examples of participatory design processes abound throughout the whole South American continent, and very much like their contemporary experiences in the North, they have not been fully researched and brought to light in architectural scholarship yet. However, unlike their Northern relatives, they left a much deeper mark on both the academic and the professional landscape of Latin America.

Examples of participatory design processes abound throughout the whole continent, and very much like their contemporary experiences in the North, they have not been fully researched and brought to light in architectural scholarship yet. Nonetheless, unlike their Northern relatives, they left a much deeper mark on both the academic and the professional landscape of Latin America.

In 1952, fifteen years before liberation theology was properly articulated, the Jesuit priests who run the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile, decided to add an architecture program to their school and invited architect Alberto Cruz and poet Godofredo Ianni to design a curriculum that became very influential decades later. Their plan for a more meaningful architecture involved the development of poetic sensibilities and an emphasis on the act of building, not on the final result of construction. As analysed briefly by myself and Luis Carranza, and more extensively by Raúl Rispa and colleagues, Doris Reina Bravo, Sony Devabhaktuni and Maxwell Woods, the Valparaíso school focused less on transforming the world at large and more on transforming the world within each designer (see Bravo 2015; Carranza and Lara 2015; Devabhaktuni 2015; González and Nahoum 2011; Rispa, Pérez de Acre and Pérez Oyarzún 2003; Woods 2020). Students built structures at a remote site north of the city called Ritoque, often cannibalising the materials of the previous year’s constructions to build their own. The envelope and the final result are less important; what matters is the fact that the students were sawing, hammering, bricklaying and celebrating both their labour and the act of inhabiting it. In several publications from the 1960s and 1970s, issues of Catholic praxis such as ‘communion’ and ‘transcendence’ were present (see Woods 2020). The current website of the school has a whole sub-topic of catolicidad where those are elaborated.

More research is needed to investigate possible parallels between the Valparaíso pedagogy and liberation theology. Maxwell Woods recently wrote the best analysis of the Valparaíso school pedagogy and has raised more questions than answers regarding their relationship with Catholicism and liberation theology. The use of empathy as an antidote to abstraction is made explicit by Woods in the first paragraph of his book, in his statement that the Valparaíso school ‘embrace[d] a poetic foundation for architectural thought and praxis where the poetic is defined as the hospitable discursive space in which to hear the other’ (see Woods 2020). It is clear to me that a model of relational engagement as an antidote to abstraction was extremely influential throughout the Americas, from the Rural Studio in Alabama to the Central Valley of Talca, Chile, and dozens of Catholic and Public Universities in between.

Located in the central valley of Chile and catering to the sons and daughters of farm workers, loggers and miners, the Talca school, led by Juan Román Pérez, has one of the most radical pedagogies currently being tested in the world. Inspired by the Valparaíso school experimentations of the 1960s and 1970s where Román himself studied, the Talca school requires that all students build their graduation project in order to claim their diploma (see Uribe Ortiz 2011). You can imagine that they do not design museums or cultural centres; instead, they design and build covered bus stops, platforms for farm-to-market fairs, playgrounds and shaded benches in front of the local health clinic (see Maragaño 2020).

At Talca the students are trained, from the beginning of the studio sequence, to work in groups, cater to the needs of the community and only design what they can actually build. It works with a traditional sequence of four foundation studios in the first two years in which abstraction is certainly the guiding principle. That is balanced in the upper studios with an emphasis on team building and community engagement. In the third year, the students are placed as ‘interns’ in a team led by someone who is about to graduate. Moving along the vertical sequence in years three, four and five, students are exposed to the whole process: drafting, detailing, specifying, budgeting, revising and fund-raising in a sequence of loops that mandates revisions and re-designing. In addition to the holistic processes of design, they also actually saw, sand, nail, weld and assemble the final structure. For five semesters they work for someone else’s graduation project. In the tenth studio, they lead the team and have five other students working for them. The result is a school that cares about design, is absolutely rooted in the community, manages to contribute to such a community, and does it all in a very participatory and empowering manner. It may not sound theological, but it is certainly liberating. And, as I have contended throughout this chapter, this focus on relational, situated empathy is one which is shared by liberation theology and participatory architectural design. Indeed, in Latin America, the former unquestionably influenced the latter, albeit in an undercover manner.

Notes

1. 1. New publications dealing with the impact of the American occupation on Renaissance Europe include Kathleen James-Chakraborty (2014), Clare Cardinal-Pett (2015) and Fernando Luiz Lara (2018; 2020; 2020a).

2. 2. In 1984, CEPAL’s work expanded to include the countries of the Caribbean, becoming the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

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