INMUNDO: ARCHITECTURAL METAPHORS FROM THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

Ingrid Quintana Guerrero – University of Los Andes

Abstract

The metaphor used by Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos for referring to his country as “an island
surrounded by ground” reveals not only the geographic condition of Paraguay (as it lacks a coastline)
but also its isolation from the rest of the Southern Cone, in economic and cultural terms. Actually,
there are two coexisting systems of reasoning in its territory: the official one, following the canons
of the Western World, and the aboriginal one, totally ignored by neighboring countries.

These differences would also explain the country’s disconnection with architectural discourses on
local modernity and critical regionalism in Latin America. That is why in 2014, Paraguayan architect
Javier Corvalán published an article titled “Un fin del mundo: fragmento del libro negro”, which
aimed to contextualize his country’s contemporary architecture. The publication coincides with the
recent international interest on Paraguay´s architectural production. In his text, Corvalán compared
the mundus to the Inmundo, a Latin voice used for defining everything unrelated to the mundus
system (enclosed by the walls of the urbs). As the meaning given to the “inmundo” term in Spanish
is “unclean”, the Guaraní meaning of Inmundo could be fundamental for decoding architectural
practices in Paraguay.

This chapter discusses the notion of Inmundo not only as a metaphor to understand Paraguayan
architecture but also as a possible framework for other metaphors supporting the emerging
architectural production in similar South American countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia – countries
which frame a theoretical “edge of the world” –. Due to the relevance of oral tradition and the role
of the architect as a builder, metaphors become a didactic tool for communicating the meanings and
execution processes of the architectural project in these countries.

Keywords: Latin American Contemporary Architecture; Javier Corvalán; Paraguayan Idiosyncrasy;

meta-metaphor

Introduction
Metaphors have been frequently used for baptizing geographic places: in the Americas, European
colonizers appealed to this figure for relating their worldview to the untold landscapes revealed
before their eyes. For this reason, today, several hills in the territory occupied by South American
cities are called pan de azúcar (sugar bread) or panecillo (little bread); Brazil got this name because
the bandeirantes compared its red-colored lands to the pigment of an Asian tree whose wood was
widely appreciated in Portugal: the pau brasil. Later, metaphors also served to characterize young
cities and countries, connecting them with urban images of the Old World: for instance, “Venezuela”
is the name Columbus’ crew gave the territory currently occupied by that country, a possible
deformation of Venizuela (little Venice), due to the pile-dwellings standing across its lands. Even
local writers have formulated this kind of comparisons: Colombian poets of the late 19th century
assigned the epithet “South American Athens” to Bogota. Many places in the Americas have
recovered their indigenous names in the last century though, as a strategy against cultural
colonialism.

Other, more visual kinds of metaphors have contested the very concept of Latin American, which
was also formulated in Europe. One of the most prominent cases is the inverted map of the Americas

1
(1943), where Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García placed Patagonia at the top and Panama at
the bottom, as case in point of his generation’s dream: a metaphor about another possible world
and its hierarchy. One more metaphor of a dreamed-of South America comes from “Amereida”, the
poetic journey imagined by Chilean architect Alberto Cruz and Argentinean poet Godofredo Iommi
in 1967: a collective poem that proposes to re-found a cultural subcontinent. “Amereida” also
served as a rhetorical figure for the formulation of new standards for the architectural discipline, a
conception that emerged originally in Valparaíso School of Architecture1. Amongst the many
drawings illustrating the poem, an inverted map of South America appears once again, this time
with a line connecting two of the main cultural centers in the region during the first half of the 20th
century: Buenos Aires and Caracas. This shape was crossed by a horizontal line: The Equator.

However, these iconic images disclose a subtle leaning towards colonialism; an intellectual
supremacy from the Southern Cone: while Argentineans, Uruguayans and Chileans claim to have
been colonized by Spanish and French scholarship, Andean and Caribbean countries would have
received European erudition through Austral mediation. This is also true in architectural studies,
especially during the last decades of the 20th century: authors such as Marina Waisman from
Argentina or Enrique Browne, from Chile, elaborated theoretical discourses around the notion of
local modernities and the search of a Latino identity, dialoguing with similar concerns in Mexico –
the other intellectual extreme of the Latin American continent2. All of them reverberated in the
architecture and discourses subsequently emerging in Colombia, Peru or Venezuela.

The alleged hegemony of the Mexican and Southern architectures (the latter including the works
from the Brazilian South-East) was first legitimated by overviews in the canonic historiography of
the modern architecture, in exhibitions and publications curated by American scholars such as Philip
Goodwin and Henry Russel-Hitchcock. Even in the 2015’s MoMA exhibition “Latin America in
Construction”, curated by Barry Bergdoll and Patricio del Real, this traditional structure persisted,
albeit with a more notorious status to Central American architectures from Cuba, Dominican
Republic and Puerto Rico.

The recent international interest on the production by architects from smaller countries such as
Paraguay, Ecuador and Bolivia – which have rarely been included in regional overviews, even by
Latin American authors – unravels two issues in the Latino architectural studies: the second-rate
role of these countries’ architecture in the historiography, and the misunderstanding of cultural
frameworks that shape their own buildings and projects. Thus, this chapter does not aim to
characterize these countries’ specific architecture but rather, to understand it as a corporate
response to both the Latin Americanist discourses rooted on an idea of genius locci, and the agendas
and aesthetics that dominate the global scene of contemporary architecture.

1
Marco Ballarín, “Forme di sintesi. L’invenzione americana nei progetti di Javier Corvalán” (PhD dissertation,
Università Iuav, 2017), 36.
2
The debates propelled from the Argentinean magazine Summa, by authors such as Alberto Petrina, Francisco
Liernur –later cocurator of the 2015 MoMA exhibition “Latin America in Construction” – and Waisman herself,
were new scenarios for discussing the current condition of Latin American architecture, such as Seminarios de
Arquitectura Latinoamericana (whose first version was held in Argentina, in 1985); the Taller América in
Santiago (led by Enrique Browne and Christian Fernández Cox) and the Buenos Aires and Santiago biennales.
The creation of these new stages had place in a transitional decade towards democracy, in several countries
of the region. This transition fed the discourses behind a new canon, in publications like Roberto Segre’s
América Latina Fin de Milenio: Raíces y Perspectivas de su Arquitectura (editado en Cuba en 1991), and Marina
Waisman’s El Interior de la Historia (1991) and La Arquitectura Descentrada (1994).

2
Paraguay: fertile land for the rise of metaphors

The former invisibility of Paraguayan architecture in the Latin American discourses on modernity
and critical regionalism is a multidimensional phenomenon. On the one hand, Paraguay, whose
name derives from the Guaraní voice “waters going to the sea”, has been described by the local
writer Augusto Roa Bastos3 as “an island surrounded by land”; by the dry land of El Chaco. This
metaphor goes beyond a geographical condition – Paraguay only connects to the coast by a hydro-
way through the Paraná river – entailing unfortunate events in the country’s history: an early and
extended dictatorship started in 1816 (right after its independence from Spain), by José Gaspar
Rodríguez de Francia; the late abolition of indigenous slavery (1870); the wars against Argentina,
Brazil and Uruguay (the “war of the Triple Alliance”, 1864-1870) and against Bolivia (the “El Chaco
war”, 1932-1935); and finally, Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship (1954-1989, being one of the longest
military regime in the Americas), sponsored by the US government. All these events resulted in a
financial and ethnic devastation whose consequences have still an impact in the political, social and
economic dynamics of Paraguay and the eventual isolation of this country from the rest of the
region.

On the other hand, a linguistic issue proves this isolation: despite the variety of tongues in the Latin
American continent, Castilian Spanish remains the common language and one of the most cohesive
factors of the region. Paraguay is nonetheless one of the few countries in the Americas with two
official languages: Guaraní and Spanish. Both of them reveal two systems of reasoning coexisting in
the Paraguayan territory: the internationally recognized one, following the canons of the Western
world, and the aboriginal one, ignored by scholarship and popular culture in neighboring countries
and underestimated by the higher social classes in Paraguay, albeit Guaraní’s expansion to
territories beyond the current Paraguayan borderlines and its vivid contribution to the
transformation of Spanish language in Latin America. Even if contemporary Guaraní is not the same
tongue spoken by pre-Hispanic peoples, it is worth mentioning its relevance as the main component
of Joropa (a mix between Spanish and modern Guaraní), an informal dialect frequently spoken
nowadays in Paraguay. Paradoxically, there is almost no scholar production or literature in this
language, due to the rejection of indigenous features in the traditional educational system.

In architecture, this tendency was reinforced by the influence of migrant elites from Italy and Arabia,
who denied the legacy of native domestic indwelling and imposed styles such as the neoclassic. This
conflictive relationship started during the Hispanic colonization era –as pointed by Ramón Gutiérrez4
– although with adaptive processes: while Spanish colonizers used to live inside their buildings,
indigenous people lived outside and consolidated the “culata jóvai” housing-type: a house with a
central veranda and two multifunctional rooms, facing each other. Therefore, local architectural
teaching (which only started in 1957, with the creation of FADA UNA: the school of architecture at
Universidad Nacional de Asunción) was highly influenced by the architectural practice in countries
allied to Stroessner’s regime, such Uruguay and Brazil. This approach only was contested in the
decade of 1980, with the creation of the Universidad Católica Nuestra Señora de Asunción. The need
of finding alternative methodologies for teaching as a manifestation against the curriculum imposed

3
Quoted in “Solano Benítez”, in Center 16: Latitudes v. 2, ed. Barbara Hoidin (Austin: The University of Texas
at Austin, 2012), 47.
4
Quoted by Eduardo Verri Lopes, "Aproximações sobre arquitetura paraguaia contemporânea" (Master 's
degree thesis, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, 2016), 138.

3
by the military power fueled the contacts between Argentinean scholarship and a younger
generation of Paraguayan architects who participated in the creation of its architectural course.
Thus, Universidad de Belgrano (via Alfonso Corona Martínez) and Universidad de Córdoba (via Pablo
Cappelletti) provided a new approach to the learning processes, as well as new tools for revisiting
the canonical histories of the Western architecture, with a high influence of the Venice School.
However, critics and academic research were rare in the architectural education in Paraguay, as they
still are.

In that context, architect Javier Corvalán got his Universidad Católica diploma, in the 1990s. The
subsequent exchanges of professorship between Universidad Católica and FADA UNA, including the
young teacher Corvalán, eventually propitiated a change in the architectural thinking at this public
university. Corvalán was a main actor of this shift along with FADA UNA graduated Solano Benítez:
both created the “Taller E”, a FADA UNA studio with an experimental and technical approach to the
architectural project. This logic became the basis of the revolution of the recent Paraguayan
architecture, with notorious international dissemination in the early 21st century. The tensions
between UNA’s Faculty and the Taller E team authorities gave to the latter the character of an
informal school (a gathering of pedagogic explorations, according to Verri Lopes5) where erudition
at the practice of architecture is condemned. The team was completed by a younger generation of
architects, among them Luis Alberto Elgue, José Cubilla, Sonia Caríssimo and Sergio Ruggeri, and the
international members of “Taller Sudamérica” (an itinerant educational program coordinated by
FADU UBA in Argentina). This network’s production has been socialized not by big-circulation books
containing manifestos or academic papers in peer-reviewed journals, but by the co-organization of
informal exhibitions.

Solano Benítez –probably the best-known Paraguayan architect outside his country today– took the
leadership of Taller E. In a country as Paraguay, where the practice of architecture is almost not
valued (an architecture has first to be a builder in order to make his work sustainable), the spoken
word —and thus the metaphors—, and not the abstraction in the graphic representation of
architecture (disegno), becomes the place where architectural strategies mature6. Solano refers to
the etymology of the Spanish verb “conversar” (to talk) — from the Latin voice conversari which
literary means “to go round together” — in order to define the key action in the construction site:
the collective meditation around a problem. The learning happens in this talking, as well as the
technological and spatial ingenious. But the verbal transmission also allows any untrained worker
to be able to grasp and execute a project. So, in his studio, metaphors are used as didactic devices;
they aid the “understanding”, that is, they give account of the similarities between his projects, at
the core of his philosophy of work7. That is why Benítez’s speech is full of the Guaraní idiosyncrasy
while describing the nature of research as Gabinete de Arquitectura, his own studio.

The first of Benítez’s key metaphors directly relates to Paraguay as a “Pirate Republic”, given the
ostentatious ambiguity of the construction legal code: everyone can proceed according to their own
inventiveness and possibilities, with ample flexibility within this undetermined legal frame. The

5
Eduardo Verri Lopes, "Aproximações sobre arquitetura paraguaia contemporânea" (Master 's degree thesis,
Universidade Estadual de Maringá, 2016), 12.
6
María Victoria Silvestre and Claudio Solari, “Exploraciones en el campo de la constructividad: arquitecturas
de Rafael Iglesia y Solano Benítez”, Dearq No. 25 (july 2019), 80.
https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/doi/pdf/10.18389/dearq25.2019.07
7
Benítez in an interview with the author, October 2019

4
second relevant metaphor is his idea of the design process as a parachute failure during a skydiving
fall, when emergency equipment must be used at the last breath8. The project also can change its
fate at the last minute before its materialization. Both pragmatic principles in Still, Benítez’s
metaphors – taking the project within its legal boundaries and conceiving it from the real challenges
at the construction site – anticipate more fantastic figures which correspond to the inmundo meta-
metaphor to be unraveled in the following lines.

Inmundo: an architectural metaphor by Corvalán

In 2014, Corvalán published one of his scarce public documents: an article titled “Un fin del mundo:
fragmento de El Libro Negro”; a compendium of main statements explaining his country’s
contemporary architecture. In his text, Corvalán introduced the term inmundo, as the opposite for
the Latin expression mundus. This mundus described the universe rooted in Greco-Latin culture and,
in the material world, what is enclosed by the walls of the urbs (the Roman urban foundations).
From the architectural perspective, the mundus would be shaped by the Vitruvian heritage.
Meanwhile, the inmundo – also a Latin voice – defines everything unrelated to the mundus system;
in other words, the universe of what is not officially recognized. Inmundo does not exclusively relate
to the geographic world but to a cultural system opposed to the Judeo-Christian heritage which
defines the mundus in the Modern era: a cultural background mostly fashioned by its religious
beliefs and languages. Coincidentally, the meaning given to the word inmundo in Spanish is
“unclean”. This dual interpretation illustrates Corvalán’s meaning of his inmundo metaphor: a
paradox in the Paraguayan culture and the key for decoding the local idiosyncrasy that drives its
architecture, which only could be risen from the aforementioned context.

But without other two Corvalán’s metaphors, inmundo would not prove to be a sufficient one. On
the one hand, the “fin del mundo”—the end of the world or, as we prefer to translate it, the edge
of the world—as it refers not to the expiration of a place (which corresponds, for example, to the
Chilean interpretation of “fin del mundo”) but to the threshold where two geographic and
intellectual universes meet. Tight between two giants – Brazil and Argentina – the vulnerability of
the Paraguayan nation has been historically demonstrated. According to Corvalán, the translation
of this fragility into architecture would be its invisibility in the international scene: the mundus. On
the other hand, the “Libro Negro”—the Black Book that would depict the inmundo—is a metaphor
of a manuscript that has not yet been written, and that Corvalán has no intention to write either:
its very existence is a fiction he created as a response to the crisis of imagination which, according
to him, gives way to mainstream architecture9. The Black Book is a metaphor alluding to unspoken
and provocative subjects; inmundo and the edge of the world are then metaphors completing a
whole allegory.

The ambiguous condition of the geographic territory in the edge of the world, with urban and
suburban areas where rural practices persist (specially in Paraguay), has been an ideal laboratory
for experimenting authentic approaches to the functional, aesthetic and technical features of its
architectures, informed by the local handcrafting knowledge and an environmental consciousness.
This ambiguity takes us in the last figure proposed by Corvalán inside the inmundo metaphor: the
ñurbanism (ñurbanismo). The sound/symbol “ñ”, contrary to general belief, is not exclusive of the

8
Eduardo Verri Lopes, "Aproximações sobre arquitetura paraguaia contemporânea" (Master 's degree thesis,
Universidade Estadual de Maringá, 2016), 130.
9
Javier Corvalán, in an interview with the author, October 2019 (unpublished).

5
Spanish language: it is used with more intensity in Guaraní and other indigenous languages in Latin
America: aimara, mapuche, mixteco, quechua, etc. According to Corvalán10, “The ñurbanism starts
from the reversed logic, and instead of focusing on the center, it focuses on the periphery, in other
words, on the countryside. All the energies for preventive urban collapses are in the control or
dealing of boundaries”. So, ñurbanism reinforces the idea of inmundo as the vertex of two territories
and also of two intellectual universes.

Finally, in “Fragmento del libro negro”11 Corvalán states: “The architecture from the edge of the
world is not yet written”. However, Bolivian, Ecuadorian or Paraguayan designers have been
creating a consistent architecture that investigates common themes related to its disciplinary
settings rituals and activities deriving in specific programs. The inmundo metaphor proposed by
Corvalán will be used in the following lines as a possible scaffold for other metaphors supporting
the emerging architectural production in South American countries, which delineate a conceptual
“edge of the world”, focusing on the works and projects conceived since 2000.

A fictional metaphor of the method

Metaphors not only relate to the nature of the project management or to the appropriation of the
work, but also to design strategies. Benítez uses an allegory for explaining the ensemble of project
strategies behind Unilever Headquarters (Villa Elisa), built by Gabinete de Arquitectura, in 2001. The
allegory comes from a fictional story belonging to Paraguayan contemporary folklore, which
attempts to “entertain, educate and moralize the daily life”. Its starring character is named Perú
Rimá, who we identify as an archetypical citizen of the inmundo:

The value of inventing Perú Rimá overcomes the ability of adaptation, by means of metamorphosis,
of the multiple characters created by Homer; conversely, Perú does not need the transformation of
the destiny to get integrated into the tale; every tale shapes him, grants him identity making him its
protagonist. It is told that in 1983, when the immigrant and ubiquitous Perú traveled to New York for
psychotherapeutic reasons, he was lucky to have met […] the famous Woody Allen. The American
filmmaker portrayed him in the most trustworthy way possible – maintaining him in a meticulous
anonymity – in a documentary film entitled Zelig: The Human Chamaeleon. Zelig achieves fame by
having been endowed with unique characteristics and developing a physical capacity of ubiquity that
transmutes the human as a poetic metaphor into a descriptive statement. He reaches the remarkable
insight that the best adapting strategy is always the use of this very resource.12

The human chamaeleon metaphor of Perú Rimá describes Benítez’s architectural tactic of change
and adaptation to achieve this “international building” according to the technological, cultural, and
socio-economic characteristics of the inmundo. The conception of Unilever Headquarters occurred
a few years after a shifting moment in the recent history of Paraguayan architecture: a trip of Paulo
Mendes da Rocha13 to Asunción, where he visited the Universidad Nacional and adopted Solano and

10
Javier Corvalán, “Un fin del Mundo: fragmento de El Libro Negro”, RITA - Revista Indexada de Textos
Académicos, 2014, 01(01), 42 (translation by the author).
11
Javier Corvalán, “Un fin del Mundo: fragmento de El Libro Negro”, RITA - Revista Indexada de Textos
Académicos, 2014, 01(01), 43 (translation by the author).
12
Solano Benítez and Alberto Marinoni, “Gabinete de Arquitectura”, ARQ (Santiago), 51, July 2002, 15.
https://doi.org/10.4067/s0717-69962002005100008 (translation by the author).
13
Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha was awarded the 2nd Mies van der Rohe Architectural Prize for
Latin America in 1999, due to the renewal of Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo (1993-1998). In the same
competition. Benítez was included in the final selection, inspiring Mendes da Rocha’s curiosity and motivation
his first trip to Asunción.

6
his fellow young architects as disciples14. As in Plato’s allegory of the cave, Solano recognizes that
Mendes da Rocha’s visit to the site where Gabinete de Arquitectura headquarters would be built
was the moment where the cave of Paraguayan architecture was enlightened form the outside, as
an open door to the mundus15 and the transition to another way of thinking: the chamaeleonic
attitude that characterizes Unilever and most of their subsequent works.

Ritual: Materializing the darkness

When we speak the word inmundo, a similar expression comes to mind, ultramundus, a Latin voice
meaning “beyond the world”, which alludes to the afterlife in fictional literature and popular tales;
that is, the dimension where dead people belong to. Both terms are akin to inframundus, the
“underworld”, also known as Hades in the Greek mythology. In the popular imaginary, mostly based
on Biblical stories, this dimension is related to darkness, the opposite of the source of Life—Jesus
Christ; the one bringing light to the world. “Amereida”, the aforementioned poem by Cruz and
Iommi, describes the whole America as Dante’s dwelling and place for the dead16. Death and
darkness have been two elements constantly present in Gabinete de Arquitectura’s works, although
not evoked simultaneously. Actually, the former would incorporate strategies opposed to the idea
of gloom. Describing Cuatro Vigas, his father’s open-cast mausoleum in Villa Elisa (2000-2001),
Benítez introduced the mirror, a reflecting surface which covers the inner faces of the four beams
of concrete, as a recreation of his personal image of the ultramundus: “In the mirror I am ‘there’,
before it, dwelling in another dimension which makes me equal to everything else or which allows
me to speak in a world different to my inner one, at a level of equality and simultaneity; perhaps we
have in the mirror a machine able to dwell within our beloved beings… the absent ones”17

Conversely, Corvalán identified the architecture of the inmundo as one built in darkness and creating
darkness, but not a metaphysical blackness. In its most basic way, it relates to the need of solar
protection during the rigorous summer season in Paraguay. However, darkness is also a contestation
to the admiration of brightness, and the appearance of newness in Western modern architectures
such as the German Pavilion in Barcelona by Mies van der Rohe (1959), whose chromed columns,
water mirrors and marbles create a game of shiny images multiplying the sources of light. As the
“praise of shadows” risen by Junichirô Tanizaki (1993) regarding Japanese domestic culture,
architectures from the inmundo value the marks of oldness in the walls, the intimacy provided by
the gloom and mystery of dark spaces. As a possible contestation to the Lecorbusierian aphorism
“Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light”
(published in Vers une Architecture, in 1925), Corvalán18 recalls the guaraní word ma´éra, which
relates to visual undefinition, to darkness as the stuff of Paraguayan traditional architecture -the

14
Pedro Barros and Pablo Hereñu, eds. Solano Benítez (São Paulo: Hedra, 2012), 18-19.
15
“Paulo aparecía desde afuera, con una voz tan poderosa en torno a ideas, compromiso, modernidad y
sociedad, que las otras miradas se acallaban, mostrándose al mundo como una puerta impresionante para
que todos transitemos” Benítez in Ezequiel Vespa, “Universos en tensión. Entrevista en Solano Bénitez.”
Summa+, 173, 2019, 11.
16
“¿qué es esta américa [sic] retornada e invertida? / ¡es américa [sic] vista a partir de la tierra! a partir de lo
debajo dicho de otro modo de donde viene dante y donde están los muertos”. VVAA, Amereida, Volumen
Primero (Santiago: Editorial Cooperativa Lambda, Colección Poesía, 1967), 174.
17
Quoted by Méndez, Rafael, ed., En Proceso, v. 1 (Bogotá: Escala, 2011), 129-130, (translation by the
author).
18
Javier Corvalán, “Un fin del Mundo: fragmento de El Libro Negro”, RITA - Revista Indexada de Textos
Académicos, 2014, 01(01), 43.

7
aforementioned “culata jóvai”-, as Le Corbusier recorded in his few sketches during his short stay in
Asunción, in 1929.

Despite of the lack of references to the darkness in Benítez’s rare texts, his work establishes a
dialogue between canonic buildings of the Modern Movement and his country’s domesticity,
recreating the dramatic game of light and darkness of modern places for rituality such as Le
Corbusier’s Notre-Dame du Haut Chapel or Eladio Dieste’s Cristo Obrero church (Atlántida, 1952-
1960). In R.P. Houses (Asunción, 2008), the pierced wall in the basement reminds the famous façade
of Ronchamp, which is one of the buildings that have inspired countless analogies and metaphors
amongst 20th century architectural critics: R.P.’s wall creates a series of beams of light breaking in
the most intimate rooms. In the Teletón Rehabilitation Center (Lambaré, 2008), Gabinete de
Arquitectura not only appealed to Dieste’s wavy surfaces for confining the hydrotherapy area, but
to the mystic light infiltrated in Atlántida’s choir, by using the open sections between the
undulations of the Teletón’s walls. Important is to mention at this point that Sitrande and Teletón,
just like Unilever and Cuatro Vigas, are all private commissions. In opposition to the corrective
Western urbanism, practiced in other countries by big public offices, in a larger scale, preventive
ñurbanism, as described by Corvalán, would only be meditated in private commissions, from the
domestic space. This fact demonstrates the lack of investment in both public works of large scale
(such as urban projects or facilities) and affordable housing by Paraguayan public agents.

Thus, High middle-class houses represent the only laboratory available for coming metaphors true.
For FADA UNA’s current dean, Ricardo Meyer19, contemporary architecture in Paraguay attempts to
portrait the materiality of local architectures despite its constant need of reinventing its language
(avoiding creating a signature, according to Sonia Caríssimo20) but also to rescue its essential
[domestic] spaces. In doing so, investigations at Laboratorio de Arquitectura (Corvalán’s studio) also
explore sustainable solutions that deal with the direct incidence of sun light, in works whose names
are full of metaphors. In his Casa Umbráculo (shadehouse), Corvalán renewed a traditional urban
house in Asunción, by creating a vaulted pergola made with recycled pallets. The house gets an
intermediary space in the terrace, an open solarium filtering the sun rays and allowing the owner’s
appropriation of the ceiling: Corvalán’s house then recreates domestic rituals taking place in
Paraguayan traditional architecture.

More recently, Taller E alumnus José Cubilla, put together the local practice of inhabiting
intermediate spaces and the shade under the trees evoked by Benítez in Sitrande: Cubilla’s Pescador
House (Villa Florida, 2010) is a cheap dwelling for a fisherman, which catches the shadow of an
actual tree (the yvyra pyta), and also creates chiaroscuro by means of ceramic latticework in the
project’s perimetral walls. In addition to this, Cubilla introduces a third strategy along with a new
metaphor: the possibility of totally opening or closing the house’s northern façade, in order to create
a terrace over the Tebicuary River. In doing so, Cubilla disposed a set of doors which would be the
top of a hermetic coffer, opened upon receiving its inhabitants. A couple of years later Corvalán and
his partners also explored the creation of temporary radical darkness in projects such as “La Caja
Obscura” (the Black Box): an 85m2 house built in Asunción; a dynamic container in metal which

19
Quoted by Eduardo Verri Lopes, "Aproximações sobre arquitetura paraguaia contemporânea" (Master 's
degree thesis, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, 2016), 129.
20
Quoted by Eduardo Verri Lopes, "Aproximações sobre arquitetura paraguaia contemporânea" (Master 's
degree thesis, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, 2016), 130.

8
pivots over a stoned basement, triggered by a system of iron pipes. When the house is open, its
composition recalls the disposition of the main volume of the Hamaca House (a name due to the
formal analogy between the house and an indigenous hammock). The Caja Obscura would be the
metaphor for a giant pinhole camera (a developed-world instrument) except that it actually works
as a pinhole camera when it is closed, since its hole frames the surrounding landscape.

Beyond Paraguay: fantastic metaphors for experimental programs and types

Ecuadorian, Bolivian and Peruvian architectural production has recently increased its international
recognition due to the work of several collectives of young architects such as CITIO, Futura Natura
and Al Borde. As previously stated, despite the differences in these countries’ historic and cultural
backgrounds the Inmundo’s fantastic connotation is at the core of this contemporary production.
For instance, in its book Las Tres Esperanzas (The Three Hopes), the Quito-based office Al Borde
showcases a historical sequence of actions in Puerto Cabuyal ten years after the inauguration of the
first pavilion conceived by the architects and the people in its community school. Each stage of the
project – a “hope” – corresponds to an epic metaphor: the ship, denoting the beginning of the
initiative —the classroom “Nueva Esperanza”—where this magic journey first began (the book itself
is a ship traveling across knowledge); the snake, or the multifunctional room named “Esperanza
Dos” (the snake is a metaphor of the shape of the pavilion’s plan); and “the octopus”, which is the
name given by the community to the “Última Esperanza”, containing the teachers’ house and new
rooms. The cover of the book illustrates a map of the ship which simultaneously diagrams the Última
Esperanza’s distribution and elevations —the shape of its plan recalls an octopus because of its
multiple “arms” (the ails of the structure).

The Al Borde team had used another metaphor, a typological association to the octopus, envisaging
the very function of the building: the “panoptic”. While “the octopus” also has to do with the
pedagogic strategy used in the school for the education of kids (every student assumes a different
role in a specific activity and they all learn the importance of cooperation for succeeding), “the
panoptic” describes the scheme of the pavilion’s plan: a four-nave structure whose center allows
visual control on the rest of the experimental areas: the crafts room, the kitchen, the nursery and
the “knowledge” room. Thanks to the diffuse enclosures of the building, the visual control from its
core extends beyond its limits, toward the horizon in the sea. Nonetheless, as Felipe Gangoneta (the
school’s creator and mentor) states, the Three Hopes, and specially the Last Hope, are a manifesto
of both a collaborative process in architectural creation and the need for physical spaces for a less
repressive system of primary education, one whose only master were the surrounding nature and
the sea.

In the inmundo, these manifestos are supported by metaphors which usually relate to more majestic
types of buildings – probably those depicted in fictional stories: in another country lacking coasts –
Bolivia –, the engineer and self-taught architect Freddy Mamani has built an abundant series of
private buildings which, corporately, have contributed to the transformation of the landscape in the
city of El Alto. As a consequence of the radical social and economic changes ensued after Evo
Morales’s mandate in the 2000s – which allowed the consolidation of an indigenous high-middle
class –, many Aimara families increased their income from mining activity. Contrary to what had
usually happened with middle classes in Latin American countries, this emergent class’s imaginary
did not adapt to the Western aspirations of pursuing white peoples’ lifestyle: Aimaras feel proud of
their festive traditions and clothing aesthetics, which recrate the geometric and chromatic patterns
of their textile crafts. Much has been said about this feature, but not from the textile metaphor of
Gottfried Semper regarding the tectonic character of the architecture (which could fit better in

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Gabinete de Arquitectura’s or Al Borde’s works) but pointing to the colorful and picturesque façades
and the decorations of the ballrooms created by Mamani, an Aimara himself.

The coexistence of the ballrooms and housing for the richest families of El Alto – the so-called cholets
– validates the name Mamani gave to the hybrid buildings that contain them, the “Neo-Andean
Palaces”: a metaphor evoking the royal lineage that connects the Aimaras with the Tiahuanaco
empire, which had occupied the surroundings areas of the Titicaca lake. The curious fact is that such
a vertical type of building, with a complex program including stores in the basement, ballrooms in
the upper floors and apartments for rent – in addition to the aforementioned chalets – has no
precedent in the rural environment. The program and typology are a consequence of the
accelerated urban growing of El Alto and its commercial dynamics; they relate more to the hôtels
particuliers built by urban bourgeoisie in France during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Consciously
or not, Mamani’s work goes beyond its frequent designation as “mere decoration”: it is a
metaphoric manifesto of the new place of an ethnical group and emerging social class in a continent
mostly oriented by neo-liberal predispositions.

Final considerations: towards a new mundus

While Inmundo and other metaphors from the edge of the world result useful for understanding the
complexities and singularities of the culture and territory where Paraguayan, Bolivian and Ecuador
architectures stand, they remain insufficient for accomplishing their pedagogic goal with local
communities who become the builders of their own houses and facilities. Enrique Villacís, partner
of the Ecuadorian studio EnSuSitio and contributor in Al Borde’s La Última Esperanza, evidences this
limitation while explaining the methodology of “Con Lo Que Hay”, the studio he coordinates at
Universidad Católica de Ecuador (PUCE) since 2010. More than an average course in architectural
projects, “Con Lo Que Hay” is recognized as a numerous collective of young architects in training,
whose products include finished projects (incorporating participative design processes) and
educational material for communities in need. Since the future users are the project coauthors and
masons, Con Lo Que Hay produces illustrated instruction manuals for construction and
maintenance, which lack of the poetics in books such as Las Tres Esperanzas but remain efficient
and clear to its readers, due to the priorization in developing technical skills applied to real
commissions over a theoretical approach (even if most of the Paraguayan rhetorical thinking is
directly related to the material circumstances of making architecture). The collective’s name itself
is here the metaphor which explains a system of work: in Latin America, where natural resources
and land abound but are unfairly distributed, we should be wise and solve the architectural problem
I the same way we treat our illness or feed our kids: we make with what is available nearby.

Furthermore, con Lo Que Hay and its fellow communities and institutions (in addition to PUCE,
universities and companies from Germany, Costa Rica, Peru and the USA have participated in
different editions of the workshop) can still be considered as producers of the Inmundo, not only
because of the ambiguous conditions where their architectural projects emerge, but because of the
epic narratives behind each project, from people’s daily life. As an example, it is worth mentioning
“La Casa de Meche” initiative (2017), sponsored by local chocolate company Pacari: after Con Lo
Que Hay’s experience, EnSuSitio organized a workshop for Meche and her neighbors (a group of
cacao growers), in order to teach them good practices for reconstructing their houses, devastated
by 2016 earthquake, by using local supplies like bamboo and rammed earth.

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In conclusion, the inmundo builders do not pretend to fund a new center of the international
architectural thinking; however, the current recognition of Paraguayan, Bolivian or Ecuadorian
architectures from “experts” belonging to the mundus, regardless their geographic proximity (like
influential metropoles such as São Paulo, where all this acknowledgement started), was enough for
creating rumors abroad about the quality of their works; for introducing these architects’
trajectories in the mainstream, sometimes in paradoxical opposition to local skepticism. As a result
of this foreigner interest, one can find the permanent exchange between Benítez and Corvalán and
some of the most relevant Latin American architects of their generation (Brazilians Ângelo Bucci,
Álvaro Puntoni, Spanish-Ecuadorian José María Sáez, Colombian Felipe Uribe, etc.); the presence
and award of pavilions by Paraguayan studios in different editions of the Venice Biennale and
exhibitions consecrated to “emerging South American” architectures worldwide. Meanwhile, voices
from the “official” architectural and academic scene in South America condemn the works of
collectives such as Al Borde, in Ecuador, and Mamani in Bolivia, due to their “povera” aesthetics in
the first case, and to the misinterpretation of pre-Hispanic geometries in the latter, resulting in a
kitsch language. For illustrating this phenomenon, Benítez usually quotes Gabriela Mistral’s epitaph
by Nicanor Parra, regarding his own stance before the local critics:

I am Lucila Alcayaga
alias Gabriela Mistral
First I won the Nobel
and then the National
Although I’m dead
I still feel bad
because I never received
the Premio Municipal21.

Does the global admiration for its architecture imply the destruction of the inmundo and the
foundation of a new mundus? Would local indifference and criticism be a mechanism of
preservation of the edge of the world?

References

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Benítez, Solano. “Fragments of a letter + Parallell Chronicles… of Contemporary Heroes.” In After

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Bossi, Laura. “Javier Corvalán. Giacomo Favillj. Punto di Svolta.” Domus, 968, 2013: 38-45.

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