An Architect in the Footsteps of Ethnographer Carl Lumholtz

The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Murray Fraser & Professor Susanne Küchler

This practice-led PhD examines the vernacular architecture of the Sierra Madre in north-western Mexico by recreating the journey of the Norwegian ethnographer Carl Lumholtz, who was the first person to photograph the region’s building customs in 1890. This thesis traces the recent history of Sierra Madran cultural knowledge by combining research methods from architectural history and anthropology as a means of observing the mutations and losses in traditional architectural practices that will be used to make a comparison with the photographs and other recorded items now held in the Lumholtz Archive at the American Museum of Natural History. Extensive fieldwork has already been conducted across the remote trails of this part of Mexico in order to compile a ‘new archive’ that, when completed, will provide a cultural testimony for local people – as well as architects and scholars.

The context for this thesis is thus multiple: the research will navigate the archives of Carl Lumholtz, explore on-site in Mexico, and examine the new archive that the fieldwork will produce. The ambition of the research project is hence to participate in an ongoing historical discourse around the vernacular architecture of the Western Sierra Madreby treating the idea of an archive as a living and creative testimony. Once completed, and placed beside the Lumholtz collection, this study will provide a contemporary and time-based perspective that stretches from Lumholtz’s original explorations until today. The originality of this thesis lies in the step-by-step retracing of Lumholtz’s journey for the first time since the late nineteenth century. Through this grounded approach, the research aims to show the nature of adaptation and/or resistance of residents to the ever-evolving world surrounding them.Indeed, whereas Lumholtz intended his archive as a testimony to pre-Columbian cultures, that he considered in danger of extinction, this study seeks to reveal how these people and their culture still represent an alternative to modernisation through the conservation of some of their most ancestral customs.

Image: La Cueva de Petra (Photograph: Olivier Bellflamme, 2021)