Guest of the Season - Longhi Architects אדריכלות ישראלית Architecture of Israel #136 February 2024 | | 90 guests of the season longhi architects, peru Natalie Mann Luis Longhi was born in the city of Puno in 1954, next to Lake Titicaca, the sacred lake of the Inca, where they are thought to have originated, and feels very close to the Altiplano landscape of the area, where he grew up. Of Italian descent, he was raised among Quechua and Aymara peoples, which connected him emotionally with their local heritage and traditions which were being undermined by hegemonic Western culture being imposed on the Andean world. Inca civilization thrived in the Peruvian highlands in the early 13th century. Its most architectural feature was the rectangular building without any internal walls, roofed by wooden beams and thatch, with several variations including gabled roofs, rooms with one or two of the long sides open and rooms that shared a long wall. An important aspect of the Inca Empire was that, lacking markets, it functioned largely without money, while goods exchange and services was based on reciprocity between individuals and among individuals, groups, or the Inca rulers. Consequently, Inca architecture was unique in that it lacked many of the features associated with civilization in the rest of the “Old World”. Following the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1532, its architecture began to incorporate many western, mainly South American features and building methods. Longhi studied architecture at Ricardo Palma University in Lima, in the design studio of Juvenal Baracco, eventually completing his Master’s in Architectural Design and Sculpture at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1984. In 1991, he studied Computer Animation applied to Architecture, Arts and Landscape Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Boston. He later worked with world-renowned architects, such as B.V. Doshi, Adele Santos, and some of Louis Kahn’s disciples in Philadelphia, among them Marshall Meyers and David Slovic. After studying and living outside Peru (United States and India) for 15 years, he felt the ancestral call and the need to return to his homeland in order to fulfill a mission; to recover the essence of an architecture of those lands, and to conceive what could be a contemporary Incan architecture, retying his productivity to the broken threads that connect him with them. Longhi won the Gold Medal for Architecture awarded by the Peruvian Institute of Architecture in 2010. Founded in 1996, Longhi Architects is an interdisciplinary practice in Peru involved in rigorous design and research that yields contemporary, local oriented architectural solutions. Founded by architect Luis Longhi, the firm consists of a small group of - never more than 10 professionals - who remain committed to the practice of architecture as a collaborative enterprise In addition to their academic research. The firm specializes in the artistic side of the profession, having designed and executed world-renowned theater stages, public installations and small architectural projects where integration with nature with the Inca’s architectural principles are a fundamental starting point for it’s design.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=