The Environmental Design department at Otis College of Art and Design is pleased to announce the Ecuadorian architecture firm, Al Borde, as the 2021-2022 Donghia Designer-in-Residence. Marialuisa Borja will represent the Al Borde collective in a presentation of a public lecture on March 17, 2022, which will take place on Otis’s Goldsmith campus in Los Angeles for the Otis Community, as well as virtually via Zoom for the general public. Borja also will conduct a one-week Master Class for Otis students and alumnx between March 17 and 23. More information about the public lecture can be found here.
“We are very excited that Al Borde will extend our history and practice of providing a unique, culturally-immersive design experience for students in the Donghia Master Class, and that Marialuisa Borja will direct a small group of Environmental Design juniors, seniors, and alumnx in a rehabilitation project that will address the history, culture, physical environment, and future of Quito, Ecuador,” says Environmental Design Chair Linda Pollari. “Students and alumnx participating in the Donghia Master Class will be introduced to the firm’s focus on vernacular practices and upcycled materials through the conversion of a former home in Quito’s heritage area into the firm’s offices.”
The Donghia Master Class allows students and alumnx to spend 30-plus hours with a designer from outside of the United States, working on a project sited in the designer’s home country. Recent Donghia Master Classes explored repurposing a derelict power station in Lagos, Nigeria with Kunlé Adeyemi; rehabilitating three historical buildings on Mumbai’s waterfront in India into public maritime museums with Geeta Mehta; and creating a responsible urban regeneration plan for Xochimilco, Mexico with Tatiana Bilbao. Other Donghia Master Class projects were sited in Barcelona, Spain; Beijing, China; Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Tripoli, Lebanon.
Of Al Borde, Laura Drouet and Oliver Lacrouts wrote in “100 Best Architecture Firms” in the March 2019 issue of Domus: “Al Borde is the Ecuadorian architecture firm founded in 2007 by Pascual Gangotena (Quito, 1977), David Barragán (Quito, 1981), Marialuisa Borja (Quito, 1984), and Esteban Benavides (Quito, 1985). Featured in landmark exhibitions, such as Think Global, Build Social! Architectures for a Better World (Vienna, 2014) and Reporting from the Front at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennial, the group is known for aiming to turn scarcity into an aesthetic and socially empowering asset. Convinced that the strength of an architectural project lies in the later autonomy of its users, Al Borde’s design and decision-making process rely on the involvement of the community in all phases of planning and construction, and the systematic exploration of the local context. From Escuela Nueva Esperanza (2009), a rural school in the coastal village of Cabuyal, to the Culunco house (2014), a semi-buried family home, and the House of the Flying Beds (2017), a renovated historic property in the city of Ibarra, each of its projects is shaped by vernacular practices and natural or upcycled materials available on-site. Habitually working with small construction budgets, the team behind Al Borde (which was shortlisted for the Swiss Architectural Award in 2018) recently started to work on projects in emergency contexts. Their Post-Earthquake Prototype (2017), for instance, was developed following the earthquake that shook the coast of Ecuador in April 2016.”
This 14th consecutive Donghia Designer-in-Residency is made possible through another generous grant from the Angelo Donghia Foundation, a privately-held, not-for-profit organization created under the will of the late Angelo Donghia. The Foundation provides support for two distinct fields: advancement of education in the field of interior design, and initiatives pertaining to the discovery of the causes of AIDS and its related diseases, and their methods of treatment.
The Residency is organized by Otis College’s Environmental Design department, which offers two curricula addressing the spatial design fields: the multi-disciplinary Architecture/Landscape/Interiors curriculum, and the new, as of Fall 2021, Interiors + Furniture curriculum.
More information about attending the public lecture in-person on Otis’s Goldsmith campus in Los Angeles, or via Zoom, can be found at this link.
Main image: Al Borde, from left: Esteban Benavides, Marialuisa Borja, David Barragán, and Pascual Gangotena, photographed by JAG Studio. Second image: Las Tres Esperanzas, Puerto Cabuyal, Manabí, Ecuador, by Al Borde; photographed by JAG Studio.