Walking as a Form of Architectural Learning: A Stroll Through Quito, Ecuador
When I was in college in a small American city almost thirty years ago, one of my art history professors declared that he lectured as often as he could about buildings that he had visited in person. “Being there,” he said, “is essential.”
I was, at the time, deeply impressed. I was twenty; I had yet to do much travel, and his words spoke to a kind of deep knowledge that I hoped to share one day. A decade later, teaching for the first time, in graduate school, I looked back on the comment with more skepticism. Here was a scholar who enjoyed spending his summers in the loveliest parts of Italy, who had learned to see certain buildings clearly and, in the process, to unsee others. The depth of his considerable knowledge was tempered by his view of what was worth knowing and why. To use the sociologist Joe Feagin’s term, this scholar looked at the world through a white racial frame that made certain forms of architectural knowledge seem valuable and others, obscure.
Like many white, middle-class architectural and urban historians of a certain age, I am unlearning that framework, especially in my teaching. Part of that process has involved turning to new sources — to scholars and books that I never encountered in graduate school, but also to novels, to films and television shows, and to the lived experiences of my students — in an attempt to teach courses that respond meaningfully to our unequal and interconnected world, much of which I will never be able to visit. And yet, travel still teaches, as my art history professor once said, even in the brief and privileged form of the middle-class vacation. Visiting places in person, walking around them, reveals things that mediation obscures. Still, I will only visit so many cities in my life, only walk so many miles. What can I learn from being there? I strolled through the streets of Quito, Ecuador, this summer thinking about these issues.
It’s hard to visit parts of Quito without noticing the name of one local developer: Uribe Schwartzkopf. Founded in 1973 and headed by architect and developer Tommy Schwartzkopf, the firm has in recent years recruited globally recognized architectural firms to design high-end multifamily housing in Quito, and to raise the architectural profile of this often-overlooked city. Billboards advertising their latest projects punctuate the skyline in upscale neighborhoods. A sales office in the busy, centrally located Mall El Jardín, includes a floor map of the city with architectural models of its buildings. And if somehow you miss the advertising campaign, the buildings themselves, taller than anything nearby and designed with distinctive, eye-catching profiles, will not be ignored. You can get a sense of the state of global, elite, twenty-first century architecture by looking at these projects, but I was also reminded that iconic architecture requires an extensive local urban infrastructure — billboards, branding, sales offices, sponsorships, signs announcing new projects — to make it viable as real estate.
With the best-preserved — and least altered — colonial city center in Latin America, Quito was designated one of the first UNESCO world heritage sites, in 1978. The city’s explosive growth in the twentieth century largely took place outside this three-hundred block area, leaving the narrow streets and small scale of the Centro Histórico intact. Although wealthy residents and the city’s major commercial functions have moved northward, the inner area is still a religious and governmental center, and a bustling residential neighborhood. A constant stream of buses and taxis moving through the cobblestone streets and plazas and a significant number of twentieth-century buildings — apartments, passages and shopping centers, offices— convey a sense of what twentieth-century modernization might have looked like elsewhere in the world had planners and politicians not prioritized open space, vehicular speed, and the wholesale clearance of the existing city.
The continuing use of local materials and construction techniques is a key issue for historians of modern architecture, especially the modern architecture of the global south, where connections to earlier building traditions often signaled a regional or national inflection of the so-called international style. Walking through Quito reveals the continuity of certain materials and construction techniques that link historic and contemporary buildings and the monumental and the vernacular.
Standing in contrast to the city’s new attention-seeking high-rises are its myriad chifas. Chifas are Chinese-Ecuadorian restaurants serving a cuisine — also called chifa — that combines the tastes and ingredients of southern China with those of the Andes. These restaurants are ubiquitous local landmarks in Quito, sometimes located in free-standing, orientalizing buildings and sometimes part of the commercial storefront landscape. Their hybridity and often exuberant vernacular expressions remind me that the kind of architecture my art history professor taught me to see is not always what commands attention in everyday life.
Author’s note: Architect and historian Glenda Puente’s essay on Quito modernism and historian Alfonso Ortiz Crespo’s 2004 Ciudad de Quito: Guía de Arquitectura both served as an invaluable introduction to the architecture of the city.
Citation
Jennifer Hock, “Walking as a Form of Architectural Learning: A Stroll Through Quito, Ecuador,” PLATFORM, Sept. 25, 2023.
