Project Details

General Information

The City of Indigenous Arts (CAI) is a cultural and urban restoration project positioned where the Mololoa River intersects one of the city’s main roads. Designed as something more than a group of buildings, the CAI operates as an integrated and symbolic system of history, culture, architecture, landscape, mobility, urban and social amendment.

Through a complex that consists of four buildings and a series of open public spaces, the project restores a previously neglected site, while celebrating the cultural legacy of original communities, therefore the architectural project draws from the geometric beliefs and spatial cosmogonies found in indigenous patterns and motifs. These principles are reinterpreted to define a participatory layout that places artisans and their craft at the center.

The materiality of the building, both a regional material and a high-performing building unit, strengthens both, the project's structural integrity and the environmental responsiveness, while evoking a sense of belonging, cultural legacy and historical and material continuity.

Through spaces for learn, exhibit, and commerce, as well as recreational and ecological interventions along the riverbank, the CAI becomes a living crucible for cultural preservation and exchange, enabling the sharing and appreciation of indigenous territories and knowledge at multiple scales of daily life.

Creative Solution (Creativity/Innovation)

We believe, that in most cases, innovation comes from the study of the history of each territory and in the reinterpretation of local knowledge, especially when it arises from facing the creation of public spaces where communities should thrive. The whole project is based on these readings.

To reinterpret the symbolic system of the original communities and transform it into a flexible and active urban site is the core idea of CAI, where we believe the innovation of its architecture is found. We believe that the future rests coded in the past., waiting to be decoded to foster the present.

Social Impact (Inspiration/Impact)

Today, the CAI actively serves as a frame for events required by the city and its communities. Here, architecture resists monumentality and embraces the everyday (brickwork, plazas, porous borders) allowing culture and vegetation to return. It creates spaces for learning, gathering, and exchange, fostering new forms of collective life rooted in empathy and cultural continuity.

The CAI is not a closed project, but a site for transformation that listens to layered histories and amplifies the living knowledge of native and modern communities. It stands as a testament to alternative evolutions, where architecture becomes a space for dialogue, repair, and belonging.

Participation/Cooperation

CAI was commissioned by federal and local governments and was developed in close coordination with them, as well as with the users of the former market, park and plazas. Throughout the design process, the project was presented to the interested local communities for dialogue and feedback. It was adjusted accordingly.

Vision for the Future

Rather than imposing a fixed aesthetic or use, the project is a process of transformation. We believe that the future must be welcomed by flexibility and possibilities for change. The ever-shifting river, the atemporality of ancestral techniques, and the city’s constant transformation are some examples to draw meaning from, when envisioning futures. Collective spaces such as these, advocate for the construction of communities involved with their territory and with each other. This model, this way of reading the land and the territory, we believe, is pertinent in diverse contexts and latitudes.