José Ibarra, assistant professor of architecture in the Stuckeman School at Penn State's College of Arts and Architecture, has received funding from the prestigious Graham Foundation to conduct fieldwork across the Andes mountains in South America. The project will study ancient Andean terraces, canals, salt flats and carved-stone sites as sophisticated environmental infrastructures - systems that coordinate water, soil, altitude and seasonal rhythms - and ask what they can teach contemporary architectural practice about designing with climate.
Titled "Andean Ecologies, Cosmologies, and Fictions across Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the project aims to study how Andean knowledge traditions link architecture and ecology, including cosmological alignments, that shaped building orientation, agricultural patterns and seasonal plant growth over time, in what Ibarra called the most biodiverse mountain range in the world.
The Andes are the tallest mountain range outside of Asia and sit 22,838 feet above sea level at their highest point. They are the longest mountain range on land and include diverse ecosystems ranging from dense forests to arid deserts.
"I'm interested in architecture as a form of environmental mediation: ways of living with terrain, atmosphere and seasonal time," said Ibarra, who directs the Climate Fictions Lab and is an affiliate researcher with the Stuckeman School's Hamer Center for Community Design. "Rather than treating Andean sites as static heritage, the project reads them as working infrastructures, or designs that make microclimates, manage water and coordinate life across altitude."
Through measured sketches, photography and archival research, Ibarra will translate on-site observations into several "multi-scalar diagnostic drawings" showing how soils, water systems, local practices and celestial cues work together across distinct ecological zones. Each drawing will be accompanied by a short companion essay to position each site within Andean cosmologies - frameworks that braid space and time, ecological practice and ritual orientation - and current debates in climate, representation and architectural history and theory.
By centering Andean knowledge systems, Ibarra said, the project reframes architecture away from object-making alone and toward a relational practice in the face of ongoing climate challenges. Instead of defaulting to carbon-intensive fixes or purely high-tech responses, Ibarra argued that contemporary architects and designers can learn from practices that achieved resilience through maintenance, reciprocity and precise environmental attunement.
The broader goal of the project is to expand architecture's representational language by developing drawings that can register multiple scales of time and territory at once.
"Climate design isn't only about new technologies," Ibarra said. "It's also about new ways of seeing. These drawings are meant to make relationships visible so we can design with long horizons, not just immediate performance."
One precedent for the work is Ibarra's& 2025 drawing, "Moray and the Inca Cosmology," exhibited at Ithaca College and at Penn State, which was developed through travel to the Peruvian Andes supported by the American Institute of Architects Colorado chapter in 2023. That work interpreted the circular agricultural terraces of Moray, Peru, as both microclimatic laboratory and cosmological diagram. The new project extends that approach comparatively across Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador.
About the Graham Foundation
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts was founded in 1956 and "fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture and society." The foundation realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations that investigate the contemporary condition, expand historical perspectives, or explore the future of architecture and the designed environment, and by producing exhibitions, events and publications.
A full compilation of projects funded by the Graham Foundation this year can be found via grahamfoundation.org/grantees.
