Later, the discovery of Amazonian oil reserves created an economic boom that began in the 1970s that helped establish Ecuador as a beacon of relative peace on a troubled continent. But two decades of uncontrolled inflation followed, which led in 2000 to the replacement of the national currency by the center-right government with the US dollar. Between 1998, as the economy neared collapse, and 2006, the year before leftist economist Rafael Correa took office, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians fled to Spain and the United States. In May 2023, conservative President Guillermo Lasso dissolved the National Assembly to avoid impeachment proceedings based on embezzlement charges, which he has denied, prompting snap elections three months later. By the time Ecuador’s current president, Daniel Noboa, was elected in a runoff, the country had endured months of political turmoil, including the broad daylight assassination of a presidential candidate on the streets of central Quito. Since then, Noboa has stepped up security across the nation after prison riots and the homicide rate nearly doubled last year. In August, Ecuador became the first country to pass a local moratorium on oil exploration in a national referendum, a victory for indigenous and environmental activists.
In the shadow of all these upheavals, Quito has become an unexpected place for a group of architects who advocate, perhaps unsurprisingly, additional transparency, community and sustainability. All close friends, all under the age of 50, all guided by the imperative—repeated among themselves as a mantra—to “do more with less,” these practitioners, organized into collectives, build with materials such as reclaimed wood and earth and share resources and knowledge freely. “Their architecture is part of the land,” says Quito-born Ana María Durán Calisto, 52, an architect and scholar at Yale. “They are neither modernist architects of Latin American socialism nor neoliberal architects of Latin American corporatism,” he says. “They are Ming architects.”
THE FIRST AND THE most important of Quito’s modern companies, called Al Borde (To the Edge), emerged from the economic and political turmoil of the early 2000s. Al Borde’s founding partners, David Barragán, 42, and Pascual Gangotena, 46, met months before Ecuador’s dollarization on their first day of classes at the prestigious Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. While there, they studied under Sáez, one of the architects of Casa Pitaya, who had moved to Ecuador from his native Spain in 1994. Sáez, 61, a founding member of the new school of architecture at PUCE that year, infused the curriculum with an ethos of spiritual openness; existential questions of identity also permeated the institution, says Handel Guayasamín, 72, another influential architect and former PUCE professor: “What are we doing with our culture? Our way of being? Our materials and local resources?’