Breaking Down the Barriers : Mexican Architect Attempting to Mix Inside and Outside

Luis Orvananos has come from Mexico City loaded with Aztec, Moorish and Mexican ideas that he says are going to bring California architecture into tune with, well, California. That is, its climate, culture and environment.

There’s no shortage of Mexican architecture in San Diego County, but Orvananos says there’s a difference between concessions to Anglo-Americans’ ideas of Mexican architecture and the real logic seen in the buildings that have evolved over the centuries in the California environment.

For the Mexican architect, much of what we see here is Hispanic icing on an Anglo cake, architects pandering to tourists’ conceptions of Hollywood Mexico. The tiled roof. The sun dial. The archway between the kitchen and dining room, or over the double garage.

Orvananos is out to change all that. He comes with a mission to break down the barriers between the two cultures. He wants to educate us into his ideas of reconciling with our semi-tropical environment. To not be afraid of living inside and outside. To have everybody living in more intimate contact with nature, not walled up away from it in high-tech “islands” of houses conceived to separate a person from the earth and water and sun that bless this climate.

What’s more, he wants to bring that concept to everybody, from super-rich to very low-income families.

So he is building his ideas into houses in prosperous La Jolla, upper-middle-class El Cajon and modest San Ysidro. What his creations in all three locations have in common are a commitment to integrating outside and inside living and using nature in ways sometimes not seen since the Aztecs of Teotihuacan.

Not Traditional

But the barriers he faces are formidable. One problem is that his architecture is not the traditional pretty-pretty picture that we have come to expect of Mexico. Clients want him to build their vision of the hacienda.

“But they still want the substance to be what they’re used to: the solid Anglo block house,” Orvananos said. “I want to break up the house, make it half outside, put in patios of varying degrees of privacy. Bring in breezes, water, natural materials like earth blocks that actually make you feel close to nature.”

According to Orvananos, we have yet to come to terms with this environment. Most Anglos are still mentally living on the East Coast--attached to ideas of privacy, idealizing houses that exclude the world, creating their own artificial realm inside. They are reconciled to the life of neon lighting, artificial environments, artificial materials, an internal existence with nothing or little to do with the world of nature outside.

Walk down Broadway and count the outside sidewalk cafes that any Latin town of this climate would boast. Where are they? Locked away behind Puritan ethics and laws from a colder coast, Orvananos said.

“We have to recognize that here in California we don’t have to fight nature,” he contends. “We have marvelous weather! Environment, climate, nature--all are sympathetic here. We just have to learn to live with them and coordinate with them and make use of them. Anglo California should be looking and learning from the Californians who have been acclimatized to this environment for centuries.”

This is why Orvananos seeks inspiration from the Aztecs of Teotihuacan, from the Grandees of Guadalajara, from the Moors of Granada--and even from the prejudices of low-income families of Mexico City.

His El Cajon houses (planned at 2,000 square feet and costing $180,000) are filled with patios, rooms looking to pools in one direction, distant hills in the other. Sliding glass doors are the only element defining inside and outside. Every room has access in two directions to life in the inner courtyards, and to the world outside.

“All these and other ideas I’m getting from the past,” he said. “For instance, the Aztecs and the Moors in Granada made use of nature where we use machines. I’m reviving their ideas: In the palace of the priests at the temple of Teotihuacan, their air conditioning came by bringing nature into the courtyards. They built them to face the prevailing breeze, and they put running pools of water out front to welcome the breezes so they would play across them--and cool down before they circulated into the rooms giving onto the patio.

“They’d angle and shelter the patios so they provided maximum shade during the heat of the day. What with the use of water, shade, prevailing breeze and the intelligent placing of rooms giving onto the patio, they had an air conditioning that didn’t divorce them from the beauties of their environment. Rather, they made use of them.

“That’s the compromise we’re building into our houses here. As at Teotihuacan, there is the outside public area, but there are semi-enclosed spaces, and there is also the enclosed patio, where you can come out in your pajamas and have your morning coffee, enjoying the sun and trickle of your pond, without worrying about the neighbors.

“The house is neither ‘the prison surrounding its yard’ nor the ‘fortress in the wilderness.’ Like the palaces of the priests at Teotihuacan, the shapes and concepts come from the best possible mix of social needs, weather and culture. So far here in California, some very expensive houses have similar ideas built in, but at best, token patios are the rule.”

A Feeling of Earth

Then there is the question of materials.

“American tract houses use so much artificial material,” he said. “The aluminum, play-tiles, plastics. They have lost that feeling of the earth, being close to it, being protected by its natural materials.

“We love to have earth, wood, water, ceramic pots, light filtering through trees--not somewhere at the end of the yard, but right within the frame of the house, where we spend the bulk of our lives. This prejudice extends to the structural materials, too. For instance, for our El Cajon houses we are bringing in the use of tepetate for main walls. Tepetate is simply compressed earth, dug from the ground in certain suitable compacted areas with the right type of composition. Thick bricks of it. It is a marvelous material. It keeps you cool in summer, warm in winter and protected from the noise of the outside world all year long.”

But aren’t people suspicious of using earth; isn’t that a little removed from today’s building ideas? Wouldn’t it all come tumbling down in the first earthquake, like those mud and bamboo walls in El Salvador?

“People may be suspicious here because they are not familiar with it,” said Orvananos, “but all they have to do is to look at the haciendas of the great families in Cuernavaca, Guadalajara . . . tepetate! Their houses are centuries old. They’re made largely of tepetate, and they have survived countless earthquakes.”

A housing sales consultant said to Orvananos recently, while looking at his plans: “Why reinvent the wheel?”

It is true that San Diego’s standard plan tract house developments are selling successfully in an expanding market. But Orvananos is in a different league. For a start, he can’t compete with the huge established companies. More than that, he just wants to break ground in areas where he sees room for improvement.

Even his apartments in San Ysidro reveal something of not just the revolutionary, but also the Robin Hood (or should one say Zorro?) in the man--a genuine interest in designing better environments for low-income families.

He has designed the two- and three- bathroom apartments with two bathrooms, an upstairs and a downstairs, and, most uniquely, two private little patios. The space has been created at the expense of public areas, because Orvananos thinks these are wasted and become no-man’s lands used only by gangs and vandals.

Bringing on Change

Early on, at Mexico City’s Universidad Iberoamericana, Orvananos decided on the “romantic” idea that he wanted to change things through architecture. Fifteen years ago, he brought together a group of friends with social and architectural ideas and started working on ways of creating houses, especially better housing for the poor. To keep things on an even keel, they took on projects for the very rich. But his main interest was at the other end of the spectrum.

“I had this idea to develop super-economic houses,” he said. “The housing shortage for the poor has, of course, always been terrible, especially in Mexico City. I was sure it was possible to create houses that were better than so many of the dog boxes they had to use, at very low cost.”

His group made mistakes, like many designers of low-income housing around the world. They built high-rise, high-density blocks surrounded by parks supposedly for everybody. But the parks inevitably were taken over by hooligans, leaving the families disoriented because they were so far from the close-to-earth living they were used to, with no private areas outdoors. Their experience echoed those in cities like London, St. Louis and New York.

“That early experience started us really thinking,” said Orvananos. “We’d fallen into every architect’s trap of planning people’s lives from our ivory towers, without ever actually going and asking them what they wanted. So we decided to do just that. We went out and interviewed 500 low-income families on social, economic, technical questions.

“By the time we came out of that, we had the concept of ‘La Morada’--it’s a Castilian word for dwelling, abode. We produced a modular design that gave us a 650-square-foot house for the same price that was at best producing a 500-square-foot house. It cost 4 million pesos, about $5,000, including land and construction.”

The moradas were “close to the ground, grouped in inward-facing squares, with private patio areas, semi-private areas and public areas. We sacrificed most of the public space for private space,” Orvananos said.

“In one project, for 1,500 families, we grouped them into 37 vecindades-- neighborhoods-- of 40 families in two-story apartments, each with its own patio, all grouped around one big patio, a plaza. It’s good, because it mixes private and community facilities, and doing things as a community is important for Mexican people. . . .

“Vecindades have been our best idea--and they have worked because they are based in history and the embedded ways of the people. Right now we are designing for 14,000 low-income dwellings all over Mexico.”

Orvananos and Carlos Garcia Velez, his chief architect partner in San Diego, say they think they could produce similar low-cost housing here for $35,000-$40,000 per unit, including land and building costs. They are now looking into requirements for this type of housing.

The 22 modest-rent San Ysidro apartments with their twin patios are their first venture in the low-cost field in this country. The apartments are proving especially popular with applicants with small families, partly because the private outside areas provide a safe place for small children to play.

Scott Hall, Orvananos’ San Diego-based designer, says the emphasis on private outside areas at the expense of public areas is unusual but proving popular.

So how has this quiet, 42-year-old revolutionary been received here? Not without some battles. Ironically, the problem has often been that his plans aren’t “Spanish” enough.

He has trouble pushing “Mexico modern” as opposed to “Spanish traditional.” He likes shed-type roofs, in which the whole roof slopes one way. But he couldn’t persuade local partners. He has had to abandon that on the 15 houses scheduled to go up in January at El Cajon’s Winchester Ranch on Jamacha Road. He’s roofing them in the Mexican way we expect to see--tiled and vaulted.

“But we’re gradually introducing ideas: the atrium ideas are there, the inside-outside feel, with rooms around the courtyard, with water flowing there from earthenware jars, and only glass between inner and outer courtyards,” he said. “The limited use of tepetate, swinging the garages around the side. Of course, compromises are necessary, and that’s not a problem. Actually it has always been my aim to combine the best of the two cultural approaches to architecture.”

Are there others like him, pursuing similar ideas?

“Not that I know of,” said Orvananos, “and that’s a pity. Our two cultures should be taking better advantage of each other. There are such great opportunities down there, for materials and ideas, at the disposal of San Diegans. Such good, inexpensive human and material resoures. The tepetate. The good labor rates. It will come. And when we do integrate more fully, then we shall both benefit--from American technology and Mexico’s centuries-long involvement in this part of the world.”