Yesterday, the EMI team flew together from Lima to Cuzco and were met at the airport by some of the Seminary leaders we will be working with this week. After strapping our luggage on top of a van and in the back of a truck, we split up the team. Some headed back on the two hour drive through the mountains to the Seminary in Urubamba, while the three architects (for the master plan, church, and dormitories--that's my part) ate lunch in Cuzco with the ministry leaders and walked around to get a bit of a feel for the local architecture and construction. Lack of sleep, long travel the day before, and altitude made for a bit of a light head, but a good night's sleep in a town at a lower altitude seemed to have cleared things up a bit.
This morning the team ate breakfast together and a few shared their testimony. I spoke a bit about myself, and Latin America and Kim's and my adoption story featured heavily in the "tell us a bit about yourself and the things God's been doing in your life" talk. The team is great, and I think it will be a great encouragement to be working with other professionals (architects, engineers, and clients) who are Christ focused. Today, one of the EMI leaders said, "It's amazing the collaboration you get when you take money out of the equation and insert Christ." The more I learn about EMI, the more their mission and their organization impresses me.
We went to church with the ministry this morning. The service was in Spanish, but I was actually able to understand quite a bit of it with my Portuguese. I must give credit where credit is due, though, it was very-well-enunciated Spanish by a gringo pastor who's been here in Peru for 15+ years.
Following church, the ministry took us out to a delicious lunch, and afterward we headed back to the current seminary campus for a programming meeting for the Church component of this week's EMI trip. The programming meeting is basically getting all the designers, the EMI leaders, and the client representatives in the room together to talk about the vision for the project: how many people need to fit in the church? Do you need classrooms? What's your vision for the future? And many more.
The project this week is really for two clients--one a church and one a seminary--who work very closely together here in the town of Urubamba. The seminary, which focuses on educating Peruvian nationals and Quechua natives, owns a large plot here in town a few minutes' walk from their current campus, and they want to develop a master plan and a few initial buildings to start moving forward with a long-term vision of expansion and moving from their current location. The church that they are associated with is planning to buy a portion of the site to build a new church as their current church has reached capacity. It's a complex relationship we're still working out, but the three architects and one architectural intern on the team will be working together this week with the rest of the volunteer engineers and EMI staff to provide a vision that will help the ministries raise funds and make the vision a reality. This week is mainly for setting that vision and schematic design, and then construction documents will follow over the next few months as the volunteers work from home in conjunction with EMI's Latin America office in Costa Rica. One architect will be in charge of laying out the master plan for the seminary, another architect will be focusing on the design of the church and their needs, and I will be designing the dormitories which are to be phase 1 of the seminary's preparation of the new site for their move.
After the programming meeting, the architects walked over to the site. It really is a stunning site with so much potential. It is surrounded by a huge adobe and stone wall with cactus growing on top (add that to my list of things I love about Latin America!), has a few existing buildings and a chapel under construction, and sits on a slight hillside in the shadow of the Andes. Beautiful. Stunning even now in the rainy season, with the wet vegetation and clouds nestling around the peaks of the mountains.
The design wheels are already turning for us architects, but we still have more meetings tomorrow morning for the dormitory programming (that's my part!) and seminar master planning. We have to be careful to not get ahead of ourselves!
In Cuzco, a Spanish colonial church built on Inca foundations. The Inca didn't use grout--all the stones are shaped and fit perfectly together.
A pretty interesting building in Cuzco. I really like the arched arcade, the window/balcony composition on the facade, and the unfinished side, showing the constrained masonry (concrete frame, masonry infill) so prevalent here.
Party in the front, business on the side! Again, constrained masonry construction, but only stuccoed on the facade. A money-saving technique I'm sure.
I love this, another building in Cuzco. Stone base. Clean stuccoed facade. Minimal window details. Exposed rafters. Use of color on the details.
Crossing the mountain pass from Cuzco into the Sacred Valley of the Incas, where the town of Urubamba is situated.
The wall around our site in Urubamba. Adobe, mud, stone (some of it from glaciers!) and cactus on top. Yes, the cactus is for security. Much prettier, though, than broken glass bottles or barbed wire!
The new seminary site is on a small sloped ground. The building under construction is a chapel. The white building in back (which I think looks pretty cool, but I didn't have time to visit before we lost daylight) is a house. The mountains are such a prominent feature of the site. The forest behind the site to the north is Eucalyptus, which is a really beautiful, tall, slender tree.
This is the corner of the site where they imagine the church going, looking west toward the center of town.
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