Casa Akamba
Casa Akamba is a cultural center that celebrates the centuries-old relationship between agave and human beings. The center enmeshes landscape with the rituals of production associated with agave byproducts such as ixtle, pulque, and mezcal. Casa Akamba is strategically located at the heart of Mexico, on the shores of Lake Cuitzeo in Michoacán. This new home for agave becomes a new cultural and agricultural node for the country at large.
In recent years, avocado harvesting has been the sole agricultural focus of the state of Michoacán. The exploitation of this resource, known colloquially as the “green gold,” has harmed several local ecosystems and created social and political conflicts in the region. Responding to these conditions, Casa Akamba proposes a new understanding of the Mexican agricultural landscape that recalls the native traditions that kept the region thriving for hundreds of years. In Mexico, agave is known as the “tree of wonders,” since this plant yields water, liquor, oil, vinegar, honey, fabrics, needles, bricks, and many other things. Casa Akamba celebrates these uses and their associated indigenous rituals through a cultural complex that helps remedy soil issues, prevents erosion, and educates human users about agave---its harvesting, growth, and byproducts.
The architecture embeds itself on the land through a series of circular geometries that juxtapose humans and nature. Lacking orientation and direction, these circles serve to highlight the natural and constructed features that make up the intervention.
At the landscape scale, a first circle materializes as a low brick wall with a diameter of 1.5 kms, reclaiming a significant area of the Michoacán land. Inscribed within this space, Casa Akamba ushers visitors towards the agricultural production of agave and its derivatives through a series of space-defining interventions sculpted from the ground itself. A circular steel canopy hangs 2 to 7 meters above the earth and is held up by the same landscape upon which it lies. In addition to offering educational spaces and galleries, the complex hosts plantation areas for different types of agave, as well as production rooms for: pulque, mezcal, and ixtle-based crafts. Casa Akamba harnesses the landscape as a healing medium and a meeting place for nature and human.
Location
Michoacán, México
Collaborators
House Operations (Andrés Romero Pompa, Paola Cuevas Báez, José Ibarra)
Research Assistants
Parris Wright
Supporters
IESARQ Premio Félix Candela
Awards
Honorable Mention, IESARQ Premio Félix Candela
josé
ibarra
- uncertain grounds
- werewolf
- geoempathy: architecture, time, and the anthropocene
- casa akamba
- landscape awakening
- earthly becomings
- rain check
- too fast too slow
- linear city
- objet petit a
- para-church
- generacji polska
- platonic starfish
- parasite
- mollometsi cabin
- casa tecate
- additive void
- do vending machines dream of electric pink gum pops
- digesting materiality
- model united constituencies
- bikkies with bonner
- beyond repair
- housing geostories
- town and gown, a pop up archive
- under the table
- cornell journal of architecture
- pidgin
- andean ecologies, cosmologies, and fictions
- powers of time
- denver low-rise: new domestic forms of collective living
- housing matters
- designing objects, relationships, and environments
- buildings, cities, and climate
- cu denver lecture series