This site is dedicated to discuss the role that architecture plays in todays social and environmental crisis. Can architecture worsen the crisis, or can it help alleviating it?
The phenomenon of local architectures in the context of this crisis is complex and highly interesting. It involves the fact that cultural crisis may not mean necessarily the disappearance of “pristine” cultures. The problem is not that simple. Cultures mix, and interesting things happen from that mixture. Cultural crisis means, rather than disappearance, cultural adaptation, cultural transformation, and, finally, cultural survival. The general point that I would like to stress through this project is that architecture is not exclusively a technological or a formal problem, but also a cultural one, one that deals with people, poverty, survival, and not only with abstractions about space or form. The site discusses these issues using its database as a point of reference. The Ethnoarchitecture.com database contains information on the architecture of almost 7,300 different groups, distributed in 228 countries and territories.
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