Architecture According to Nature: Studies on Survival of Self-construction in Córdoba, Colombia. Contradiction Adapted

Colombian Cordoban landscape turns out to be an interesting case where an adaptation degree is acknowledged to identify both control and spontaneity. Need of people to change places to survive, determines moving and transporting knowledge from one part to the other. Changes can be unforeseen, gradual or catastrophic and, they obviously cause and determine the effects. In the outskirts of the city, developed informal experiences reveal their origin, ancestral practice of adaptation and self-construction. Montería, (Córdoba) is just one of the many Colombian cities where in the last thirty years peasants arrive to find refuge and hostility, without accepting the new relationship between nature and environmental habits consolidated throughout the years. Self-construction, as one of the processes to develop housing, is the only option for these people of limited resources who lack assistance from the government, since it provides economical and available materials, generally from waste, that aesthetically generate a contradiction. Within the informal forming city, any order idea loses full potential despite people adaptation. In this landscape, natural and artificial categories that seem determinant, because can serve to identify the “wild” or “domesticated”, become reading instruments on how man interprets such categories to achieve a habitat.