For five months in 2021, dozens of people worked to improve 200 homes in the popular neighborhoods of La Honda, Moravia, San Javier and San Cristóbal, in Medellín. Led by the Coonvite Arquitectura Cooperativa collective, they poured cement on the dirt floors, repaired the bathrooms and modernized the kitchens. “These mountains moved! I remember one Wednesday they told us that we had used up all the cement that Argos had for the city,” recalls Juan Miguel Durán Vélez (Pereira, 37), general director of Coonvite and one of its founders.
The collective had been officially created a year earlier, but its members (eight architects, an architect, two engineers and a political scientist) had already been entering the most vulnerable neighborhoods of the capital of Antioquia for a dozen years to organize a party with its residents and help resolve one of the great challenges of modern Latin American cities: the quality deficit in housing. According to figures from the National Planning Department, in 2023, around 15% of housing in Medellín was in inadequate habitability conditions due to the lack of technical support during the construction process, which generated rapid deterioration.
When the Argos cement company contacted them to join forces on the ground in its nascent Healthy Homes project and provide decent housing for 200 families, the people at Coonvite already knew how to work with communities. Drawing on their experience, they developed a methodology integrating elements of the dynamics of working-class neighborhoods and the practice of assisted self-construction, implemented by the English architect John Turner in Peru in the sixties and seventies. Thus, they transformed housing improvement into a collective and “patched” experience, in which house owners, neighbors and volunteers participate. Even the budget was a sum of effort: the owners contributed 33% and the remaining 67% was borne by Hogares Saludables. “It was a cooperative process, not welfare,” Durán explains.
Coonvite members studied at a time when active urban debates – involving businesses, universities, the public sector and citizens – were transforming urban planning into social policy, and when the mayoralty of Sergio Fajardo (2004-2007) saw architecture and urban design as tools to promote education, generate opportunities and improve people’s quality of life, especially in marginal neighborhoods. “This environment encouraged us to consider our knowledge and our craft as political acts,” explains Durán. They learned to take to the streets and gain the trust of residents in the outlying neighborhoods of Medellín, even asking them, “What should we do? “. “It was a commitment to democratizing high-quality architecture and, therefore, beauty,” says Jasblleidy Pirazán, a political scientist with the group.
Coonvite is the country’s first architectural cooperative. “When we studied the history of this model in Colombia, we realized that a cooperative was like having both a foundation and an SAS. Legally, we could diversify the portfolio and have a commercial exercise that allowed you to take advantage of the social and a social one with its own cash flow and an economic dynamic almost stronger than the commercial one,” explains Durán.
The commercial part works almost like a traditional architectural agency, but with the group’s stamp: they apply for calls to design rural schools or cultural centers, and whoever hires them to build their house can expect a “cool” pleasure experience. 2% of the profits from each of these projects are invested in social commitment.
By 2024, the team had intervened on approximately 42,000 square meters making improvements to housing in strata 2 and 3, and had worked with Argos, Comfama, Visionamos Sistema de Pago, the Berta Martínez Foundation and the Confiar financial cooperative, among others. That year, their housing improvement program, called Foonvite, won the Ibero-American Biennale of Architecture and Urban Planning in the “New Rules” category. They had found an innovative way to democratize architecture and transform the effort to provide decent housing for thousands of people into a civic pedagogy tool that built community and opened up opportunities, as people gained technical knowledge of construction.
Its social commitment also covers rural Antioquia. In 2019 they created the Cooperarescul program, with which they intervene in the infrastructure of rural schools by setting up a treat for children to teach them architecture and the values of cooperativism, and recently they partnered with the Government of Antioquia to improve 500 houses in the rural area of Entrerríos, Santa Rosa and San Pedro.
For Durán, good architecture does not necessarily have to be monumental, but contemporary. “All the knowledge we gained at university is about taking action in this crooked house and, through small actions, bringing it up to technical standards to give people decent housing,” he says. Sometimes your most significant accomplishments come from small actions, like cutting some bricks in a wall in half to let light into a house without windows. “When we finished, the lady, about 80 years old, was playing with the afternoon light by moving her hands,” he recalls.
About The Author
