MuNa/docs/counter-proposal.md

# Casa de la Memoria Andina

### An Alternative Vision for the New National Museum of Ecuador

*Av. Eloy Alfaro & Av. de la República, Iñaquito, Quito*

---

## About this proposal

Ecuador is building a new home for its National Museum — the institution
that holds the country's most important collection, more than 1.2 million
objects and documents spanning 12,000 years, currently so short of space
that less than one percent of it can ever be shown at once. A new building
on a 13,000 m² site facing La Carolina Park is a real chance to fix that.

This document presents an alternative to the design that has provoked
public objection since it was announced. It is not a technical drawing or
a finished design — it is a description of what the building could feel
like to everyone who will use it: a family visiting on a Sunday, a school
group on a weekday morning, the curators and conservators who care for the
collection every day, and the communities across Ecuador's coast, Andes,
and Amazon whose heritage the museum exists to hold.

The guiding idea is simple: a national museum should welcome people before
it impresses them. It should be legible from the street, generous with
shade and courtyards in a city that gets both blazing sun and sudden rain
in the same afternoon, built from the materials and colors of Quito
itself, and organized so that arriving, finding your way, working, and
belonging all feel natural rather than effortful.

What follows are four accounts of the same building, told from four points
of view: a visitor walking through for the first time, the staff who work
in it every day, a school group spending a day there, and the indigenous
and community stakeholders whose heritage it represents. Together they
describe one consistent building, seen from four sides.

*(Illustration: the museum seen from the corner of Av. Eloy Alfaro and Av.
de la República)*

---

## I. The Visitor

*Arrival, threshold, courtyards, collections, and departure, as
experienced by a member of the general public.*

### First sight, from the two avenues

From the corner of Avenida Eloy Alfaro and Avenida de la República, the
museum does not announce itself as a single monumental object. It appears
as a gathered family of white and grey masonry volumes rising from a broad
platform of dark andesite — an archaeological wing, a historical wing, an
artistic wing, an education wing, and, above them all, the taller central
hall whose broad pyramidal roof gathers the whole composition. The
25,000 m² of accommodation are stacked on four levels of roughly 6,250 m²
each, so the footprint covers less than half of the 13,004.65 m² property;
the rest of the ground stays alive as forecourt, patios, gardens, and
trees.

The elevations step forward and back in shallow movements, making
sheltered entrances, arcades, balconies, and small exterior rooms along
the street. Above the walls, a roofscape of red-brown clay tile cascades
down from the high roof of the central hall — lower gables and hips
descending over the wings — and deep horizontal aleros throw hard shadows
that shield the visitor from Quito's fierce midday sun, its sudden
afternoon rain, and the occasional hail. The building reads vertically as
a tectonic history of the country: dark stone at the earth, thick
limewashed tapial and adobe above it, and a lighter crown of timber and
bahareque beneath the roofs.

*(Illustration: the stepped street elevation and roofscape)*

### The Civic Atrio

The public face of the museum is not its façade but its atrio, set
slightly above street level. Broad ceremonial steps and gently sloping
accessible paths rise between low sitting walls, planted terraces, and
trees. This is where the city's scale adjusts to the institution's: large
enough to absorb school groups and a daily attendance in the tens of
thousands, yet never an empty ceremonial plaza, because its edges are
lined with activity pockets — the ticket and information kiosk, a
bookstall, sheltered benches, drinking water, meeting points. Cars and
service vehicles are kept visually subordinate, screened behind planted
walls and secondary wings; yet from the drop-off, the entrance portal
remains clearly in view, so no one arrives through a back door by
mistake.

*(Illustration: the Civic Atrio, ceremonial steps, school group arriving)*

### Threshold: portal and zaguán

The entrance projects from the façade as a deep stone portal composed in
a rhythm of five bays — unmistakable from both avenues, but not
overpowering. Passing beneath the low protective edge of the roof, the
visitor enters a broad zaguán, and the city falls away. Street noise dulls
against thick walls with rounded reveals; the paving changes from rough
exterior stone to smoother brick and stone bands underfoot; the light
turns cool and subdued. Then, at the far end of the passage, the view
opens suddenly onto sunlight, trees, moving water, and the first patio.
The transition is staged and bodily: street, atrio, portal, zaguán, patio
— the museum never exposes itself all at once.

*(Illustration: the entrance portal, five-bay rhythm)*

### The Patio of Origins

The first realm is the Patio of Origins, proportioned so that the high
equatorial sun reaches the paving and planting while the surrounding
corredores remain in shade. It is not a void to be looked at through
glass: doors open into it from the entrance hall, the archaeological
galleries, the café, and the education rooms, and natural paths cross it
in several directions. Large andesite and fired-clay slabs are laid with
narrow planted joints, mosses and small flowers growing between the
stones. Rainwater falls from expressed canales into shallow stone-lined
rills that cross the court toward planted basins. When an afternoon storm
breaks, visitors stand under the corredor and watch the rain work across
the court; when the sun returns minutes later, that same sheltered edge
becomes a warm place to sit.

*(Illustration: the Patio of Origins, water channel, community room door)*

### The Great Hall

Beyond the patio stands the central building, the institutional heart
toward which all roofs and paths converge. Inside, a broad pyramidal
timber roof rises overhead, its structure fully visible, so that even in
the largest room of the museum the visitor feels sheltered rather than
dwarfed. The perimeter of the hall drops to a human register —
information counters, window seats, alcoves, orientation displays,
doorways into the collections.

The main staircase is a room in its own right: it turns along two walls
and widens near the floor into broad steps where school groups assemble,
talks are given, and people simply sit to watch the life of the hall. From
the upper landings, windows and balconies give repeated views back to the
entrance patio, so visitors constantly re-orient themselves without
signage.

*(Illustration: the Great Hall interior, timber roof structure, retablo
wall)*

### Realms and thoroughfares

Movement through the museum is organized as a sequence of named realms —
the Civic Atrio, the Patio of Origins, the Great Hall, the Corredor of
Time, the Patio of Memory, the Garden of the Arts. Directions are given
through places, not floor numbers. From the hall, several parallel loops
branch out — archaeological, historical, artistic — and each returns
independently to the hall or to a patio. This is what allows 400,000
visitors a month to move without a single forced procession: school
groups gather on the stair and in common rooms while individual visitors
flow past; temporary exhibitions run outside the permanent route. The
principal circulation spaces are built as genuine building thoroughfares,
4.5 to 6 metres wide and considerably taller than ordinary corridors,
their edges lined with seating, exhibit windows, doorways, and views into
conservation and education work. Walking is part of the visit, not
leftover space between galleries.

*(Illustration: a wide, daylit circulation gallery, seating along one edge)*

### The ascent of the collections

The permanent collections unfold as a gradual climb through the material
history of Ecuador, and the building's construction tells the same story
as the artifacts.

The archaeological galleries occupy the lowest and heaviest realm. Floors
and lower walls are dark stone; rooms are cool, calm, and acoustically
quiet. At a few significant thresholds, doorways narrow slightly toward
the top in restrained trapezoidal profiles — used sparingly, never as a
repeated motif. Objects are met in rooms of varied size: a small gold
piece in a low, protected niche at close range; a monumental stone in a
taller vaulted chamber opening toward a court.

The historical galleries rise into the earthen middle of the building —
the Corredor of Time. Limewashed walls, timber beams, balconies, maps,
documents, and domestic objects carry the narrative from colonial Quito
through republican and modern national life. The route is chronological
but not mechanically linear — shorter loops are always possible — and at
regular intervals it expands into a common room with seating, daylight,
and a view, where groups can rest and rejoin: this is the Patio of Memory,
the historical wing's own court, adjoining the museum's reading room and
archive study spaces. Interior windows along this court let a visitor
glimpse a librarian consulting a bound volume or an archivist unrolling a
map, a quiet reminder that the collection's less visible reserves — until
now largely unexhibited — now have a real, inhabited room of their own
rather than remaining out of reach.

The artistic collections occupy the light timber crown, opening onto the
Garden of the Arts. Here the galleries open toward recessed balconies and
a balcón corrido overlooking the principal patio, and a roofed mirador,
folded into the central roof rather than built as a tower, frames a single
carefully chosen view of Quito and — when the weather allows — the flanks
of Pichincha. From here the visitor understands the museum as part of the
city and the Andean landscape, not a sealed container of objects.

Throughout, the wings are narrow and every public room receives daylight
from two sides. Sensitive artifacts rest in protected chambers where
sunlight is excluded, but these darker rooms always alternate with
luminous corredores, window bays, patios, and resting places. No visitor
is held for hours without contact with daylight, weather, vegetation, or
the position of the sun.

*(Illustration: the historical gallery route with a common-room bay; the
artistic wing's balcón and rooftop lookout)*

### Edges, courts, and gardens

The building's edge is treated as an inhabited thickness rather than a
line. Deep window reveals become seats; recessed balconies, a full two
metres deep, let visitors step outside while remaining under cover;
arcades and a trellised walk connect the patios even during rain. Every
courtyard has a protected "back" and a view toward a larger open space;
every terrace is placed where it catches useful sun and is sheltered from
the afternoon wind. The café opens at once toward an interior common room,
a roofed veranda, and a sunny garden, so a parent can sit with the
building at their back and watch children in the space ahead. Around the
smaller education court, interior windows reveal the museum at work — an
exhibition being mounted, an artifact being documented — making visible
the human labor by which cultural memory is preserved. Terraces, steps,
and sitting walls blur the line where building ends and earth begins.

*(Illustration: a deep recessed balcony, the café terrace and garden)*

### Look and feel

The atmosphere is substantial without being oppressive, ceremonial
without being authoritarian. Walls feel thick enough to shelter; roofs are
always perceptible overhead; openings are tall and relatively narrow,
glazed in small panes, so daylight enters as reflected light from pale
plaster rather than glare through plate glass. The sound of footsteps
changes from stone halls to timber galleries to brick corredores to
planted courts. Timber, earth render, vegetation, and rain give the
building a smell as much as a look.

Wall fields are matte lime-white; andesite carries the plinth, retaining
walls, steps, portal, and principal structural frames. Carpentry is dark
walnut; roof tiles remain their natural red-brown; wrought-iron rejas are
almost black; a restrained oxblood zócalo runs along selected lower
walls. From a distance the museum has a grave civic presence; at close
range it is animated by moving sunlight, deep shadow, timber, planting,
and people. Color lives on doors, windows, rails, and chosen interior
elements — never spread indiscriminately across the building.

*(Illustration: close-up of stonework detail at the portal; the color
palette across a typical courtyard elevation)*

### Ornamental treatment

Ornament is disciplined by place: concentrated at the base, the
threshold, and the crown, never distributed as surface decoration.
Diamond-coursed masonry appears in limited bands within the andesite
plinth. Stepped profiles derived from the chakana — the Andean stepped
cross — shape the stair edges, portal mouldings, metal grilles, door
pulls, and a small number of cornice transitions — all of it made through
masonry bonding, timber joinery, perforation, and shadow, never applied
graphics.

The density of ornament increases as one approaches the portal. Its outer
bays stay relatively plain; the central bay carries the most precise
stone carving, deeply recessed doors, and geometric timberwork. Beyond
the entrance, ornament subsides so the patios and galleries can remain
quiet.

The single figurative episode waits inside the great hall: one wall
composed as a contemporary retablo of national memory — a tiered field of
niches and frames holding abstracted sun and moon discs, maize, Andean
flowers, birds, and animal forms, integrated with the orientation desk,
the stair landing, and the first objects of the collection. It is dense,
luminous, and memorable, and it stays in this one civic center. Every
other major wall remains calm, preserving the distinction between
ornament, architecture, and the artifacts themselves. The result
translates pre-Columbian, colonial, indigenous, and baroque traditions
into contemporary construction — without reproducing a historical
façade, and without becoming collage.

### Departure

At the end of the visit the loops converge gently rather than discharging
the visitor. Routes return through the great hall or a patio, past the
shop and café, into the entrance room with its clear view of the atrio and
the city beyond. The exit reverses the arrival: protected gallery,
corredor, sunlit patio, shaded zaguán, civic atrio, street. What remains
is not the impression of having crossed a large institutional machine,
but of having ascended a condensed Ecuadorian landscape — stone ground,
earthen rooms, inhabited thresholds, living courts, crafted timber,
rain-bearing roofs, and a few carefully concentrated moments of
celebration.

*(Illustration: the view back toward the Civic Atrio and street from the
entrance room)*

---

## II. Museum Staff

*The working experience of curators, conservators, librarians,
archivists, and educators.*

### Arriving to work, not to visit

Staff do not use the Civic Atrio. A modest service entrance sits at the
rear of the historical wing, reached from a small court screened behind
planted walls in the same manner as the visitor parking — a handful of
staff spaces and a loading bay for collections transport, never more than
5–7 vehicles, invisible from either avenue. This entrance is deliberately
subordinate to the main portal, but it is not a leftover gap between
buildings either: it opens directly into a proper building thoroughfare,
so a conservator arriving at seven in the morning walks the same
generously daylit route a visitor will use hours later, just entered from
the other end.

### Loading and handling the collection

The service court connects directly to a goods lift and a ground-level
handling room behind the archaeological wing, sized for the monumental
stone pieces in the collection — the Tolita Sun among them — as well as
smaller crated works. This handling room has its own daylight from a
narrow clerestory rather than being a windowless box, but the crates
themselves rest under the same protected, sun-excluded discipline as the
sensitive galleries upstairs.

### Conservation and curatorial workspaces

Two conservation studios sit close to the collections they serve rather
than being centralized in one distant lab: an object-conservation studio
adjoining the archaeological wing's handling room, and a
paper-and-textile conservation studio adjoining the Patio of Memory,
close to the Historical Archive's holdings of manuscripts, photographs,
and musical scores. Both studios are narrow, elongated rooms with windows
on two sides, because conservation work depends on stable, even daylight
as much as any gallery does. Curatorial offices line the same corridor in
a loose chain rather than a double-loaded corridor of identical doors:
each office opens onto the working corridor and, on its far side, onto a
narrow light well or the Patio of Memory itself, so no curator works
without a view of sky or court.

### The Patio of Memory precinct: library and archive

The Human Sciences Library — around 210,000 items, including the Jijón y
Caamaño and Isaac Barrera collections — and the Historical Archive —
918,673 documents — both live adjacent to the historical wing, opening
onto the Patio of Memory. For librarians and archivists this is not a
back-room afterthought: the reading room is a real, daylit space at the
court's edge, with the same limewashed walls and timber beams as the
historical galleries above it, and its own quiet corredor for readers to
step outside without leaving the building's shelter. Archive storage —
the manuscripts, cartography, sound recordings, and posters — sits one
level below the reading room in a controlled, sun-excluded vault, but the
vault's staff workroom still receives borrowed light from a sequence of
small clerestory openings, so no archivist spends a working day with no
sense of daylight or weather.

This precinct is where staff feel most directly the museum's founding
problem: for the first time, the Library and Archive have a named place
with a public reading room attached, rather than being warehoused out of
reach. A researcher requesting a Jijón y Caamaño volume and a
schoolchild's teacher preparing a lesson from the Historical Archive now
use the same room.

### Educator and workshop spaces

The education wing — named alongside the temporary-exhibition wing in
the building complex — holds the educators' own working spaces: a
preparation room for handling teaching objects, a materials store, and a
small staff office, all opening onto the same court the café faces.
Educators can watch a school group gather in the Civic Atrio or the Great
Hall stair through window bays before stepping out to meet them — the
same sight-line orientation the repeated views from the Great Hall's
upper landings give visitors, so no signage or radios are needed to know
a group has arrived.

### Common areas at the heart

Museum staff — conservators, curators, librarians, archivists,
educators, security, and front-of-house — are a single social group, and
one shared staff room sits at the center of gravity of the back-of-house
spaces described above, reached tangentially from the conservation
studios, the curatorial corridor, the Patio of Memory precinct, and the
education wing alike. It opens onto a small private court — not the
Civic Atrio, not the Patio of Origins, a court reserved for staff — with
its own sitting walls and a single mature tree, so a conservator on a
break and an archivist between requests end up in the same room without
needing to arrange it.

### Look and feel, extended to the working spaces

The back-of-house realm uses the same material and color discipline as
the public building — matte lime-white walls, andesite, dark walnut
carpentry, natural clay tile — because that discipline does not stop
applying once a door is marked "staff only." What changes is density, not
palette: ornament here is close to absent, since decoration was always
concentrated at the public thresholds, and the single figurative retablo
wall stays in the Great Hall — no second figurative wall appears anywhere
in the staff areas. The effect is a building staff recognize as
continuous with the one their visitors experience, calmer but never
colder.

---

## III. A School Group's Day

*A teacher, chaperones, and children from roughly six to sixteen years
old, visiting for the day.*

### Arrival: the bus, the atrio, the count

The bus stops where service and drop-off traffic is kept visually
subordinate to the entrance portal — no separate "school entrance" is
needed, because the Civic Atrio was already sized to absorb school groups
and a daily attendance in the tens of thousands. A teacher doing a
headcount before the portal has the low sitting walls and planted
terraces to gather thirty children without spilling into the street, and
the activity pockets lining the atrio's edge — the kiosk, the bookstall,
the sheltered benches — give restless children something to look at while
the count happens twice.

### Threshold, at child height

The zaguán's staged transition — street to portal to cool dim passage to
sudden sunlit patio — reads differently to an eight-year-old than to an
adult: the change from bright street to shadowed passage to bright patio
again is a more dramatic sequence of thresholds when your own vantage
point is lower. Ornament density peaking at the portal puts the
chakana-derived stepped mouldings and door pulls closest to the ground
right where the portal is thickest with detail — which is also, at a
child's height, where they are easiest to see and touch.

### The Great Hall: the stair as the day's gathering point

The main staircase is a room in its own right — where school groups
assemble, talks are given. For a school group this is the anchor of the
entire visit: the broad, shallow steps near the floor function as tiered
seating built into the architecture itself, tested by whether people
actually gravitate to sit there, not merely built to look like seating. A
guide can address thirty or sixty children at once without a microphone,
and — because the perimeter of the hall drops to a human register — the
alcoves and window seats around its edge let a chaperone keep a wandering
child in sight without leaving the group. From the upper landings,
repeated views back to the entrance patio mean a child who gets briefly
separated can re-orient by sight, toward a place, not a floor number or a
sign.

### Moving through the collections at a child's pace

The building thoroughfares, 4.5–6 metres wide, are wide enough that a
school group moving as a loose cluster does not block individual
visitors, and the several parallel loops through the building mean a
group can peel off into the archaeological loop while another group is in
the historical Corredor of Time — two school groups from different towns
never have to queue behind each other through a single forced route.

In the archaeological wing, the small gold piece in a low, protected
niche at close range is exactly the kind of object a child can approach
at their own height without a rope barrier looming overhead; the
monumental stone in its taller vaulted chamber gives the same group an
experience of scale in the other direction. The restrained trapezoidal
door-thresholds are subtle enough that a class doesn't need them
explained to feel a room has changed register.

Along the Corredor of Time, the periodic common-room expansions — where
groups can rest and rejoin — are where a school group actually stops for
its scheduled break: built-in seating, daylight, and a view, sized for a
class rather than a single family. A teacher can hold a short discussion
here without leaving the route or needing a separate room booked in
advance.

### The education wing: workshops as the day's second half

The education wing holds the educators' preparation room, materials
store, and office, opening onto the same court the café faces. For the
school group, this wing is where the day's structured workshop happens —
object-handling sessions using teaching replicas prepared by the
educators, in a room scaled and furnished for groups of thirty rather
than the individual-visitor scale of the galleries. Because the educators
can watch the Civic Atrio and Great Hall stair through window bays, a
workshop can start the moment a group arrives without a chaperone having
to go looking for staff.

### Outdoor time: patios as recess, not just scenery

Every named court in this building is a real outdoor room, not a view
seen through glass, and for a school group that matters practically: the
Patio of Origins and the Garden of the Arts are places a class can be
released to move, sit, and eat a packed lunch between gallery sessions,
under cover if an afternoon storm arrives. A tired six-year-old gets a
change of pace and daylight before the next room, not another corridor.

---

## IV. Indigenous and Community Stakeholders

*Members of the indigenous nations and communities whose heritage the
National Collection holds and represents — visiting, consulting the
archive, or attending a community event.*

### A complex, not a monolith

Public opposition to earlier museum proposals has centered on buildings
that read as a single anonymous mass and feel like they represent
nobody in particular. This building is built from a different premise: the
archaeological, historical, and artistic wings, the temporary-exhibition
and education wing, and the Great Hall are legible as distinct parts of
one composition — a building whose very massing admits that the nation it
represents is plural, not singular, before a single object is displayed.

### The roof that draws on indigenous, not colonial, logic

The Great Hall's roof is the tallest and most prominent element in the
whole composition, and it belongs to Ecuador's indigenous building
tradition — the logic of a great, protective, structurally expressed
canopy — rather than the colonial or baroque traditions that shape the
walls beneath it. This is a considered hierarchy: the single most
important space in the building is roofed according to indigenous
constructive logic, its structure fully visible from below, rather than
borrowing its dominant gesture from the traditions that give the walls
their character.

### Ground: recognition, not decoration

The archaeological wing's restrained trapezoidal profiles, at a few
significant thresholds, are a potent pre-Columbian marker traceable to
real precedent — the great site of Ingapirca — rather than an invented
motif, and they are used sparingly by design. For a community
stakeholder, that restraint is the point: this is a recognized
architectural language, deployed with discipline — not scattered
decoratively across every doorway as surface pattern, which would cheapen
it into applied ornament rather than structural, load-bearing meaning.
The dark andesite ground floor itself sits on the same battered-stone,
terraced logic as Ingapirca and Cochasquí — the building's heaviest, most
permanent material stratum speaks the pre-Columbian ground language
literally, not figuratively.

### The one figurative episode: integration, not tokenism

The single retablo episode inside the Great Hall — a tiered field of
niches and frames holding abstracted sun and moon discs, maize, Andean
flowers, birds, and animal forms — is a translation, not a replica: every
other major wall remains calm. For a community stakeholder this
distinction matters directly: the retablo is not a replica of any
specific community's regalia or a collage of borrowed motifs assembled
for visual effect — it is one disciplined, abstracted composition, sited
at the building's institutional heart and integrated with the orientation
desk, the stair landing, and the first objects of the collection, so it
reads as part of the building's structure and civic purpose rather than
as decoration applied to impress. One episode, in one place, doing real
orientational work, not a pattern repeated for atmosphere.

### Community rooms, at the origin of the sequence

Community rooms are named explicitly alongside the permanent collections
and education spaces as part of the building's program. This narrative
places them opening off the Patio of Origins — the first sunlit realm
after the zaguán, alongside the entrance hall, archaeological galleries,
café, and education-room doors that already open onto that same court.
Community rooms sit at the very beginning of the visitor sequence, not
appended at the back of the building: a delegation from an Amazonian,
coastal, or Andean community consulting on how their heritage is
displayed, or gathering for a cultural event, uses a room with the same
daylight, the same andesite-and-tapial materials, and the same access to
the Patio of Origins's water and planting as every other visitor — not a
separate, lesser space reached by a different route.

### The archive and library as a place of return

The Human Sciences Library and Historical Archive open onto the Patio of
Memory, adjoining the historical wing. For community researchers —
genealogists, knowledge-keepers, or scholars consulting the Jijón y
Caamaño or Isaac Barrera collections, or the Historical Archive's
manuscripts, cartography, and sound recordings — this reading room is
where less-visible patrimonial material becomes something a community
member can sit with directly, answering the museum's founding problem
that under 1% of the collection is currently exhibitable. The same court
a conservator or archivist uses daily is the court a community member
crosses to reach that material — one shared room, not a restricted back
office.

### Dignity in how objects are met

The archaeological galleries meet a small gold piece in a low, protected
niche at close range, and a monumental stone in a taller vaulted chamber
opening toward a court — varied room sizes matched to the object, not a
uniform grid of identical vitrines. For a community stakeholder whose
ancestors' work is held here, this variation is what dignity in display
looks like architecturally: the building's room sizes respond to what is
being shown, at the scale of the object as much as the room, rather than
every piece — however sacred, however small, however monumental — being
flattened into the same generic gallery bay.