Husos: Diego Barajas, Camilo García (architects) Francisco Amaro (biologist) and the building inhabitants community (residents, workers and visitors), with the special assistance of the Fundación Zoológico de Cali ///

(HNHAGB)
HOST AND NECTAR HOME ATELIER GARDEN BUILDING, AND DIFFERENT ACTIONS TO FACILITATE ENVIRONMENTALLY-AWARE GARDENING INITIATIVES:
This project began as a commission to design a building for a small fashion domestic atelier run by five women based in the Colombian city of Cali, which had been branching out through a network of micro-distribution points around the world. It also prompted the devising and development of numerous different activities aimed at stimulating environmental care initiatives that took place among people living in and visiting the building for a decade now, as well as in the neighborhood around the atelier.
The building is home to live-work spaces and a shop, and is simultaneously a vertical garden with host and nectar plants that provides a comfortable microclimate within the building. This reduces energy consumption and at the same time attracts local butterflies, offering a home for many insects and birds in the area, which rely on a network of biological corridors to move around.
These energy-saving, and biological processes have been carried out by using bushes and climbing plants from the local ecosystem (mainly nectar and host plants for butterflies), which are also part of the habitat for birds and other local insect species. The presence of butterflies, and their periodical monitoring, has made the building function as a biometer, which was devised to try to gauge the quality of the environment and lend visibility to the unique value of the biodiverse ecosystem in which it is built. Butterflies are generally one of the most effective indicators of an ecosystem’s quality and biodiversity, and they are especially important in this area, which is home to the greatest diversity of butterflies in the world.
Parallel to the different construction phases of the garden building, a second operation ran which was developed together with the building's inhabitants, a small team of biologists, and the Cali zoo: this involved disseminating information about the importance of the outstanding natural habitat of Cali among Caleños visiting the shop, and also about different ways of looking after the natural environment. Myriad activities were developed throughout the years that the atelier operated in the building. Some included handing out seeds and brochures to the visitors of the building, and organizing workshops for neighborhood children. Others took place outside of the building, during fashion shows organized by the atelier, in which environmental information and a list of host and nectar plants were distributed. All of these efforts were aimed at helping to preserve the biological corridors and to improve them, by inviting people to get small plants and seeds and to plant them in their balconies, front gardens, or patios. Both the building and these local efforts helped the shop to strengthen its connections with the neighborhood, and additionally worked as a strategy for the business' transnational micro-expansion through its small but widespread network of sellers and customers, by reinforcing its compromise with Cali and nearby realities.
When the design phase began, the economic situation of the atelier was expected to be unstable, which later proved to be the case. With this expectation, and learning from the step-by-step method of building in the informal settlements of Cali, a construction in stages was conceived. A dry construction system facilitated the continuation and construction of the later phases while the building was being used by people, animals and vegetation.
The design of an exterior, peripheral means of circulating around the building facilitated multiple possible uses of the spaces, because every unit is accessible directly from the outside. This enabled the spaces to be separated and rented out individually - to provide extra income to the residents, when needed - without depending on any of the others in order to function. This layout, consisting of a separation between property walls and the main building, has not only proven to be suitable for accommodating several changes of use over time, but it was also meant to increase the garden surface on the detached building façades, generating a separate mass covered with vegetation. From the inside, the feeling is one of being immersed in local flora, recreating the atmosphere of some rural constructions in this area, such as animal pens and arbors. This gap also facilitates the airflow, working in a similar way to spaces left between traditional houses in hot, tropical areas of Colombia, to remove heat from the interior and help creating a comfortable indoor climate.
The spatial richness given by different levels of the building slabs and the porous façade facilitates multiple visual oblique relations between interior spaces and exterior to interior. It attempts to re-create and preserve - in a vertical version - those hybrid forms of public and private spatial appropriations that are characteristic of the traditional house + business combination in Cali, in which there is a fluid relation, on the ground level, between the life on the street and that inside the house, especially in the most traditional neighborhoods.
Some interior design strategies meant for small service spaces, a few of which finally were not built, (for example, a sanctuary kitchen, or a 'teletransportation' dressing room wallpapered with a collage of images of Caleño migrant shops in Madrid and other centers of the Caleño diaspora), were intended to connect imaginatively the building's inhabitants and visitors to the atelier with other dimensions of Cali apart from the immediate, biological one. At the same time, these were also part of an exploration of how to create atmospheres suited to the domestic working character of the atelier, where productive and reproductive activities mingle during the day.
Both the design and the different microcommunity-driven actions developed in the garden building produced a set of affective, multimedia devices that has created a space for new relationships between the house-workshop and its natural and cultural environments, acknowledging both as ecosystems that operate on different scales. ///

MICROLANDSCAPING AND MANAGEMENT OF A SOCIAL AND NATURAL ENVIRONMENT:
The project was developed through two complementary methods: the building itself as an infrastructure or platform, for the realization of direct biological actions, and to accommodate the everyday activities of its human and other species inhabitants; and "Proyecto Cali", a research and management organization. The latter emerged as a small group formed by the atelier workers, Husos, and the biologist Francisco Amaro, with the help of other local entomologists such as Lorena Ramirez. It was this group that has served as the main engine for development of the vertical garden, along with the atelier. It was also responsible for the creation of different strategies for providing and disseminating information about biodiversity, and publicizing other issues related to urban development in Cali, looking to join forces with local environmental activists and to promote some valuable – but frequently unknown - work done by local researchers. Part of the project was developed in close collaboration with the local zoo and their project 'Gardens for the City'.///

WORKING WITH PRE-EXISTENCES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ALLIANCES:
Cali's lush vegetation and urban fauna are still a very distinctive characteristic of the city, a common feature of the most traditional districts. However, they are gradually becoming less present in new development areas, as current patterns of development threaten this environmental heritage. Therefore, at the beginning of this project, the transdisciplinary team of architects, building users and biologists started by investigating a number of specific aspects of this heritage, trying to identify key features of its bio-geographic context; thus the project became an exploration of ways of being actively involved in expanding and taking care the city’s unique ecological wealth.
When researching pre-existing local activities designed to counteract environmental degradation, the team came across a valuable, though largely unknown initiative being run by the Fundación Zoológico de Cali (the Cali Zoological Foundation), called "Jardines para la Ciudad". The aim of this "Gardens for the City" program was to help create a garden network specially designed to attract native species of birds and insects, primarily focusing on an educational program in the city’s schools, most of which are located on the outskirts of the city.
The HNHAGB, which has been officially registered since 2005, started to be a testing ground for this program, while "Proyecto Cali" sought to extend its possibilities by making them visible in a new realm by involving not only schools and institutions, but also other audiences. In this case, it started targeting the visitors of the atelier, who often aren't regular visitors of natural science museums, but are instead out shopping. ///

HNHAGB IN THE BIO-GEOGRAPHIC REGION OF THE TROPICAL ANDES:
During the design process of the HNHAGB the specificities of its context in its different scales were taken into account. The province of Valle del Cauca, where Cali is located, covers only 2% of the country’s total surface area, but is one of the richest regions in Colombia in terms of species variety, accounting for 25%-45% of the entire country’s biodiversity. This is measured in terms of the number of bird, reptile, mammal, amphibian and plant species present. Colombia itself is one of the world’s 12 megadiverse countries,(1) containing 10% of the planet’s total biodiversity in an area that covers only 0.7% of its surface.(2) Apart from having the largest number of bird species in the world, Colombia is one of the top three countries in terms of diurnal butterfly diversity, alongside Brazil and Peru.(3) As well as the urgent problems caused by increasing environmental deterioration, this partly explains why Cali is located right between two of the world’s 34 sensitive biodiversity areas or hotspots,(4) one of which is the Tropical Andes hotspot, which is believed to have the greatest number of endemic species on the planet. Knowledge of this rich heritage is, however, poorly publicized and little understood or appreciated by the people who live in the city, reflected by the fact that many people continue to plant commercial species in their gardens, which are frequently non-native or related in any way to the local ecosystem, much less endemic, and this contributes in large part to a standardization of the landscape rather than the preservation of its biodiversity and variety. In addition, as the city grows and in the way it is planned, the overall proportion of green spaces is on the decline. The HNHAGB, as a garden made up of species related to the Cali´s ecosystem, takes advantage of the existing natural ecosystem within the city, which includes some of the threatened regional species.///

HOST AND NECTAR PLANTS – A CHANGING BUILDING:
The host plants in the garden building, such as passionflowers (Passifloras), pipevines (Aristolochias) or milkweeds (Asclepias), provide home for the butterflies throughout their developmental stages as eggs, caterpillars and cocoons, and their leaves serve as the caterpillars’ only food source. The nectar plants, such as climbing ragworts and daisies (Senecio confusus), starflowers (Pentas lanceolada), and Spanish Flag (Lantana camara) are visited by different types of butterfly who drink the nectar from their flowers. Although as adults they are able to feed themselves with nectar from different types of flowers, they are usually dependent on one single host plant species throughout their larval stage, which makes them especially vulnerable. Caterpillars typically consume more than their own body weight each day, which means that at this stage in their life cycle, depending upon the species, they sometimes defoliate an entire plant. Thus, the developmental cycles of the caterpillars often affect the appearance of the building, by opening up “windows” in the façade during their growing stages that are expected to be later covered again with new foliage.

Climbing plants occupy pots on the balconies and in the side spaces of the frontages. Shrub-like plants, as well as some climbers, are sown in the back garden and in the bulb-shaped containers incorporated into the exterior wall of the property. Nectar species have been interspersed with the host species. This means that even when the host species are defoliated, the nectar species are expected to cover at least half of the garden’s surface. This process is not free of conflict between the house of butterflies and the house of humans. At some point when we realized that there were too many larvs eating the façade plants, non host or nectar plants had to be planted in the garden building. ///

BIO-METER BUILDING, BUTTERFLIES AS BIO-INDICATORS:
Butterflies are especially good indicators of changes to species diversity resulting from man-made changes to the environment.(5) The structure and composition of butterfly populations often give an indication of not only the diversity of a species in any given area, but also its conservation status.(6) Different research studies have shown that the wealth of butterfly species decreases in direct relation to the growth in urbanization.(7) The appearance of any species of butterfly is a reliable indicator of the presence of certain other species of plants (host and nectar plants, which both the grub and the adult butterfly use as a food resource), animals (parasites and predators), and a particular set of environmental factors (temperature changes, humidity, luminosity level) to which butterflies are extremely sensitive.(8) There are other reasons for using butterflies as ecological indicators: apart from providing an in-depth knowledge of their biology and taxonomy, butterflies' high level of sensitivity to temperature variations, humidity and solar radiation, the high degree of dependency of each species on its host plant, and their high space-time stability and limited dispersion capacity make them very accurate bio-indicators of the conservation status of, or alterations to, their natural habitat.(9) The HNHAGB works as a bio-meter, or indicator of the status of the natural environment in the area. ///

THE GBHNPCB AS A CATALYST FOR ENVIRONMENTALLY-AWARE GARDENING ACTIONS:
The movements of butterflies and other species living in a city are dependent upon a green network. Butterflies, like other insects and birds arriving at HNHAGB, still need the existing gardens and plants of the city. Thus, beyond the building process, the construction of other processes based on small initiatives to promote the expansion and maintenance of these spaces have been essential in order to create a closely-linked network of areas and corridors for those species to move around in, connecting them also to non-urbanized spaces on the outskirts of the city.
The garden building, apart from its direct action on the environment, has also been useful for more than a decade as a platform to provide information through various activities at the atelier, explaining the butterfly garden and the biodiversity of the region. Activities in this space have taken advantage of the continuous flow of visitors to the atelier to try to create awareness among a non-specialist audience of the valuable projects being carried out by local entomologists and other professional and non professional specialists. The intention of the HNHAGB has been to operate as a catalyst for small-scale, domestic green projects, by promoting the use of particular plant species to attract local fauna among visitors of the shop, and encouraging people to plant more host and nectar plants in their gardens, thus broadening the network of self-managed garden areas. During events at the atelier, information was handed out in the form of flyers, as well as being printed on product labels, bags, and other company stationery, as part of the series of activities designed to showcase and discuss the possible positive outcomes of environmentally-aware gardening throughout the neighbourhood. Currently the care of the garden has been fully assumed by new residents, as a natural and important process of transferring responsibilities. ///

ENERGY AND BIOCLIMATICS:
The HNHAGB design has included passive strategies for interior comfort, which is a very important issue in a hot and humid tropical climate such as that in Cali, with an average annual temperature of 26 degrees C all year around. The building is detached, standing 1.2 meters apart from its neighbors, allowing a permanent flow of cool air which helps to remove heat from the lateral façades, while leaving 250 m2 of additional surface for the vertical garden. This is covered with climbing plant species, forming a layer of foliage that helps to reduce temperatures inside while also providing shade. The floor plans have balconies on the south/west façade providing shade for the windows and making room for the plant pots. All floors have cross ventilation, removing the need for A/C or electric fans. In a context such as the one in Cali, where institutional presence tends to be weak, - local governments scarcely have the funds to intervene - it seems important to test projects based on responsible citizen activism, and micro-community driven strategies which transcend the reductionist approach that is behind most private initiatives, which currently dominate as the engine for the city's development.
The social and natural processes that have occurred therein over time have turned this project into a micro laboratory for approaching some of the dynamics and temporalities of the ‘biological’ in the city.
This project was intended as a sort of Trojan horse, introducing an environmental agenda into such an apparently banal - and often wrongly understood as non-political - place as a clothes shop, by putting into practice biological experiments, and explaining and making them accessible to its visitors. Rather than expecting such environmental concerns and knowledge to be discussed exclusively among specialists, this project has tried, though multiple means, to give them a place in the everyday. ///

FOOTNOTES:
(1) Megadiverse countries are those presenting the largest rate of biodiversity and hosting as a whole more than 70% of the planet’s biodiversity. These are mainly tropical countries, hosting in their jungles and mountain regions the most diverse and largest number of the world’s flora and fauna species, many of which are endemic (native to a clearly delimited area: island, country, etc.). On February 18, 2002, the Semamat (Department of Environment and Natural Resources), hosted a meeting in Cancún for representatives from the twelve megadiverse countries: Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and Venezuela. The Cancún Declaration was then signed and the Grupo de Países megadiversos Afines (group of megadiverse countries with similarities) was created.
(2) Potes, L.F. 1999. Los Ricos en Megadiversidad (Rich in megadiversity). Universidad del Valle. Palmira.
(3) Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt, Colombia (http://www.humboldt.org.co).
(4) The hotspot concept (critical area) was created in 1988 by Norman Myers referring to areas where a high level of species at an important degree of risk is concentrated. For an area to be described as critical, it must contain at least 1,500 species of vascular plants and it must have lost at least 70% of its original natural habitat (http://www.biodiversityhotspots.org).
(5) Blair, R. B. 1999. Birds and butterflies along an urban gradient: Surrogate taxa for assessing biodiversity? Ecological Applications 9(1): 164-170.
(6) Brown, K. S., 1991. Conservation of neotropical environments: insects as indicators. In: The Conservation of Insects and their Habitats (eds N.M. Collins and J.A. Thomas), pp. 350-404. Academic Press, London.
Beccaloni, G.W. and Gaston, K. J., 1995. Predicting the species richness of neotropical forest butterflies-Ithomiinae (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae) as indicators. Biological Conservation, 71, 77-86.
Andrade-C., G. 1998. Utilización de mariposas como bioindicadores del tipo de habitat y su biodiversidad en Colombia (Use of butterflies as bioindicators of the type of habitat and their biodiversity in Colombia). Revista de la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Vol XXII, September, 407-421.
Caro TM y O'Doherty G. 1999. On the use of surrogate species in conservation biology. Conservation Biology 13:805-814.
(7) Brown, JR. K. S., Freitas, A.V.L. 2002. Butterfly communities of urban forest fragment in Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil: structure, instability, environmental correlates, and conservation. Journal of Insect Conservation. 6: 217-231; Blair, R. B. 1999. Birds and butterflies along an urban gradient: Surrogate taxa for assessing biodiversity? Ecological Applications 9(1): 164-170.
(8) Salazar, J. y Vélez J. 1991. Mariposas de Colombia (Butterflies of Colombia). First Edition. Bogotá. Villegas Editores. 167 pp.
(9) Kremen C., Colwell R., Erwin T., Murphy D., Noss R. & Sanjayan M. 1993. Terrestrial arthropod assemblages: their use in conservation planning. Conserv. Biol. 7: 796-808.
Andrade-C., G. 1998.
Fagua G., Amarillo A. y Andrade-C M.G.1999. Mariposas (Lepidoptera) como bioindicadores del grado de intervención en la cuenca del río Pato (Caquetá) (Butterflies (Lepidoptera) as bioindicators of the degree of intervention in the basin of the Pato river). In M.G. Andrade, G. Amat & F. Fernandez (eds) Insectos de Colombia, Estudios Escogidos. (Insects from Colombia, Selected studies). Colección Jorge Álvarez Lleras 13: 285-315. Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Bogotá. ///
CREDITS:
Authors:
Husos: Diego Barajas, Camilo García, (Architects) and Francisco Amaro (Biologist) + Building community (inhabitants, workers and visitors).
Client: Taller Croquis (Cali, Colombia)
Location: Cali, Colombia
Built Surface: 510.30m2
Design: 2003-2004
Construction: stage 1: 2005 / stage 2: 2010 /
Collaborators: Anibal Arenas, Juan Pablo Arias, Junko Watanabe, Antonio Cobo, Jahir Sabogal.
Construction: Stage 1: Luis A. Ramírez / Stage 2: Camilo García
Foundations: Rodrigo Gallegos
Steel structure: Jorge Mejía
Structural consultants: Diego Gómez and Ángela Mª Ramírez
Photography: Manuel Salinas and Javier García.
Acknowledgments: Fundación Zoológico de Cali, Douglas Laing (Agronomical Engineer specialist in tropical agriculture), Lorena Ramírez (Biologist. Universidad del Valle. Colombia), Luis M. Constantino (Biologist Entomologist, Ms.C, Associate Researcher National Centre for Investigations in Coffe. Cenicafé. Chinchiná), Ricardo A. Claro (Biologist Entomologist. Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Colombia), José Martín Cano (Biologist Entomologist. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), María García, Manuel Salinas y Julián Velásquez.
Husos Architects
Address:
Calle Luciente, 14 2C
28005 Madrid, Spain
@:
diego@husos.info / camilo@husos.info /
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+34-617184812 / +34-657133281
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www.husos.info