02.03.09

Observations [for architects] on the Colombian narco aesthetic

To talk about the narco aesthetic today, with an unprejudiced eye, is a difficult and above all
contradictory business. On the one hand, the aesthetic code of the drug trafficker in
Colombia is part of its national identity and development, and as such it is too simplistic to
reject the narco aesthetic in the name of good taste. On the other hand, it is an aesthetic which is ostentatious, exaggerated, disproportionate and laden with symbols which seek to confer status and legitimise violence. It would be better if architecture were not one of the means to do this.
It is almost impossible to think about my city and ignore the reality of the Cali Cartel, which
produced a buoyant and fictitious economy of which we can see today ruins and
consequences; leaving the visible legacy of an aesthetic which we all now identify through
the façades of marble-clad Greek-style entrances with golden railings, flash cars and the
bodies of men puffed up with gold and women inflated with silicon. Cali is a city marked by
drug trafficking and contaminated with the influence of its aesthetic. Over the last three
decades it has passed from being the capital of salsa to being the capital of the mafia and
plastic surgery. These processes which characterise Cali, however, are common to many
cities around the country, among which we could include Bogotá, which according to recent
declarations made by the city’s mayor to the El Tiempo newspaper, “is filling up with
traquetos (middle-ranking drug dealers).”

Despite all of this, I would like to attempt to give a positive view of the phenomenon of the
narco aesthetic, emphasising that it is not my intention to endorse the type of architecture
which it produces or discuss whether this aesthetic and the taste from which it derives are
good or bad. My interest is based in curiosity, to analyse a phenomenon which exists and
which we cannot ignore, proposing the possibility of creating a new interpretation. I wonder
how to think specifically about the architecture of drug trafficking, not as a group of illegal
buildings of bad taste, but as a compendium of useful evidence for architects.

In my opinion, the first thing it is important to note is that the narco aesthetic in Colombia
does not any longer belong only to the drug trafficker, but forms part of popular taste, which sees it through positive eyes and copies it, ensuring its continuity through time and across cities. The diffusion of the narco aesthetic is evidence of the Colombian institutional vacuum:
no stronger system for social cohesion exists to provide an alternative to the model of the
power and social justice which drug trafficking has given. As Alonso Salazar describes in
the book Drugs and Drug Trafficking in Colombia:

The ‘men of honour’ have a positive image of themselves as defenders of order and executors of the essentialjustice which constitutional authorities are not able to guarantee... As the State stopped being an instrument of justice, the traditional political class showed signs of breakdown and the church did not respond to the demands of the new times, society was left with no paradigms and the traffickers had a clear ground to turn themselves into identity figures...”

Drogas y narcotráfico en Colombia, Alonso Salazar, Editorial Planeta, Bogota 2001, p. 65-66

Within this phenomenon architecture, undertaken as self-build in informal neighbourhoods,
or to order, plays a fundamental role as a means of disseminating the ornamental, ostentatious and disproportionate aesthetic which the drug trafficker has used in a great number of buildings. As architects we can learn from these phenomena which characterise our cities and use them to create architecture which stresses not the representation of the narco but a mass popular taste which can be transformed into an architectural approach of high quality and, at the same time, closely tied into the context.

In 1909, Adolf Loos, the famous architect from Vienna, wrote the text Ornament and Crime, which in my view is still valid not only for the practice of architecture globally, but in the local Colombian context. Loos condemned the use of ornament as a façade which used
ornamental surfaces and forms and copied styles from the past to symbolise the splendour of the royal institutions in Vienna at that time; when in reality they were passing through an
unstable period of conflict with liberal powers. These façades also attempted to confer status to the emergent bourgeoisie, who desperately sought to show that they were accumulating wealth and could also accumulate ‘good taste’. In Loos’ view, this was a symptom of intellectual degeneration which alienated his people from modern times. For him, culture and access to education had as a logical consequence the abandonment of ornament. Lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual strength. Loos directed his text exclusively at the aristocrats of the time, arguing that it was they who could reach the climax of their existence through art and not through ornament.

Ornamental things cause a truly non-aesthetic effect when they have been made with the best materials and the highest care, and when they have required a large amount of work...
The modern person, who considers ornament sacred, as a sign of the artistic extravagance of past times, immediately recognises how tortured, how painfully achieved and how sickly are modern ornaments. No ornament can be created today by someone who lives at our cultural level. It is different for those persons and peoples who still have not reached this level...

I speak to the aristocrats. I will put up with ornaments in my own body if these make my fellow countrymen happy. In that case they are my happiness too. I will put up with the ornaments of the Kaffir, the Persian, the Slovak peasant, the ornaments of my shoemaker, but none of these have any other means to arrive at the height of their existence. For us, we have art, which has substituted ornament.

Writings I, Ornament and Crime, El Croquis Editorial, Madrid, 1993, pp. 353-354

The façades of buildings constructed for drug trafficking in Colombia also have the intention of giving status to an emergent bourgeoisie, and also establishing them as an institution. As opposed to the situation which Loos describes in his city and his time, these façades attempt to replace the power of institutions, which their money can buy, as they are constructed on the destruction of official institutions. In this sense, they are important pieces in our recent history and evidence of weak institutions and overturned values, and as such relevant for a formal and symbolic analysis of the architecture of our cities.
In 1972, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Publisher Learning from Las Vegas, a book which attempted to learn from the architecture of Las Vegas, the city which in the

United States and across the world symbolises vice, degeneracy, the exaggerated value given to money, prostitution and alcohol. Thirty years after the publication of Learning from Las
Vegas, whose subtitle is: the forgotten symbolism of architecture, as a reference to the
importance of rescuing symbolism more than the architectural space itself; it is worth asking
if we wish to forget symbolism or if we opt to use it without the management it represents, as a formal strategy which constructs the face of our cities and which will later produce new
meanings.

We relieve that architects, except for a few stubborn ones, begin to understand that those of us who learn from Las Vegas, and by implication those who should also learn, does not mean placing neon advertising boards on the Champs Elysees, or a notice stating “2+2=4”, on the roof of the Mathematics Building, but to reaffirm the role of symbolism in architecture, and on the way, to learn a new receptiveness to the tastes and values of other people and apply a new modesty to our designs and to the idea that we have of our role as architects in society.
Architecture should be, in the final quarter of this century, less socially coercive and aesthetically more vital than the opinionated and inflated edifices of our recent past. We
architects can learn this from Rome and from Las Vegas, and from what we see around us, as long as we think to look.

Denise Scott Brown, prologue to the 1977 revised edition of Learning from Las Vegas

In our context, symbolism and iconography are important, and the strategy of the copy
widespread. As architects we are used to copying models. We learn with examples of
architecture from the first world, or from Latin America legitimised by history and
recognised publications. Many of the works which we recognise as models of the
architecture of our own country are inspired by international models. The first world
influences the construction of our architecture and this in my opinion does not exclude the
possibility of looking in other directions. Just as we can learn from Las Vegas, Vienna or
Rome, we can learn from Cali or Medellin or from what we see around us.

It is worth noting that the narco aesthetic has been changing. The third generation of the drug cartels has changed their strategy of ostentation for camouflage, as the illegal drug trade has demanded diversification, ramification and ‘sophistication’. Ornament has given over to smooth surfaces and aluminium blinds which copy the ‘modern’ houses of young successful executives of the big businesses, which are in themselves copies of the residences which we can find in architecture magazines from Europe and the United States. Now we don’t know who is copying who, and in the complex juxtaposition of models which these processes show, we find replicas both of icons such as the Capital Building in Washington and of standard photos of façades made of aluminium blinds and painted white with a touch of yellow, a combination which has caused a furore in the architecture of Cali.

In the following sequence of photos (1 to 4), we can see the types of façade which have been built in the El Ingenio neighbourhood of Cali, in a period of around ten years. From voluptuous façades with rounded balconies, Doric columns, marble and golden railings, passing by outside mirrors and combinations of different cladding, we arrive at smooth white surfaces, straight dark railings and granite cladding; aesthetic which has been imposed in recent years in construction of both private houses and buildings in this neighbourhood, identified in Cali as a drug-dealer’s neighbourhood.

The last photo is a copy of houses which as architects we have seen in many catalogues and
magazines. And the other three? Despite the fact the houses of North American suburbs have been a typical model for narco architecture; these houses are not copying specific models and have been copied by popular architecture. Who is copying who? This is not about rescuing the model, which in some cases can not even been identified any more, but the formal strategy which although congested, is less bland in the first photos than in the last. As architects we can optimise the use of ornament without dismissing the richness in the combination of materials and forms which we can see in facades such as those shown in the first photos, creating a local architecture without wasting material or effort in our work. I

In the words of Loos Ornament is a wasted effort and, as such, wasted health. Thus it has always been. Today, furthermore, it also means wasted materials and both of these things
mean wasted capital.

Writings I, Ornament and Crime, El Croquis Editorial, Madrid, 1993, p. 351

When the taste for the narco aesthetic becomes popular taste, excesses such as those shown in the photo occur, which are repeated throughout our cities. The excessively ornamental and overworked stairs contrast with a half-finished building and appear to be an unnecessary
investment. Houses such as that shown by the photo are constructed in stages, and here the
need to boast is clear showing the balustrade which has priority over the third stage of
construction. For me, however, with or without the balustrade this type of stair prominent on
the façade has many benefits. The exterior stairs are an important symbol for many homes, as well as being a practical necessity to make the second floor independent. If they were used as a constitutive element in many housing projects in which apartment rental is desirable, they not only ensure more interior space and happiness for the client, but also the active use of the pavement as pubic space, and the visual richness of blocks and squares.

Bellavista Neighbourhood, Cali, 2006 Giving emphasis to facades, their symbols and potential richness, a good city can be created, avoiding waste of resources, both economic and symbolic. Not only external staircases but also the entrance gates. windows and the use of combinations of materials can create a homogenous pattern, as in El Ingenio, which can be seen to bring out qualities. This neighbourhood has active pavements and open front gardens, a certain regularity in the heights and formal patterns such as balconies on the entrance gates, which make the neighbourhood spatially superior to gated communities, separated from the cities by security bars and police. If this type of benefit is repeated in housing projects, we will surely have a more agreeable and diverse city. For its quality as open neighbourhood, El Ingenio has become a famous Christmas event in Cali. Thousands of people visit the neighbourhood in December and January, taking evening walks to look up the lighting displays which inhabitants create on their facades.

Despite the full on fight which our country has waged against drug trafficking, the figures
show that the production of coca and the exportation of cocaine has not decreased. The
consumption continues to grow and the diversification of activities of the cartels such as the commercialisation of heroin in the market is growing. From this perspective the legalisation
of drugs is the only viable way to confront the problem which has proved itself impossible to combat and which through penalisation has produce markets which feed violence of
guerrillas, as well as the coffers of the big banks which capture the profits produced with our products abroad.

The magazine The Economist has calculated that in the second decade of this XXI century drugs could be legalised.

Drugs and drug trafficking in Colombia, Alonso Salazar, Editorial Planeta, Bogota 2001, p. 18

So the legalisation of drugs supposes confronting and regulating a problem with a different
strategy than penalisation, the inclusion of the narco aesthetic as a source of urban
construction; undertaken already by informal sectors as a natural process, can become a tool
for Colombian architecture. We architects can contribute to the construction of our cities
without dismissing the aesthetic patterns which the architecture of drug trafficking has
created, and without ‘penalising’ their aesthetic quality, or excluding the model through
elitist distance which in the name of good taste copies the good taste accepted by
international magazines, but condemns the copies emerging from the context of Colombian
cities.

Adriana Cobo is a Colombian architect based in London
www.adrianacobo.com

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