Living on the Water: A Resiliency Toolkit for Stilt-house Villages of Lake Maracaibo

The waters of Lake Maracaibo have been inhabited by the Añu people’s stilt house-settlements uninterruptedly for centuries. The particular sight that these settlements create gave the region its name, Venezuela, meaning “Little Venice.” In these water settlements, kids learn how to swim before they learn how to walk. Boats replace cars and buses as the method of transportation. Fishing and agriculture are the family trade, the young learning from their elders. Goods are ferried from the land-based cities, specially from Maracaibo, the regional capital. Water is almost a character itself, with which they have a communion, and a deep sentiment of respect. For the Añu, water represents the totality of all the things created. Water surges become a sign of change, either of climate or in people’s life. It’s a symbol of life as well a one of disaster and chaos, thus, water becomes supreme, bringer of life and death.

The research project explores how can the water settlement evolve, with adaptive measures to the 21st century, being able to be sustainable and give resiliency to the communities which incur in their use. The study focuses on the vernacular architecture, which is the stilt house, it’s design, it’s evolution, it’s capacity to evolve with new materials and programmatic spaces, and its ability to adapt to different landscapes that combine water and land features, the design intention is to create a model community up the rivers that feed the Lake, since the water is cleaner and the challenges of the troubled waters can be diminished to an extent, able to house migrants from the current water settlements.

The intention of the design is not to tell the story that every human tailors for himself/herself inside the microcosm of the dwelling, but rather provide the stage in which said story can be narrated. The possibilities that the created modular system allows are many, and the limitations are up to the users and their needs. The results can vary from elongated dwellings to compounds of several housing units joined together to house several nuclei of a same family.