09/04/2019 The Bolivian architect whose “New Andean” style is transforming El Alto | Art and design | The Guardian

The Bolivian architect whose “New Andean” style is

transforming El Alto
Like Gaudí in Barcelona or Niemeyer in Brasília, Freddy Mamani has the chance to shape the
aesthetics of an entire city
Nick Miroff for the Washington
Post
Sat 8 Nov 2014 10.00 GMT

F
anning out across the barren altiplano at 4,000 metres, the city is one of the fastest-
growing in South America. El Alto is going up so quickly it looks like it’s still in
sketchbook form, as if no one had time to add any colour.

The streets are dusty and treeless. The houses and half-finished buildings are
unpainted brick. A blinding sun blanches everything else.

“It’s so monotonous,” said architect Freddy Mamani, for whom this is clearly a problem and a
personal irritant. “It’s depressing.”

Mamani wants to liven things up. You might want to reach for your sunglasses.

Walking into one of Mamani’s buildings is like coming out of a rabbit hole into an electric
Bolivian wonderland. It’s a jolt to the rods and cones.

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09/04/2019 The Bolivian architect whose “New Andean” style is transforming El Alto | Art and design | The Guardian

The interiors of his buildings feature two-storey ballrooms that are spellbinding tapestries of
bright paint, LED lights and playful Andean motifs: chandeliers anchored to butterfly symbols,
doorways that resemble owls and candy-coloured pillars that could hold up a Willy Wonka
factory.

One soaring wedding hall evokes the inside of a reptile, with arching roof beams like dragon
ribs and huge orange curlicue mouldings that could be alligator eyes.

“We use the colours of our textiles, colours that are alive,” said Mamani, who traces his
inspiration to the elaborate shawls and other traditional garments made by his mother and
fellow Aymara weavers.

Mamani, 42 and largely self-taught, is an architect with a rare privilege. It’s not often that a
single artist or designer gets a chance to define the aesthetic of an entire city. Gaudi did it in
Barcelona. Niemeyer in Brasilia. L’Enfant, to a degree, in Washington.

Mamani is turning cold, gritty El Alto (population 1 million) into the world capital of “new
Andean” architecture. This is in contrast to the old Andean architecture of the Incas and
Mamani’s Aymara forebears, who left their designs and symbols in the ancient city of
Tiwanaku, between El Alto and Lake Titicaca, built more than 1,000 years ago.

Mamani has big dreams for El Alto’s plazas, bus stations and boulevards. But only recently have
the Bolivian authorities begun warming to his work.

Critics dismiss his buildings as kitsch, or something worse: “decorative”. In architecture

departments where Mamani said his instructors were only interested in copying European
forms, his bold colours and extravagant designs were not well received. But in El Alto, Mamani
is the Aymara version of Michelangelo. To his patrons – the city’s newly affluent – his works are
a status symbol.

It is these traders who have changed El Alto from a slum into Bolivia’s throbbing hub of street
commerce. La Paz, next door, has filled the bowl-shaped canyon below it and has no more
space to grow. But El Alto, which translates roughly as “the Heights”, starts at the canyon rim
and sprawls out across the flat desert plateau of the altiplano, with plenty of space for new
arrivals, new money and unconventional architecture.

A worker cleans up on the building site of one of Freddy Mamani’s

New Andean designs in El Alto, Bolivia. Photograph: Dominic
Bracco II/Prime/Washington Post

Mamani moved to El Alto as a young man. His father, a bricklayer, taught him to build. He went
to engineering school and began sketching his designs by hand. He still works that way – no
computer, no office, just a battered pickup and a mobile phone that nags him every few

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minutes when one of his site managers needs something. Mamani’s five younger siblings work
for him, too.

He has completed about 60 structures, known in El Alto as “chalets”. Mamani says their
owners are typically well-to-do Aymaras who have been emboldened by the success of
Bolivia’s most famous Aymara, Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president. Morales
was re-elected to a third term last month by a wide margin.

“There have always been rich Aymara, but before Evo, they were timid. They didn’t want to
draw attention to themselves,” Mamani said.

“Now they say, ‘This is where the successful Aymara live.’ They are proud of Evo, and they say,
‘I have wealth, I can show it off. I don’t have anything to hide.’”

Most of Mamani’s buildings are five or six storeys tall, with bold facades of Andean symbols,
tinted glass and geometric patterns in relief. Each unique structure is an all-in-one compound
to meet all the commercial, familial and aesthetic needs of the modern, urban Aymara.

The ground floor offers commercial space that the owner can use or rent. The second and third
floors are exuberant ballroom spaces meant for weddings, parties and the quinceañeras, “Sweet
15” birthday celebrations that Bolivians wouldn’t think of having at home.

Covering the fourth and fifth floors are rooms for rent, or apartments for the owner’s family. At
the top of the building, offset from the street, is a penthouse structure – the actual “chalet”
typically with a gabled roof and huge windows to catch the sun and with views of snow-
capped Andean peaks.

Most of his buildings cost between $300,000 and $600,000, Mamani said. Some even more.

The architect has a dozen or so under construction, dividing his 200 workers into two brigades:
one for basic construction; the other for detail work. His interiors are almost entirely done with
plaster and oil-based paints.

One building he debuted this summer with a ballroom for 700 has already become a
destination for the curious. It has wall panels decorated with Andean pastoral scenes, stages
for two bands and a giant glowing chandelier at the centre.

“People come from all over to see it,” said Alejandro Chino, a successful haberdasher, pleased
by his decision to commission Mamani. “It’s the best place in all of Bolivia to get married.”

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from the Washington Post

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Topics
Architecture
Antoni Gaudí
Oscar Niemeyer
Bolivia
Americas
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