Bolivia. El Alto. David Garcia

I met another architect in Senkata the one day A guy was working on his bus in the middle of the street and I said hello. He said hello back and seemed pretty nice. We started talking a bit, I figured he was just another mechanic. But, he got really excited when I told him I was an architecture student. He said he was studying architecture at Universidad Publica de El Alto (UPEA). I didn’t even know they had a program there.

I ran into him later and we shared pictures and designs and he showed me around his place. It had a nice intimacy and scale to it, things of which people here don’t really care that much about. But, I liked it. They had built an oven to make bread, but the competition increased and they aren’t able to keep up. Now that space essentially functions as storage. They have built half the wall on the front to eventually open up a new store. The bus that his father uses to earn money is just parked out in the street at night. It blocks the entire street. I love it. I also love, that I can bump into a mechanic on the street here, and he is an architect working in 3-D Studio Max.