Viewpoint: Self-Construction, Vernacular Materials, and Democracy

Building: Los Bestias, Lima, 19841987

Dorota Biczel

Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum,

Volume 20, Number 2, Fall 2013, pp. 1-21 (Article)
Published by University of Minnesota Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bdl/summary/v020/20.2.biczel.html

Access provided by The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries (12 Mar 2014 02:00 GMT)

D orota B iczel

Viewpoint: Self-Construction, Vernacular

Materials, and Democracy Building
Los Bestias, Lima, 19841987

A stark, dark form intrudes upon the blank, almost white background of the sky (Figure 1). Out
of the solid blackness that occupies the entire
lower quarter of the image, four upright torsos
emerge, melded with their support, looking almost like sculptural busts. The two on the right
are frozen in seemingly pensive poses, as their
arms appear to be tightly clasped around their
chests. The two on the left become nearly indistinguishable from the vertical poles surrounding
them. A piece of flapping, torn cloth is stretched

between the four forms that extend upward, cutting the picture plane. The image evokes a flattened silhouette of a makeshift, storm-battered
sailship, captured cruising against the bright
sun. One thing is certain: even if the figures look
stoic, the material forms within which they are
embedded manifest signs of fatigue, wear, or
incompletenessripped, twisted, flawed geometries tied with a string. Whether these are pirates or survivors, their destination remains unknown. Perhaps because of the association with
Figure 1. One of
the installations
from Los Bestias
project D
es-hechos en
arquitectura, December
1984. Campus of
Universidad Ricardo
Palma, Santiago de
Surco, Lima. Courtesy
ofArchivo Bestiario.

Figure 2. Schematic map

of the central districts
of Lima, showing
major communication
arteries. Los Bestias
interventions indicated
are (1)Primer esquisse
del bestiario, (2)Deshechos en arquitectura,
(3)Denuncia por la vida,
(4)Rockacho, (5)La
semana de integracin
cultural latinoamericana
(SICLA), (6)El carpa
teatro del puente Santa
Rosa, and (7)Lima
Utopa mediocre.

the ship and the precariousness of the construction, for me this image points to the quality of
a pirate urbanization, typical of the exploding
metropolises of the so-called Third World.1
These pirates, imbricated with the imperfect construction, are not urban squatters, who
have constituted the major challenge to urban
policies all over the planet, but a bunch of young
architects who studied at the Lima-based Universidad Ricardo Palma in the early 1980s.2 Between
1984 and 1987, an amorphous, fluctuating group
of students at the university, calling themselves
Los Bestias (The Beasts), realized a number of
anarchist, informal architectural interventions
on campus and in various sites of the Peruvian
capital (Figure 2). Because they built them with
their own hands, using industrial discards, recycled junk, and cheap, traditional construction
materials (such as bamboo cane and reed mats),

they earned the nicknames architects-masons,

architects with dirty faces, and kings of trash.3
The groups activities occurred during the
bloodiest period of the Peruvian Internal Conflict (19802000), when the very concept of democracy was under assault as a result of extreme
violence unleashed by all sides involved.4 The
armed conflict between the Maoist rebel groups,
led by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), on the
one hand, and the military forces of the state, on
the other, caused irreversible changes in the material and social fabric of Lima. It profoundly affected the lives of ordinary people and the options
of young architects alike. Taking the phrase democracy building as an architectural metaphor,
I trace how the interventions of Los Bestias rear
ticulated the meaning of the term democracy.
Through their projects Los Bestias responded to
the dwindling possibility of making even a mod-

Rmac
4
6

Cercado de Lima
7

Torres de San Borja

2
Santiago de Surco

3
Callao

1
Miraflores

B UI L DI N G S & L A N DSCA P E S 20, no . 2, F A LL 201 3

500 1000 1,500 m

est life happen amid the escalating war between

the Shining Path and the government.5 Aligning
their tactics with the evanescent nature of ordinary, everyday practice and asserting the value
of self-construction, the group engaged in a productive effort to generate alternatives or antidotes
to the unfolding social disintegration.
The ephemeral experiments and constructions of Los Bestias wedged themselves in between the eclipsing modernism promoted by the
state and the rising Limean critical regionalism
sponsored by a handful of upper-class private investors. On the one hand, the radical affirmation
of the grassrootsexpressed through actions
of self-construction and land invasionworked
against the modernist obsession with centralized planning by experts that drove the career of
the president-architect Fernando Belande Terry
and the vast majority of his public policies during
his fifty-year career.6 On the other, the collective
articulation of the groups proposals and their
engagement with molding some kind of a community sharply distinguished Los Bestias from
the inward-oriented, private concerns of their
teachers, who were of the generation associated
with critical regionalism.
The projects Des-hechos de arquitectura (1984),
El carpa teatro del puente Santa Rosa (1986), and
LimaUtopa mediocre (1987) characterize distinct stages in the groups trajectory.7 They range
from a self-organized, anarchistic intervention into the university campus to collaboration
with the municipal government and a theoretical
urban
istic proposal encompassing the dynamics of the Peruvian capital. Self-construction
and the pragmatic employment of recycled and
cheap, easily available, vernacular materials are
two common threads that bring these projects
together. The question of methods and materials is intimately intertwined with the problem of
who and for whom. For Los Bestias material was
never inherently endowed with meaning. It was
just the stuff that was there, available at hand
the mundane stuff that could acquire a symbolic
or representational value only through pragmatic
and functional use in the collaborative process
of the elaboration of specific proposals.8 The poignant title of their last project, LimaA Medio-

cre Utopia, can be seen as harkening back to the

prejudices associated both with self-construction
itself and with its material forms. At the same
time, its very name undermines shiny visions of
the top-to-bottom-implemented futures promised by violent political regimes of the era. Los
Bestias rejected totalizing, teleological utopias of
the discourses of revolution and modernization.
What was important was the creative process of
carving out the independent, autonomous space
for the fluid, collective body in the making. The
groups attitude salvaged the critical, liberatory
promise of modernity and modern vanguards in
which the emancipated self did not lose sight of
a collective social horizon. Yet it also modified
the modern stance in a crucial way: the architects
did not act as experts but rather articulated their
position from the perspective of praxis of the inhabitants of the city.9
If by the early 1980s Lima was an exploding,
heterogeneous metropolis that the official policies could not control or contain, similarly, Los
Bestias were never a formalized group or a closed
collective; rather, their number fluctuated between a dozen and forty and, sometimes, even
more.10 As they stated: We dont consider ourselves a group, we unite people who want to liberate the creative ability (the creative beast) that they
already possess. The Beast is any student who produces artistic, cultural, [or] social work, and who
wants to make it known.11 They also consciously
took up an oppositional stance against their institution: We demonstrate our attitude of negation
with our informal language and our anarchist
position. We aim to unite with the cultural movement that is being born in Lima. What we want
is to introduce in the context of the University the
reality that exists outside of the bars of its perimeters.12 Therefore, their adversarial position was
not just an expression of youthful nihilism but a
call for the recognition of the radically new reality
of the citya reality shaped by extreme political
violence and internal migration from the provinces into the capital.13
The Urban Landscape of Lima in the 1980s
Between 1945 and the late 1980s, the population of Lima skyrocketed from 600,000 to over

DOR OT A BI CZ E L, SEL F-CONSTRU CTION, VERNACU L AR MATERIAL S, AND D EMOCRACY BU ILD IN G

Figure 3. Street-food
vendors in the Historic
Center of Lima, 1987.
Photograph taken
by members of Los
Bestias in the process of
preparing the urbanistic
proposal LimaUtopa
mediocre. Courtesy of
Archivo Bestiario.

7 million inhabitants, 50 percent of whom lived

in the squatter-origin settlements (known as barriadas or pueblos jvenes) on the peripheries and
25 percent in the rental slums of the center of the
city.14 In the 1980s the bodies of these mostly Andean migrants turned into a battlefield on which
two opposing factions of the Peruvian Internal
Conflict waged a war in the name of ideological
visions. The guerilla group Shining Path took up
arms to implement its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
revolutionary program, and the state, while unleashing its violence against the subversion, targeted the easiest-to-identify suspectsthe marginalized, Quechua-speaking poor
ultimately

B UI L DI N G S & L A N DSCA P E S 20, no . 2, F A LL 201 3

taking the lives of almost as many victims of the

conflict as the clandestine groups.15 A bloody war,
which in its initial stages primarily consumed
the provinces, exacerbated the rapid influx of the
migrants into the capital. In search of reprieve,
people flocked to the city and erected on its outskirts makeshift shelters along the dusty mountains. They also appropriated the dilapidating
Historic Center, which its traditional inhabitants,
the upper-middle class, abandoned in favor of new
suburban districts (Figure 3). Although they were
not entirely free from clandestine or institutional
terror, between 1979 and 1985 alone, the number
of the new barriadas grew from ten to forty-five.16
This volatile period, with its acute political, economic, and social crises, brought into sharp focus
the failure of the oligarchic, technocratic state,
which compromised itself with its administrative
ineptitude and its hard-handed turn against the
populace.17
The material act of taking over spaceland
invasionbrought into existence the barriadas
of Lima, posing the main challenge of the second half of the twentieth century for architects,
planners, and other decision makers.18 If the aspiration of the modern state was the total management of population, then one of the most
visible, palpable mediums of such disciplining
procedures was built form. This modern utopia endeavored to embody and reproduce itself
through architecture, whose transparency, luminosity, and hygiene would organize and order the
ostensibly unruly, filthy bodies and cohere them
into a new and improved model social corpus.
Although these lofty plans collapsed elsewhere,
they had a long life in Peru: the year 1980 was
marked by the return to power for the second
term in office of the president-architect Fernando
Belande Terry. Arguably, his entire political career was built upon an architectural rhetoric, and
the solution to the problem of social housing was
the constant of his platform.19 Both of his terms
in office oversaw construction of new, centrally
planned residential complexes in the capital and
other citiesmost notably, in Lima, San Felipe
and Santa Cruz in the 1960s and Torres de San
Borja in the early 1980s (Figure 4).20 The projects
of the latter term were championed in an official

publication with the telling title Revolucin habitacional en democracia: Plan de vivienda del gobierno peruano, 198085 (Housing revolution in
democracy: Housing plan of the Peruvian government, 198085).21 Its title adhered to the vanguardist discourse of revolution, implying both a
radical break with the past (the San Borja Towers
were supposed to open up a new era in the history of Peru) and the dependence of the very occurrence of that fracture on the social condition
of democracy.22
Yet already by the beginning of the second half
of the twentieth century, the programmatic drive
toward development produced an unexpected corollary ultimately responsible for reopening rifts
in the spatial and ideological matrix of the nation-states: the migrant, the unwanted stranger.
Not the benign wanderer who comes today and
goes tomorrow, but the person who comes today
and stays tomorrow, she polluted a neatly imagined fabric of the social organization of everyday
life.23 In Peru a migrant from the provinces, a
cholo, came to signify the aberrant, unpredictable
actor who did not fit into the spatial and ideological matrix of the Peruvian nation-state.24 She, an
explosive element, undermined the neat compartmentalization of the planned whole; she infringed on the design of the envisaged structure,
appropriated it, and resisted integration into preestablished patterns. She refused being administered and carved out her own space, constructed
on the bases and priorities that contradicted purist official tenets. Yet the migrants needs and
demands also highlighted the phenomenon of
urbanization without industrialization and the
complete inadequacy of centralized housing and
urban-planning policies.25
Even grand complexes like the Torres de San
Borja could not come near to meeting the actual housing needs in the vertiginously growing
megalopolis: there were more than 400,000 candidates for the 2,405 available units.26 Critiques
of Belandes projects also pointed out formalist
and stylistic shortcomings of the towers, accusing them of the lack of freshness and quality of
the anterior housing projects and of being dull
groupings of blocks lacking in spatial organization.27 Finally, according to the most radical

Marxist stance, Belandes relentless promotion

and reproduction of the principles of functionalism and rationalism, firmly rooted in the logic of
an urban plan, were the prime means of capitalist production of urban space, inherently geared
toward the middle and upper classes while leaving out those in most dire need.28
Peruvian architecture of the 1980s has been
described, critiqued, and classified against the
perceived failures of the modernism promoted
by Belande. Award-winning shopping malls
and headquarters of financial institutions that
emerged during the decade are seen as examples of an inevitable turn toward rootless postmodernism and the assertion of a new power:
neoliberal capital.29 The better incarnations
of the architectural practice are categorized
rather credulously applying Kenneth Framptons
termas examples of the flourishing critical regionalism.30 Its iconic example is the beach house
Casa Ghezzi, designed in 1984 by URP professor
Juvenal Baracco (Figure 5).31 It is one of the four
homes built by Baracco in a gated community in
the district of Lurn, some forty kilometers south
of Lima. The house is extolled for the use of indigenous, traditional materialsits spacious interior patios and ample porches overlooking the
Pacific Ocean are shaded by large bamboo-cane
structuresand evocation of the pre-Hispanic
architectural forms of the Peruvian coast.32
What is problematic about such a formalist
reading of architectureand here, I echo Keith

Figure 4. Neighborhood
complex Torres de
San Borja, San Borja,
Lima. Reprinted from
Revolucin habitacional
en democracia: Plan de
vivienda del gobierno
peruano, 19801985
(Lima: Empresa Nacional
de Edificaciones, 1985).

DOR OT A BI CZ E L, SEL F-CONSTRU CTION, VERNACU L AR MATERIAL S, AND D EMOCRACY BU ILD IN G

Figure 5. Juvenal
Baracco, Casa Ghezzi.
Malecn Jahuay, Lote 5,
La Barca Beach, Lurn,
Lima. Designed in 1983,
constructed in 1984.
Courtesy of Juvenal
Baracco.

Eggeners critique of critical regionalismis

that the very presence of a particular construction material is taken to mean something absolutely specific and the form of a building to
signify with equal efficacy.33 The appearance
of local materials, eucalyptus wood and bamboo cane, in Baraccos beach houses is equated
with the return to a somehow more authentic
and more noble
perhaps, because explicitly
antimodernist

tradition. However, the context and the subtleties of their deployment and
functions are completely disregarded. This has
profound repercussions in terms of the social
and public roles of architecture. Baracco and
his generation became disenchanted with a bureaucratic system that would simply not accept
experimental prototypes for mass housing that
used vernacular materials. Those materials
were associated with poverty and backwardness
and, as such, perceived as an offense to decent
people.34 As a result, these architects turned to
a new client base: an emergent affluent middle
class.35 Simultaneously, they also rejected what
they saw as an ideology and rhetoric of progress,
abandoning the interest in large-scale, futureoriented public plans in favor of a psychological
concern with the personal problems of the
client, the designer, or the project.36 Hence, the
indigenous and the local were divorced and
displaced from the people who most commonly
relied on them; instead, they were situated in a
gated community, separatedboth physically

B UI L DI N G S & L A N DSCA P E S 20, no . 2, F A LL 201 3

and legallyfrom the larger concerns of the city,

and used to enhance the leisure of the privileged
class. This shift toward indigenous materials in
design can be seen as further reproducing and
reinforcing the operative principle Incas s, indios
no (Incas yes, Indians no)the politics that glorifies the indigenous past while ignoring (if not
outright quelling) the realities of the indigenous
present.37
Simultaneously, throughout the 1980s, the
acute housing crisis deepened as the construction industry was stalled by the progressively
worsening economic crisis and state initiatives were marred by corruption scandals. Even
though neither the state nor the scant investment
capital would respond to the needs of the population, voices against self-construction dominated
official discussions. On the one hand, the efforts
of migrants to provide any kind of roof for their
heads were condemned as total chaos. On the
other, many Marxist critics rebuked the official
permissiveness that turned a blind eye toward
and legalized informal processes. They criticized
such policy as a reactionary solution that only exacerbated the problem while the existing superstructure, responsible for its emergence in the
first place, remained unchanged and unscathed.38
Los Bestias: The Unmaking and Remaking
ofArchitecture
The political and economic reality of Lima of
the 1980s denied young architects professional
opportunities to exercise their craft; the system
and circumstances produced the architects
that could not practice architecturea paradox, given the rate of urban growth.39 Nonetheless, Los Bestias chose to operate within the
realm of their immediate possibilities. They
undertook the actions necessary to constitute
the kind of future thatunlike totalizing, teleological utopias of either revolution or capitalist
modernizationcould not be either known or
designed.40 Adopting a tactic of land occupation
and deploying vernacular and recycled materials
that were available at hand, Los Bestias began
by realizing a number of informal architectural
interventions, which they called esquisses, on the
grounds of the Ricardo Palma University. The

first esquisse took place in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century villa on the corner of Arequipa Avenue and Dos de Mayo Street in the Miraflores
district in September 1984. It was an impromptu
appropriation of the patio for an event, a festival of art and music, presented on a stage put
together with broken desks pulled out from storage, underneath a canopy woven from colorful
yarn (Figure6).
The groups second large project, realized between December 7 and 21, 1984, responded to the
lack of a dedicated locale for the Department of
Architecture. Called Des-hechos en arquitectura,
it decisively reorganized the space of the newly
constructed Universidad Ricardo Palma campus
in the district of Surco, claiming the area for Los
Bestias themselves. Since the Department of Architecture did not have its own building at the
time, classes and workshops were divided between the Department of Economy and the Department of Modern Languages.41 On the large,
rectangular plaza between these two blocky
buildings, parceled out by the grid of walkways
and a parking lot, Los Bestias created a number
of installations that they insisted spoke of their

reality. Each of these sculptural constructions

was dedicated to a social theme that the group
considered pertinent. These themes ranged from
consumerism to terrorism, women, food, and architecture. Many of the individual installations
were also embellished with a prolific number
of hand-painted posters, banners, and signs.
One of them, in an effort to compel the groups
peers and assert that the whole enterprise was
working to reveal their reality, pleaded, Help
us. Work with us or help us with the expenses
(Figure7). Some of them contained poems, while
others had a much more programmatic character, speaking of the role of architects and architecture in society. Perhaps somewhat ironically,
given his professional endeavors at the time, Los
Bestias quoted Juvenal Baracco. Addressing the
necessary transformation of the role of middleclass professionals, the quotation postulated an
individual ought to be capable of using his own
cultural background to work with the majority to
which he belonged.42
The rigid space of the plaza was altered not
only by the very presence of the unruly constructions but also by the fact that Los Bestias altered
Figure 6. Primer esquisse
del bestiario, September
1984. Department of
Architecture, Universidad
Ricardo Palma, currently
Centro Cultural Ccori
Wasi; corner of Arequipa
Avenue and Dos de Mayo
Street, Miraflores, Lima.
Courtesy of Archivo
Bestiario.

DOR OT A BI CZ E L, SEL F-CONSTRU CTION, VERNACU L AR MATERIAL S, AND D EMOCRACY BU ILD IN G

Figure 7. Los Bestias,

detail of one of the
installations from Deshechos en arquitectura,
December 1984. Campus
of Universidad Ricardo
Palma, Santiago de
Surco, Lima. Courtesy
ofArchivo Bestiario.

the pattern of established movement (Figure 8).

They gathered stones and rocks from the construction site and laid out new curvilinear pathways that traversed the space and led from one
installation to another. Multiple festive gates
whose organic forms and junky embellishments
contrasted sharply with the barren Brutalist design of the campuspunctuated these new
routes. These trails also physically connected the
dispersed architects themselves. Similarly, such
bringing together occurred through the incorporation of signs that pointed to various locations
that the Department of Architecture had intermittently occupied on Piura, Independencia, and
Dos de Mayo Streets (see Figure 7).
If the moniker of the entire project, Des-hechos
de arquitectura, can be understood as either the
remnants or the unmaking of architecture,
no other installation articulated Los Bestias position more eloquently and directly than a precarious shack assembled under the banner of the

B UI L DI N G S & L A N DSCA P E S 20, no . 2, F A LL 201 3

discipline (Figure 9). Its most crafted, crisp, and

professional-looking elements were the sign and
its geometric sans-serif lettering. Conversely, the
huts frame was erected using bamboo canes;
its sides were covered with planks of found plywood and cardboard; and its floor was laid out
with branches. The frail construction stood in
acute contradistinction to the solid brick-andconcrete buildings around it. For their installations Los Bestias used materials they could find
and salvage on site or acquire at very low cost.
These materials happened to be poor and commonly deployed in the so-called pueblos jvenes
(young settlements or, less euphemistically,
slums) of Lima. The vernacular, improvisational building components aligned Los Bestias
method with those used by squatters to claim the
hillsides of the capital. They brought informal architecture from the periphery into the center of
establishment. Yet, if the majority of installations
performed a symbolic function, a small bamboo

quincha, thatched with palm leaves and equipped

with fruit crates as seating, had a practical, utilitarian role: to provide shelter from the sun and
a gathering space to rest and talk (Figure 10).43
Hence, just like the winding pathways, it marked
the space for and by the collective itself.
With time, through word-of-mouth advertising, a cohort of visual artists, musicians, and theater groups coalesced around the group, and their
events quickly evolved into multimedia festivals,
incorporating rock and folk music, performance,
mural painting, art workshops, and scores of
other activities.44 Within a couple of years, however, the practice of Los Bestias would also transcend the world of the Limea youth subculture.
By 1985 municipal officials noticed their energy
and their ability to construct on shoestring budgets. As a result in 1986 the group was invited
to construct the architectural setting for two cultural endeavors: the folk art fair held during La
semana de integracin cultural latinoamericana
(SICLA; Week of Latin American Cultural Integration), which took place in the Parque de la
Exposicin in the center of the city, and El carpa

teatro del puente Santa Rosa (Tent theater of the

Saint Rose bridge).
El carpa teatro (Figure 11) was an arts center
established in the heart of Lima as a part of the
program of Popular Cultural Participation by the
municipal administration of the new mayor, Alfonso Barrantes, a leader of the leftist coalition
Izquierda Unida (United Left). Within the historical context of the decade, the emergence of this

Figure 8. View of Deshechos en arquitectura,

1984. Courtesy of Archivo
Bestiario.

Figure 9. Los Bestias,

Arquitectura from Deshechos en arquitectura,
1984. Courtesy of Archivo
Bestiario.

DOR OT A BI CZ E L, SEL F-CONSTRU CTION, VERNACU L AR MATERIAL S, AND D EMOCRACY BU ILD IN G

Figure 10. Los Bestias,

Quincha from Des-hechos
en arquitectura, 1984.
Courtesy of Archivo
Bestiario.

Figure 11. El carpa teatro

del puente Santa Rosa,
1986. Wall murals by
artist Herbert Rodrguez.
In the background (left)
is the historic Convent
of Santa Rosa of Lima.
Tacna Avenue, Cercado
de Lima, Lima. Courtesy
of Archivo Bestiario.

10

program was a rare opening in whichto use

the words of Manuel Castellsthe relationship
between the state and the city [was reconstructed]
on the basis of their mutual grassroots.45
Progressive-thinking municipal officials were

ready to welcome the spontaneous, rebellious social mobilization fueled by young artists in order
to channel it and engage disenfranchised inhabitants of El Cercado district.46 The Municipal Program of Popular Cultural Participation aimed
to embrace these diverse groups and recognize
the richness and variety of cultural forms that
they had developed. This was an anthropological vision of culture conceived from the bottom
up as an expression of the wide sectors of population. The municipality not only worked on

B UI L DI N G S & L A N DSCA P E S 20, no . 2, F A LL 201 3

mobilizing various neighborhood associations

but also sought their input and comments. We
want the organized community to decide on the
forms and priorities of the cultural activities in
their locality, proclaimed the widely distributed
promotional flyer.47 These goals of nurturing culture came from the understanding that social
problems of marginalized populations go far beyond narrowly understood economic issues and
that culture can be a useful tool of community
empowerment.48 The assumption was that the
people would actively participate in the endeavor.
The plan is not to offer great spectacles/tricks
to escape from reality. . . . The important thing
is that the public becomes actors and stops being
passive viewers.49
Despite a tight budget, the municipal officials
committed to transforming a dilapidated lot on
Tacna Avenue, in the center of the city, into an
environment that would support the creative,
liberating activities designed to take place inside.
Multiple agents contributed to the overhaul of the
space in its various stages. Initially, the very tent
for the performances was assembled by a circus
magician from the neighborhood, experienced
in creating such structures with canvas bags for
storing sugar and flour.50 Jos Nio, a professor
at the Universidad Ricardo Palma and a specialist in quincha construction, designed workshops
in the back of the lot. The task delegated to Los
Bestias was arguably their most ambitious and
most architectural assignment. Using what
they called nontraditional materials, Los Bestias erected the elaborate entrance to the theater
and visually organized the environment.51 Form
would not only make a symbolic statement but
also perform a utilitarian social function. As
before, they employed the stuff that was largely
rejected in contemporary architecture sponsored
by the state and private capitalthe stuff that, as
such, refuted the concrete material discourse of
modernism but that nonetheless had been used
for generations in traditional rural and popular
vernacular construction. To the customary assortment of eucalyptus timber, bamboo cane,
wood, and woven reed mats, they addedas in
their previous enterprisesrecycled and salvaged industrial materials.

The monumental gate, which welcomed the

visitors to El carpa teatro, was perhaps the most
noteworthy design element of the theaterfirst
of all, simply because of its sheer size (Figure 12).
The mostly wooden construction, three stories
high, towered over the mural-covered brick wall
surrounding the theater grounds. Two brightly
painted triangular pillars, built out of eucalyptus
and bamboo and tied together with rope, were
culminated with a large lattice arch. It was assembled from planks of wood that framed a pair
of circles with tiny diamond shapes in their centers. This structural element was devised to harmonize with its historical surroundings, echoing
the Baroque arches of the Convent of Santa Rosa,
located right next door on Tacna Avenue. The
gate was accompanied by an equally high bamboo tower, in which long, slender canes were ingeniously held together with car tires (Figure 13).
Whereas the entrance arch was reminiscent of

colonial buildings, in front of it the architects designed a plaza with two concentric circles carved
into the ground and laid out with stonea nod
to traditional Incan structures (Figure 14).52 As a
result, the entire structure was a heterogeneous
entity, with references to indigenous, colonial,
and popular contemporary traditions that paralleled the historical and social makeup of the city
of Lima.
In order to embrace the diverse groups and
fulfill the mission of the municipal program,all
events at the theater were free and open to the
public. They consisted of a mixture of tradition
ally understood spectatorship and events that
aimed to enable and encourage the creative skills
of ordinary individuals. Saturdays were dedicated to youth, with the evenings filled with
underground rock music, and Sundays were
planned for family programs, including concerts
of traditional Peruvian music and performances

Figure 12. Los Bestias,

entrance gate to El carpa
teatro, 1986. Courtesy of
Archivo Bestiario.

DOR OT A BI CZ E L, SEL F-CONSTRU CTION, VERNACU L AR MATERIAL S, AND D EMOCRACY BU ILD IN G

11

goal of also organizing the traveling exhibition

The Height and Crisis of the Aristocratic Neighborhood; and finally, a workshop of testimony and
oral history that was run by the students of the
School of Literature of San Marcos University.55
The six months of El carpa teatros operations
were widely hailed as a success:

Figure 13. Los Bestias,

entrance gate to El carpa
teatro during the process
of construction, 1986.
Courtesy of Archivo
Bestiario.

Figure 14. Los Bestias,

detail of the entrance to
El carpa teatro during the
process of construction,
1986. Courtesy of Archivo
Bestiario.

12

of childrens theater. Dozens of artists passed

through the Carpa scene (Figure 15). They included punk groups, the leading voice of Peru
vian black music, Susana Baca, and the now
legendary theater group Yuyachkani, which was
renowned for its collective, experimental crea
tion, deep engagement with grassroots community issues, and commitment to social mobilization and advocacy.53 The programming consisted
also of four workshops aimed at nurturing the
innate creativity of the population: an art workshop lead by the young but seasoned Herbert
Rodrguez;54 a theater workshop run by Mauro
Sifuentes; a photography workshop organized
by the group Agencia No. 2, which set itself the

B UI L DI N G S & L A N DSCA P E S 20, no . 2, F A LL 201 3

In its short but effective existence, [the theater]

managed to convene a good quantity of people
dedicated not only to a profitable business, not
only to entertainment and amusement, but also
to informing, teaching, and debating through different forms of artistic expression. . . . The people
of the neighborhood got engaged, the notice
spread through the blocks uptown and downtown,
through the peas . . . so, they came: mothers, fathers, children, the foreigners, the locals. . . . Many
people of different backgrounds and motivations
began to visit. . . . We believe that the people who
worked on this dream showed that with the imagination and will, you can do many things.56

This dream of El carpa teatro was the vision

of inclusive, participatory democracy. The municipality, which promoted its program with the
slogan United we can, divided we do nothing,
was open to embracing both unruly youth culture and the social groups disenfranchised by
traditional political processes. Within collaborative processes such as the creation of the theater,
conflict was bound to emerge, and Los Bestias
themselves attested to the fact that the transformation of conflict in order to achieve their
common goals was one of the main productive
challenges of their work.57 Inclusion of the multiplicity of voicesvoices of affirmation or dissent,
voices that might contradictwas at the core of
dynamics as small as Des-hechos de arquitectura
and El carpa teatro and as large as the emergence
of the grassroots movements of the Peruvian pobladores.58 In order to emerge collectively on the
social scene, however, both youth subculture and
newcomers to Lima had to claim space through
which they would assert and articulate their existence. As Henri Lefebvre postulated, the new
type of urban social relations could emerge only
if specialized knowledgethat of architects,

urban planners, and administratorswas unified with praxis, with the everyday lived actions
of human groups.59
According to architect and urbanist Wiley
Ludea, Peru has never really possessed public space.60 Historically, its vast lands have been
controlled, owned, and regulated by colonial
and postcolonial oligarchies that have ruled this
highly artificially constructed nation. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century,
modest grassroots claims to segments of privatized spacemade by the underprivileged newcomers from the Peruvian provinceswere seen
as contributions to the increasing fragmentation
of the capital.61 This challenge to traditionally understood public space also increased tensions between the criollo (creole) Limeos and the cholos
(Andean migrants).
Los Bestias projects were developed on the
principles of self-construction and collectivity.
Their continuous desire to open up their process
and involve other people should be read as an attempt to counteract the intensifying fragmentation of the country by materializing do-it-yourself
nichessuch as a spatially reorganized plaza of
the university campus or an urban theaterin
which shared or communal experiences could
take place.62 The group intruded upon spaces
they could not necessarily claim as legally theirs
in order to carve out independent liberated zones
where the creation of a total artwork could
occurplaces in which visual art, music, theater, poetry, pedagogy, and empowerment came
into spontaneous free play, bringing together
disparate, unruly free agents and engaging those
individuals who had been excluded from participation in the cultural projects in the capital.
As the civil war encroached upon Lima, however, any form of cultural, collective grassroots
expression became a suspicious site of potential political dissent that had to be quelled immediately. The decree of the Ministry of War
of July 4, 1986, permitted the organization of
cultural days on the condition that they would
not touch upon any political matters, include
protest music, or incorporate any act related to
the recent events in the prisons of the capital.63
That phrase referred to a brutal repression of

riots in Frontn, Lurigancho, and Santa Mnica

that resulted in nearly three hundred dead, including over one hundred prisoners who were
executed extrajudicially. Following the municipal elections of 1986, El carpa teatro was closed

Figure 15. Los Bestias

rock band performing
in El carpa teatro, 1986.
Courtesy of Archivo
Bestiario.

Figure 16. El carpa teatro

destroyed. Photograph
taken in the first days of
January 1987. Courtesy of
Archivo Bestiario.

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13

Figure 17. Los Bestias,

detail of one of six display
panels of the project
LimaUtopa mediocre,
1987. Plaza at the end of
the Paseo de la Repblica
taken over by selfconstructed architecture.
Center right, the Palace
of Justice; upper left, the
colorful Centro Cvico;
below Centro Cvico, the
Sheraton Hotel; below
the hotel, the Museo de
Arte Italiano. Courtesy of
Archivo Bestiario.

14

B UI L DI N G S & L A N DSCA P E S 20, no . 2, F A LL 201 3

promptly, and the fantastic decorations and constructions created by the artists and architects
were destroyed (Figure 16). Pervasive violence
and political pressures eventually fractured Los
Bestias, too, with the members of the group dispersing along d
istinctand sometimes much
more orthodoxpolitical lines.
Nonetheless, regardless of divisions within
the group, in this volatile context Los Bestias
final project must be seen as a defiant stance not
only against impotent official urban planning
and design policies but also against institutionalized violence and the crackdown of the state
on grassroots activities. In 1987
designated
by UNESCO as the International Year of
Shelterfor the Homelessthe Congreso Latino
americano de Escuelas y Facultades de Arquitectura (CLEFA; Latin American Congress of
the Schools and Departments of Architecture)
was held in Cuzco. Los Bestias presented to the
congress LimaA Mediocre Utopia, a critical
theoretical proposal in architecture and urban-

ism (Figures 17 and 18). The proposal staged a

takeover of the Historic Center of Limawith its
symbolic sites of governmental powerby rural
migrants. The people would occupy the Palace of
Justice, Centro Cvico (a New Brutalist complex
of government offices constructed in the early
1970s), the Sheraton Hotel, and the empty plaza
between them, reserved for the main station of
an electric train. They would invade the center,
using spatial channels provided by the nonfunctioning tracks and the main northsouth artery
of Paseo de la Repblica.64 There, they would
erect their ownmeaning self-constructed
buildings and institutions. They would also
transform the monotonous concrete greyness
of the city with a carnivalesque array of bright
colors of ludic aesthetics. Hence, Los Bestias recognized that space was, as Manuel Castells has
suggested of urban movements, necessary as a
physical base from which the populace could organize their autonomy against the institutional
power, that the control of space was a major

Figure 18. View of the

Paseo de la Repblica
from the Centro Cvico,
with the Palace of Justice
(lower left). Photograph
taken by the members
of Los Bestias in the
process of preparing
the urbanistic proposal
LimaUtopa mediocre.
Courtesy of Archivo
Bestiario.

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15

battle in the historic war between people and the

state.65 They rejected the power that sought to
discipline bodies through modern architecture
and brutal force and aligned themselves with
the values and materials of everyday, bottom-up,
need-responsive action and construction.
Conclusion
Los Bestias projects render visible a number of
issues thatto a large extentremain hidden
undercurrents of architectural practice and urban
life. The demands for physical spacesboth built,
constructed infrastructure and open spaces with
truly public accessunderlie the discourses of architectural and urban development. Its shape and
principle are at stake for politicians and their public policies and a wide variety of resistance movements alikefor the so-called global metropolises
and the Third World cities.66 As David Harvey has
recently written, The question of what kind of
city we want cannot be divorced from the question
what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of
social relations we seek, what relations to nature
we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold.67
In the context of urban regeneration projects,
architecture continues to be associated with
permanence and, especially in economically
depressed postindustrial areas, with expensive
landmark buildings, which are thought to be
capable of transforming secondary cities or districts into new cultural destinations.68 Despite
calls to the contrary, far less attention is paid to
provisional or ephemeral projects, particularly on
the policy level.69 Since the global fiscal crisis of
2008, however, it has arguably been temporary,
often vernacular architectural and infrastructural
enterprisesfood trucks, urban gardens, popup markets, and performance spacesthat have
most profoundly reshaped the spaces of everyday
urban action and interaction.70 Although some
are aimed at pragmatic change, other endeavors
blend architecture, art, and activism, inciting the
aesthetic and affective sensibilities of urban dwellers.71 This array of ephemeral projects can be seen
as yet another updated means of the grassroots
claiming the Lefebvrian right to the city.72
The assessment of such ventures is often dif-

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B UI L DI N G S & L A N DSCA P E S 20, no . 2, F A LL 201 3

ficult and messy, as the critic Mimi Zeiger has

recently claimed.73 Los Bestias projects remind
us that meaning is based on context and that appearance, material, or duration alone cannot be
used as effective criteria of evaluation. Thirty
years ago in Peru, seemingly emblematic bamboo could signify poverty in a squatter settlement, elitist critical regionalism in an upperclass architect-designed home, and do-it-yourself
democratic space in the installations by architecture students. Hence, the crucial question to ask
is, How do the functional uses of specific materials or approaches to design contribute to the
transformation of social relations and everyday
life in the city?
Los Bestias ephemeral, makeshift proposals
were crucial exercises in the grassroots efforts
to reformulate beliefs regarding who would have
access and how to access and attain the right to
the cityto planning and to utilization of urban
space. Between the presumed anarchism of the
squatter settlements and the planning of the
governmental and private-investment projects,
all struggled for control over the space of the
Peruvian capital. Los Bestias endeavors called
for a collective existence rooted in bottom-to-top
decision-making processes and vastly expanded
egalitarian participatory democracy. Their community would articulate itself from the ground
up, in opposition to homogeneous entities programmed from top to bottom by the dominant
ideologiesbe it the nascent neoliberal state or
the Leninist-Maoist cause of the relentless Shining Path. Instead, Los Bestias envisioned a nonhierarchical collective body that was organized,
to evoke the words of John Friedmann, in opposition to this world [of social planning and the
state], asserting itself in a struggle to open new
territories for itself.74 From the mundane conditions of the appalling present, from the detritus
of the quotidian, such a collective body worked
from the premise that neither ideological programs nor discipline and violence could inscribe
shared aspirations into the people. It refuted bureaucratic and authoritarian claims to social integration and coherence. Rather, it operated on
participatory, nonidentitarian principles of subversive, pragmatic realism of an anarchist kind.

Au t hor Bio gr a ph y
Dorota Biczel is a doctoral candidate at the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS)
in the Department of Art and Art History at The
University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation
research focuses on artistic and architectural
urban interventions and the production of space
in Lima, Peru, between 1978 and 1989.

No t es
1. I take the term pirate urbanization from Mike
Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006), Kindle edition, chap. 2. The image is a color photocopy
of the photograph of a quincha from the project Deshechos en arquitectura, realized in December 1984
on the campus of the Universidad Ricardo Palma in
Limas Surco district.
2. Among the groups members were visual artists
Alfredo Mrquez and lex ngeles; architects Jhoni
Marina, Jos Luis Garca, Juan Carlos Lpez, Sandro
Passalacua, Javier Bonifaz, and Claudia Fernndez;
and architectural historian Elio Martuccelli, who are
currently involved in preserving Los Bestias legacy.
Painter Herbert Rodrguez worked with the group
from the very beginning and, following the groups
dissolution in 1987, went on to form the graphic-arts
collective Taller NN with Mrquez, ngeles, Garca,
and another Beast, Enrique Quique Wong. The very
name of the group, like the amorphous body that constituted it, remains debatable: the projects were presented under the monikers Los Bestias, Las Bestias,
and El Bestiario, inspired by the title of the first collection of short stories by the Argentine writer Julio
Cortzar, Bestiario (1951).
3. Sissi Acha, Arquitectos con caras sucias, Amauta, November 13, 1986, 2223; Elio Martuccelli,
Des-hechos de arquitectura: Reyes de basura, reinas
de chatarra, Arquitextos 23 (2008): 7788. All the
translations from Spanish are the authors.
4. The Peruvian Internal Conflict lasted from 1980
to 2000. Its outbreak coincided with the first democratic elections following a twelve-year-long military
dictatorship and was marked by the burning of ballot
boxes in the Andean province of Ayacucho on the eve of
the 1980 presidential election. This gesture signaled
the taking up of arms against the state by the MarxistLeninist-Maoist guerilla group Partido Comunista del
PerSendero Luminoso (The Shining Path), joined

in 1984 by the Movimiento Revolucionario Tpac

Amaru (MRTA). The bloodiest conflict, following the
Conquest, in the history of Peru, it claimed nearly
70,000 lives, as accounted for by the Peruvian Truth
and Reconciliation Commission (Comisin de la Verdad y Reconciliacin; CVR). Massive crimes and abuses
of human rights occurred during the dictatorship of
Alberto Fujimori (19922000), even after the 1992
capture of the leader of Sendero, Abimael Guzmn. See
the commissions final report at C
omisin de la Verdad
y Reconciliacin, Informe Final, 2003, http://www
.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/index.php.
5. Activities of the group coincide with the administrations of the presidents Fernando Belande Terry
(198085) and Alan Garca (198590).
6. Fernando Belande Terry (19122002) was
the president of Peru for two nonconsecutive terms,
196368 and 198085. Educated at the University of
Miami and the University of Texas at Austin, he was
a main champion and political force behind the implementation of the principles of architectural modernism in the country, starting with the foundation
of the magazine El Arquitecto Peruano in 1937. For a
basic study in English, see Sharif Kahatt, Agrupacin
Espacio and the CIAM Peru Group, in Third World
Modernism, ed. Duanfang Lu, 85110 (New York:
Routledge, 2011). On Belandes deployment of the
discourse of indigenous patrimony during his political campaigns of the late 1950s and 1960s, see Luis
Castaeda, Pre-Columbian Skins, Developmentalist
Souls: The Architect as Politician, in Latin American
Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories, ed. Patricio del Real and Helen Gyger, 93114 (New York: Routledge, 2013).
7. Des-hechos en arquitectura does not have a straightforward translation into English. Deshecho is a past
participle of the verb deshacer, which means to undo,
to unmake, or to destroy. The title then could be
understood as Architecture unmade, Unmaking of
architecture, or, even, Remnants of architecture.
The English titles of the two following projects are
Tent Theater of the Saint Rose Bridge and LimaA Mediocre Utopia.
8. In a July 2011 interview, lex ngeles told me
that the group would have used spaceship materials
if they were something that was there.
9. This analysis owes the most to the writings
of Henri Lefebvre. I relied on Henri Lefebvre, The

DOR OT A BI CZ E L, SEL F-CONSTRU CTION, VERNACU L AR MATERIAL S, AND D EMOCRACY BU ILD IN G

17

 roduction of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith

P
(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991); Henri Lefebvre,
Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and
Elizabeth Lebas (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996);
Mary McLeod, Henri Lefebvres Critique of Everyday
Life: An Introduction, in Architecture of the Everyday,
ed. Deborah Berke and Steven Harris, 929 (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997).
10. The students of the Universidad Ricardo Palma
(URP) were also commonly seen as less apt, the castoffs of the more selective institutions, literally uncivilized beasts, which contributed to coining the name
of the collective. Alfredo Mrquez claims that the bestprepared and most financially secure people studied
at the more prestigious, long-established schools
UNI (Universidad Nacional de Ingeniera) and PUCP
(Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per). Alfredo
Mrquez and lex ngeles, interview with the author,
July 2011.
11. Las Bestias, Boletn de la Universidad Ricardo
Palma (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 1985).
12. Las Bestias, Boletn de la Universidad Ricardo
Palma.
13. The cultural movement to which the group referred can be most immediately understood as the
nascent Limea Movida Subterrnea (Underground
Scene). Olga Rodrguez Ulloa, Movimiento Subterrneo y espacios polticos en la cultura peruana de
la dcada del 80, Critica Latinoamericana, http://
criticalatinoamericana.com/movimiento-subterraneoy-e spacios-politicos-en-la-cultura-peruana-de-ladecada-del-ochenta.
14. Henry Dietz, Urban Poverty, Political Participation, and the State: Lima 19701990 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 2.
15. Comisin de la Verdad y Reconciliacin, Informe Final.
16. See Dietz, Urban Poverty, 2; Jean-Claude Driant,
Las barriadas de Lima: Historia e interpretacin (Lima:
Instituto Francs de Estudios Andinos and Centro de
Estudios y Promocin del Desarrollo, 1991), 183.
17. This view of the period is common. See, for
example, Gustavo Buntinx, La utopa perdida: Imgenes de la revolucin bajo el segundo belaundismo,
Mrgenes 1 (March 1986): 5298.
18. As Manuel Castells observes, the land invasions could occur and be tolerated only due to either
the permissiveness of the officials or the strength of

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B UI L DI N G S & L A N DSCA P E S 20, no . 2, F A LL 201 3

the urban social movements. According to him, the

increasing cases of land takeovers in Lima happened
mostly because of the electoral game of populist clientelism played by the subsequent governments, from
the regime of General Manuel Odra (194856) to
that of the democratically elected Fernando Belande
Terry (196368). The Revolutionary Government of
the Peruvian Armed Forces of General Velasco Alvarado (196880) ended up legalizing land invasions
after the public conflict with the Catholic Church,
caused by the brutal repression of the squatters of
Pamplona in May 1971. As a result of this political
maneuver, the barriadas were transformed into officially recognized pueblos jvenes. The regime also
worked on political organization of the new districts,
andas Castells notesit was so successful that the
game eventually turned against them. By the 1980s
the pobladores were successfully petitioning on their
own behalf for their own self-defined needs, contrary
to the program and expectations staked out by those
in power. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983),
19094. For example, in 1980 the First National Congress of New Settlements (Primero Congreso Nacional de PPJJ) took place in Lima. The group formulated
a broad program of economic, social, educational, and
cultural demands that included making the Quechua
language official. It also called for political autonomy
and democracy of the neighborhood movements, cutting itself off from the states sponsorship. See Confederacin General de Pobladores del Per, Acuerdos
del Primero Congreso Nacional de PPJJ y UUPP del
Per, Lima, July, 46, 1980.
19. Wiley Ludea Urquizo, Las Torres de San Borja o
el ocaso de la urbanstica (Lima: Lluvia Editores, 1983);
Wiley Ludea Urquizo, Tres bueno tigres: Vanguardia y
urbanismo en el Per del Siglo XX (Lima: Ur[b]es Ediciones y Colegio de Arquitectos del Per, 2004).
20. PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda),
which left room for substantial agency of the inhabitants, allowing and providing for expansion and modification of the basic housing units, can reasonably be
seen as an exception, since its foundational principles
went very much against a closed, highly structured
ordering of residential complexes. See Fernando Garca-Huidobro et al., El tiempo construye!: El Proyecto
Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) de Lima: Gnesis
y desenlace / Time Builds!: The Experimental Housing

Project (PREVI), Lima: Genesis and Outcome (Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, 2008).
21. Revolucin habitacional en democracia: Plan
de vivienda del gobierno peruano, 19801985 (Lima:
ENACEEmpresa Nacional de Edificaciones, 1985).
22. Ludea Urquizo, Las Torres de San Borja, 15.
23. Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social
Forms, ed. D. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971), 143, as quoted in Anthony Vidler, Warped
Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 144.
24. Cholo is a new type of mestizo who emerges
with the phenomenon of urbanization. Cholo is not
the mestizo of blood but rather a person of indige
nous origin who tries to assimilate into the dominant
culture. For a long time, a cholo was perceived as a
person who was basically forcefully uprooted from his
or her original community and lost his or her authentic identity, with disturbing social repercussions.
25. The term urbanization without socialization
aptly applies to the situation of Lima (as well as other
megapolises of the so-called Third World) in the second
half of the twentieth century. Davis, Planet of Slums.
26. Ludea Urquizo, Las Torres de San Borja, 10.
27. Enrique Bonilla Di Tolla, Los 80s, in El arquitecto y su obra: 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 (Lima: Agencia Espaola de la Cooperacin Internacional, Centro Cultural de Espaa, Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2009),
147. Ludea Urquizo in Las Torres de San Borja hits a
similar register, focusing on the flawed distribution
of different functional spaces of the complex and its
separation from the fabric of the city.
28. Ludea Urquizo, Las Torres de San Borja, 52.
29. This is how Elio Martuccelli characterized the
building of Banco de Crdito in La Molina, which won
the main prize of the VII Biennial of Lima in 1988.
Elio Martuccelli, Arquitectura para una ciudad fragmentada: Ideas, proyectos y edificios en la Lima del siglo
XX (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2000), 212.
30. Kenneth Frampton, Critical Regionalism:
Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity, in Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames
and Hudson, 1992), 31427. Frampton deployed the
term as a response to the perceived homogenization of
the world by consumer mass culture, especially dangerous to developing nations. Seeking to rejuvenate
the emancipatory aspects of the modernist legacy, he
sought to identify regional schools that would re-

interpret local vernaculars in pursuit of regionally

based world culture (327).
31. Bonilla Di Tolla, Los 80s; Martuccelli, Arquitectura para una ciudad fragmentada. Interestingly,
Barraco is credited with some major pedagogical innovations instituted at the university, most notably,
the creation of so-called vertical workshops. Many
of the Beasts were his students; however, according to
the former members of the group, their relationship
was to a large degree contentious.
32. See Bonilla Di Tolla, Los 80s; Martuccelli,
Arquitectura para una ciudad fragmentada. For the
one comprehensive monograph of Baraccos work, see
Juvenal Baracco, Juvenal Baracco: Un universo en casa
(Bogot: Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad de los
Andes; Miami: School of Architecture, University of
Miami, 1988).
33. Keith Eggener, Placing Resistance: A Critique
of Critical Regionalism, Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 4 (May 2002): 22837.
34. See an interview with Baracco in Juvenal
Baracco, 38.
35. Baracco, Juvenal Baracco, 38.
36. Baracco, Juvenal Baracco, 52, 126.
37. For the historical roots of this phenomenon,
see Cecilia Mendez G., Incas Si, Indios No: Notes on
Peruvian Creole Nationalism and Its Contemporary
Crisis, Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 1
(February 1996): 197225.
38. For an exemplary debate, see Andrew Maskrey
and Gilbero Romero, Auto-construccin: Mito o solucin, Plaza Mayor 2 (1982): 3538; Autoayuda y
vivienda, Habitar 1 (1983): 912; Andrew Maskrey
and Gilbero Romero, Mas all del viviendismo,
Plaza Mayor 7 (1983): 1112. Such perspectives persist today. For example, in Planet of Slums Mike Davis
condemns John Turners celebrated model of selfhelp and legalization of spontaneous urbanization as
an amalgam of anarchism and neoliberalism that
spurred radical departure from the policies of public
housing, led to the withdrawal of the state, romanticized the cost and results of slum upgrading, and,
finally, brought about commodification of informal
housing.
39. Alfredo Mrquez, interview with the author,
Lima, September 2010.
40. John Friedmann, Insurgencies: Essays in Planning
Theory (New York: Routledge, 2011), Kindle edition.

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41. Alfredo Mrquez, interview with the author,

Lima, July 2011.
42. The full quote reads: Al eliminar la ansiedad
del ascenso social por la adopcin del otro cosmos que
viene implcito en el conocimiento que se imparte [en
la universidad] se podr producir individuos que sean
capaces de extraer de su propia cultura para enfrentar
coherentemente al medio y al sistema junto a las mayoras a las que pertenecen, en ese momento el ttulo
universitario habr dejado de ser de la nobleza.
43. Martuccelli, Des-hechos de arquitectura, 82.
Quincha is the word that the members of the group
themselves use in reference to this construction. It
evokes a traditional colonial construction system in
which wood and bamboo frames are covered with
mud and plaster. Alfredo Mrquez and lex ngeles,
interview with author, August 2012.
44. Here, I would like to mention the concert Denuncia por la vida that was supposed to take place
on September 21, 1985, on the campus of Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM),
organized by Herbert Rodrguez to protest human
rights violations and bloody massacres in the provinces. The event, conceived as free and open to the
public, was intended to bring together the spontaneous generational movement, 15 [underground rock]
groups and performances of art and architecture.
The concert never took place, however. While it is not
clear if they were sympathizers of Sendero or hardline Marxist leaders of the Student Federation of San
Marcos University, some youth, outraged at the appropriation of the circle-A symbol for anarchy and
the swastika by the artists, accused them of being
agents of Western imperialism and kicked them
off the university grounds. Musicians and artists
moved to the roof of one housing block in the project
Unidad vecinal no. 3 to continue with the event, but
they ended up being thrown out by the police. The
organization committee to the rector of UNMSM,
Antonio Cornejo Polar, September 11, 1985, collection of Herbert Rodrguez.
45. Castells, City and the Grassroots, 14.
46. The two agencies directly involved were Secretara Municipal de Educacin y Cultura and Oficina de
Participacin Vecinal.
47. Flyer in the collection of Herbert Rodrguez.
48. For example, see John Friedmann, Rethinking
Poverty: The Dis/Empowerment Model, in Insurgencies.

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49. Juan Luis Dammert, coordinator of the cultural promoters of the six municipal agencies of El
Cercado district, quoted in Sissi Acha, Arquitectos
con caras sucias, Amauta, November 13, 1986, 22.
50. lex ngeles to the author, e-mail, February
12, 2013.
51. Acha, Aquitectos con caras sucias, 22.
52. Alfredo Mrquez, interview with the author,
Lima, July 2011.
53. For more information on Yuyachkani, see Yuyachkani: Performance and Politics in Peru, Hemispheric Institute website, http://hemisphericinstitute.
org/cuaderno/yuyachkani/index.html.
54. Born in Lima in 1959, Rodrguez established
himself as one of the most important artists of the
1980s, exhibiting at the XVII Biennial of So Paulo
in 1983 and I Havana Biennial in 1984. More recently,
he has been a vocal cultural activist. Between 1976
and 1981, he studied at the School of Art of the Catholic University of Peru in Lima. As a student, he was a
member of the important experimental artistic group
EPS Huayco (197981). In 1982 he cofounded Artistas Visuales Asociados. He participated in all of the
events organized by Los Bestias and is credited by the
group with teaching them serigraphy.
55. Acha, Arquitectos con caras sucias, 22. The end
product of the literature workshop was the book Habla la
ciudad (Lima: Municipalidad de Lima Metropolitana/
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1986).
56. Paul Gogin, La carpa teatro: El suplicio de Santa
Rosa, newspaper clipping, n.d., G3.
57. Acha, Arquitectos con caras sucias, 22.
58. Poblador can have multiple connotations in
Spanish. Here, it indicates an urban squatter or a semilegal settler.
59. Especially useful in understanding Lefebvres
position are Philosophy and the City, 8693, Spectral Analysis, 13946, and The Right to the City,
14760, in Writings on Cities.
60. Wiley Ludea Urquizo, interview with the author, September 2010.
61. Such a view of Lima persists. See Pablo Vega
Centeno, ed., Lima, diversidad y fragmentacin de una
metrpoli emergente (Quito: Organizacin Latinoameri
cana y del Caribe de Centros Histricos, 2009).
62. Or to unite the dispersion. See Martuccelli,
Arquitectura para una ciudad fragmentada, 243.
63. Ministry of War, Decree No. 5887, July 4, 1986,

collection of Alfredo Mrquez. For the prison riots, see

Comisin de la Verdad y Reconciliacin, Las ejecuciones extrajudiciales del penal de el Frontn y el Lurigancho (1986), 2003, http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ifinal/
pdf/TOMO%20VII/Casos%20Ilustrativos-UIE/2.67
.FRONTON%20Y%20LURIGANCHO.pdf.
64. The electric train, the landmark project of the
first presidency of Alan Garca (198590), can be seen
as yet another testimony to the failure and weakening of the state. For more than twenty years, gigantic
steel-enforced concrete pillars that supported nothing
appeared as brutally materialized ghosts in the fabric
of the city, attesting to the collapse of the central technocratic planning. The trains official opening in July
2011 preceded by days the inauguration into office of
the successor of Garcas second term (200611), Ollanta Humala. It did not, however, begin actual functioning until March 2012.
65. Castells, City and the Grassroots, 70. Castells
was indebted to Lefebvre for many of his formulations.
What distinguishes The City and the Grassroots is Castellss insistence on the dependence of social movements on the material structure from which specific
cities arise. For a critique of Lefebvre and Castells and
their relationship to their Marxist foundations, see Ira
Katznelson, Towards a Respatialized Marxism: Lefebvre, Harvey, and Castells, in Marxism and the City
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), Kindle edition.
66. For example, see James Holston, Insurgent
Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity
in Brazil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2008); Ana Sugranyes and Charlotte Mathivet, eds.,
Cities for All: Proposals and Experiences towards the
Right to the City (Santiago, Chile: Habitat International Coalition, 2010); Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse,
and Margit Mayer, eds., Cities for People, and Not for
Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City
(New York: Routledge, 2010). Among recent cases
deserving special mention are student-led protest
movements concentrated in Santiago, Chile; Spains
Movimiento 15-M (also known as the movement of the
indignados); the Occupy Wall Street movement; and
the Canada-originated, indigenous Idle No More.

67. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the

City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 4.
68. The global museum-building boom, a prime
example of such an approach, has been extensively
discussed both in professional and popular literature
and press. For recent analysis of the common fallacies associated with the desire to reproduce the Bilbao
effect, see Joanna Woronkowicz et al., Set in Stone:
Building Americas New Generation of Arts Facilities,
19942008 (Chicago: Cultural Policy Center at the
University of Chicago, 2012), http://culturalpolicy.
uchicago.edu/setinstone.
69. On mobile and temporary architecture, see Robert Kronenburg, Flexible: Architecture That Responds to
Change (London: Laurence King, 2007); Robert Kronenburg, Portable Architecture (Burlington, Mass.: Architectural Press, 2003); Houses in Motion: The Gene
sis, History and Development of the Portable Building
(Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2002). For a
recent assessment in the popular press, see Allison Arieff, Its Time to Rethink Temporary, New York Times,
December 19, 2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes
.com/2011/12/19/its-time-to-rethink-temporary.
70. For a down-to-earth appraisal of DIY urbanism, see Mimi Zeiger, The Interventionists Toolkit series, Design Observer, January 21, 2011March
27, 2012, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/
the-interventionists-toolkit/24308.
71. A multiplicity of recent exhibitions speak to the
widespread popularity and perceived importance of
such projects. Especially worth mentioning are Living
as Form, curated for Creative Time by Nato Thompson, Historic Essex Street Market, New York, September 24October 16, 2011; Oh, My Complex: On Unease
at Beholding the City, curated by Hans D. Christ and
Iris Dressler, Wrttembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, May 17July 29, 2012.
72. On the resuscitation and current relevance of
the Lefebvrian concept, see Harvey, Rebel Cities.
73. Zeiger, The Interventionists Toolkit: Our
Cities, Ourselves, Design Observer, 12 September
12, 2011, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/
the-interventionists-toolkit-part-3/29908.
74. Friedmann, Insurgencies, chap. 3.

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