Peru Home Pt. 1 – The Idea
June 6th, 2007
For the next few weeks, as over half of Vestal’s employees roadtrip through the Andes, blog editor Jeffrey Goodman will be sharing some of his experiences in designing, constructing, and living in a sustainable house on the roof of Vestal’s Lima office. Look for updates in the coming days from the road.
When we set up shop in Lima last summer, I didn’t know what to expect in terms of my living situation, whether I’d be in a jungle hut or colonial mansion or anything in between. In fact, this capital city has an extremely complex and various urban pattern and, despite its age, is much more related to a relatively new city like Los Angeles rather than the other colonial capitals of Latin America. Most of the city is of unremarkable two or three story brick town homes set apart from the busier thoroughfares, each home a little walled compound for reasons both cultural and pragmatic, as security is a concern in the nicer neighborhoods. Like Los Angeles, everyone commutes by car or bus, but since private ownership is rare, most people use a combination of combis (large vans that have set routes but no set stops) and taxis. Shrouded in winter fog, it was a strange and confusing land to be dropped into.
Confined in a sixth floor apartment in Miraflores, an upscale-yet-decaying district along the coast, Vestal designers Jeff Warren, Diego Rotalde, and I dreamed of greener pastures – or at least more space. (Also, the tenants association gave Jeff multiple verbal haranguing for his red curtains. We’re too young to have only cream-colored drapes.) So we moved, just a few blocks, to a subdivided mansion across from a 1500 year old ruin. Ironically, the ground floor is inhabited by Peru’s biggest web design firm. They’re good people.
We quickly found use for all the room we now had. I was most excited about the upstairs, a full roof terrace approximately fifty feet wide by thirty feet deep. Now, in Peru, roofs are used in a variety of ways; some build rooms for their “help,” some keep rabbits, others just hang their laundry up to dry. Very few people we have seen use it as, I think, most Americans would use it, i.e. hot tubs, BBQs and parties. Maybe we just live in a staid neighborhood.
For whatever reason, I decided to build a structure on the roof and then, barring any major problems, live up their in the smoggy air. Perhaps the fog had addled my brain, or I’ve just got too much youthful exuberance, but once the idea had planted itself in my mind, there was no going back. So like any good amateur architect, I booted up Google Sketchup and said, “Great Caesar Pelli’s Ghost!”
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