Freddy Mamami Silvestre’s New Andean Architecture
The Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre doesn’t have an office, use a computer, or draw formal blueprints. He sketches his plans on a wall or transmits them orally to his associates. Since 2005, Mamani and his firm have completed sixty projects in El Alto, the world’s highest city, which sits at nearly fourteen thousand feet, on an austere plateau above La Paz. In the past twenty years, the economy there has burgeoned, along with an enterprising, mostly indigenous population.
Mamani earned his fame building mixed-use dream houses for the city’s nouveaux riches.
Like most of his clients, and like some 1.6 million of his fellow-citizens, Mamani is an Aymara. His people have been subject to successive waves of conquest and dispossession, first by the Inca, then by the Spanish. As a young man, he worked in construction; in his early twenties, he earned a degree in civil engineering, against the advice of his family. “It’s a career for the rich,” they told him. Architecture, too, is a career for the rich. But Mamani has made an advantage of his outsider status; he designs in an Aymara vernacular of his own invention.
The Bolivian Aymara Architect whose New Andean Style is transforming El Alto
The interiors of his buildings feature two-storey ballrooms that are spellbinding tapestries of bright paint, LED lights and playful Andean motifs: chandeliers anchored to butterfly symbols, doorways that resemble owls and candy-coloured pillars that could hold up a Willy Wonka factory.
One soaring wedding hall evokes the inside of a reptile, with arching roof beams like dragon ribs and huge orange curlicue mouldings that could be alligator eyes.
“We use the colours of our textiles, colours that are alive,” said Mamani, who traces his inspiration to the elaborate shawls and other traditional garments made by his mother and fellow Aymara weavers.
Mamani, 42 and largely self-taught, is an architect with a rare privilege. It’s not often that a single artist or designer gets a chance to define the aesthetic of an entire city. Gaudi did it in Barcelona. Niemeyer in Brasilia. L’Enfant, to a degree, in Washington.
Mamani is turning cold, gritty El Alto (population 1 million) into the world capital of “new Andean” architecture. This is in contrast to the old Andean architecture of the Incas and Mamani’s Aymara forebears, who left their designs and symbols in the ancient city of Tiwanaku, between El Alto and Lake Titicaca, built more than 1,000 years ago.
Mamani has big dreams for El Alto’s plazas, bus stations and boulevards. But only recently have the Bolivian authorities begun warming to his work.
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