The Past Is The Future

A new generation of Paraguayan architects is creating simple structures from clay, mud, timber and other humble materials that both rebuke the doctrine of Modernism and argue for primitive building techniques as one response to the world’s environmental crisis.

- Michael Snyder

Until less than a century ago, the Ayoreo peoples of Paraguay lived nomadically in the Chaco, a hot, dry region of savannas and thorn forests covering nearly 200 million acres spread across western Paraguay, southeastern Bolivia, northern Argentina and a small fringe of southern Brazil, a region once known by the Spanish as the infierno verde, or “green hell.” The Ayoreo were resourceful in building their modest shelters: Depending on the materials available to them, they might construct a low dome of leaves over branches cut from quebracho (axe breaker) trees, dig the hot earth out from underneath until they reached the cooler subsoil, then mix that excavated dirt with cactus sap, spreading the resultant thick paste between the leaves of the roof above to waterproof it. Settled into the hollowed ground beneath the dome, the interiors were cool and dim, a reprieve from the forest’s hostility. “These shelters don’t get recognition for being ‘green’ or ‘eco-friendly’, ” says the 50-year-old architect José Cubilla, who’s based in Asunción, Paraguay’s capital, a slow-paced riverside city built at the point where the Chaco in the west meets the iridescent meadows and forests that unfurl across the country’s east.

“But this is what interests me: obvious things, obvious solutions, simple materials.”