MuNa/projects/ecuador-museum/CLAUDE.md

National Museum of Ecuador — Pattern Language Counter-Proposal

Paths below are relative to this directory (projects/ecuador-museum/) unless stated otherwise. For the generalized method and repo-wide conventions shared with other projects, see the root CLAUDE.md.

What this project is

A public-advocacy counter-proposal for the New Building of the National Museum of Ecuador (Quito), written from scratch to be 100% committed to meeting the human needs of the people who will use the museum — visitors, staff, school groups, and the communities whose heritage it holds — rather than to "inhuman" architectural spectacle.

Background: the Government of Ecuador ran an open international call (Stage 1 deadline 17 Feb 2026) for the museum's architectural preliminary project. A winner was selected, but the winning design has provoked considerable public objection over its failure to serve human needs, and is currently on hold and may be abandoned. This project is not a competition entry — it is an independent alternative vision, intended to be published to influence the public debate in Ecuador while the winning scheme's fate is undecided.

Team: a small informal group (not a single firm), of which Bruno is one member.

Our process for this project

1. Pattern subset — a subset pattern language for a national museum, built with the APL-Companion tool, prepared by Nikos Salingaros (not Bruno) and added to ref/.
2. Condense the brief — work through the official brief (see Reference material below) and extract only the aspects that serve genuine human needs (programmatic requirements, collection scale, site, functional spaces), discarding or flagging anything that pushes toward inhuman / spectacle-driven architecture. The critique transcript (ref/youtube-transcript.txt) of the winning proposal is used here as a source of specific, concrete failures to avoid — we mine it for named problems (e.g. illegibility, hostility to human scale, disregard for how people actually move/gather/rest) so the condensed brief and later narratives explicitly steer clear of them.
3. Write narratives — using the pattern subset + condensed brief, write one or more experiential narratives in the style of the method paper's Section 4.2, from these viewpoints (at minimum):
   • Visitor (general public)
   • Museum staff (curators, conservators, educators)
   • School group / children
   • Indigenous / community stakeholders whose heritage is represented Note that it is important that the narratives are mutually consistent, features described in a narrative from the point of view of one stakeholder must not contradict those perceived by another stakeholder.

Deliverable

Two tiers of written output, both in Markdown:

1. Working narratives (narratives/) — the four stakeholder viewpoints, each cross-referencing ref/ for shared facts and provenance. This is the drafting-stage material.
2. Public presentation document (docs/counter-proposal.md) — the four narratives combined in full under one preamble, for publication. This is the document actually meant to influence public debate, and the one illustrated with images. It deliberately does not reference ref/ source material, pattern numbers, or grammar codes, and does not condense the four narratives — see Status below.

Output format and layout (decided):

• A narratives/ directory holds one Markdown file per stakeholder viewpoint, numbered in the order listed under "Write narratives" above:
  • narratives/01-visitor.md
  • narratives/02-staff.md
  • narratives/03-school-group.md
  • narratives/04-community.md
• Each file opens with a one-paragraph pointer to ref/project-chassis.md (the shared invariants — site data, materials/color/ornament systems, named circulation realms, collection placement) so a reader who only opens one narrative still has the shared grounding, then the narrative prose itself.
• The shared chassis document itself (ref/project-chassis.md) is treated as reference material, not a deliverable narrative, and stays in ref/ alongside the pattern subset and condensed brief it distills.
• docs/counter-proposal.md holds the combined public document (see Status below); docs/illustration-prompts.md holds one fully self-contained AI image-generation prompt per illustration placeholder (style guide pasted in full into each one, not cross-referenced, so any single prompt can be copied standalone into an image generator); docs/images/ holds the generated illustrations — full-resolution PNGs in docs/images/originals/, and quality-85 JPEG copies at top level (referenced by docs/counter-proposal.md) kept small enough that the exported .docx stays well under typical email attachment limits (~20 MB for Gmail). docs/counter-proposal.docx is generated from the Markdown via pandoc projects/ecuador-museum/docs/counter-proposal.md -o projects/ecuador-museum/docs/counter-proposal.docx --standalone --resource-path=projects/ecuador-museum/docs (run from the repo root) for sending directly (e.g. to Nikos to format/edit) — it is not committed to the repo, since it's a regeneratable export, not source material.

Reference material (ref/)

• buildings-15-02400-v2.txt — the Postle & Salingaros paper this project's method is based on (see root CLAUDE.md).
• A Pattern Language Ecuador National Museum.md — the project-specific pattern subset (55 patterns from Alexander/Ishikawa/Silverstein, numbered and paraphrased by the APL-Companion tool), prepared by Nikos Salingaros for this museum project. This is the core design-constraint input for narrative writing.
• Ecuadorian_Form_Language_Grammar.md — "Ecuadorian Form Language — Quito Grammar", a companion design-grammar module (generated by Kimi.ai, source unclear beyond that) covering Quito's climate response rules, a vocabulary of regional/historical form elements (indigenous, pre-Columbian, colonial, baroque, regional), composition syntax, and color/ornament systems. Written as a prompt module for an LLM. Relevant to us for the "look, feel, and ornamental treatment" part of narrative-writing (per the method paper's Section 4.2 approach) grounded in authentic Ecuadorian vernacular character, and for glossary terms (zaguán, corredor, zócalo, alero, etc.) worth reusing verbatim in our narratives. Its material/color/ornament vocabulary (CR1, OP2, OP4, and the E-numbered form elements) also underpins the shared style guide in docs/illustration-prompts.md, translated into plain descriptive language there rather than cited by code.
• Muna Technical Bases for Stage 1.txt — the official Stage 1 open call document: scope, site (Av. Eloy Alfaro / Av. de la República, Iñaquito, Quito, 13,004.65 m² plot, min. 25,000 m² building), schedule, selection process, and background on the National Museum of Ecuador.
• Muna ANNEX-1_RulesMuseum_ENG.md, Muna ANNEX-2_RulesMuseum_ENG.md — participation rules annexes (mostly administrative/legal boilerplate; ANNEX-2 is longer, worth checking for programmatic requirements).
• MUNA Guide-for-the-submission-of-the-enabling-documentation.txt — administrative submission guidance (procedural, low relevance to design content).
• Muna.md — template email for Stage 1 document submission (administrative only).
• youtube-transcript.txt — transcript of a critique (Nikos Salingaros and others) of the winning proposal, analysing it against human-centered design/pattern-language principles. Use per "Condense the brief" above.
• youtube-transcript-2026-07-23.txt — transcript of a later symposium (Salingaros, Nir Buras of the Classic Planning Academy, Pablo Álvarez Funes, and others) discussing this counter-proposal project itself and walking through Salingaros' own parallel narrative/image process (see "Salingaros' parallel process" below) — not a critique of the winning scheme, so not a source for critique-failures.md.
• Salingaros-Chapter-11-Two-Languages-for-Architecture.md — Chapter 11 ("Two Languages for Architecture") of Salingaros' A Theory of Architecture (2006/2014): the theoretical basis for combining a pattern language (human/organizational rules) with a form language (geometric/ tectonic rules), cited as document 4 in his process-report article (see below). Background reading, not itself a design-constraint input.

Salingaros' parallel process (docs/)

Independently of, and in parallel with, our narratives/ → docs/counter-proposal.md pipeline, Nikos Salingaros ran his own version of the same method end-to-end (his own narrative, his own images, and an article about the process), for completeness and as the origin of some of our own inputs. His pattern subset and form-language grammar (in ref/, see above) are shared with — and prepared by him for — our pipeline too, but from that point on the two efforts diverge: our narrative synthesis and his are separate LLM runs with separate outputs, and his illustrations were generated independently of ours (ChatGPT, vs. our Midjourney). Included here for completeness, not as an input to be merged into docs/counter-proposal.md.

His files, in pipeline order:

• salingaros-narrative-prompt.md, salingaros-form-language-prompt.md — his own raw prompts to an LLM (distinct from our prompting approach), requesting the design narrative and the form-language grammar respectively.
• Casa-de-la-Memoria-Andina-National-Museum-Narrative-Kimi.txt — an intermediate narrative (from Kimi.ai) that Salingaros fed back into a second LLM as "a narrative another LLM wrote" to be merged with its own draft (see salingaros-narrative-prompt.md's second prompt). A messier PDF-extraction duplicate of this file also exists at ref/Casa de la Memoria Andina - National Museum Narrative-Kimi.txt (stale, kept from an earlier stage — see ecuador-e0k to remove it).
• 3.Casa-de-la-Memoria-Ecuatoriana-Design-Narrative-Museo-Nacional-del-Ecuador.txt — his final design narrative, "Casa de la Memoria Ecuatoriana", the output of the above merge. His counterpart to our narratives/ + docs/counter-proposal.md.
• From-Pattern-Language-to-Architectural-Image-Salingaros-revised.md — his process-report article describing the whole pipeline (pattern language → form language → narrative → images → critique), written for publication (e.g. ArchDaily), citing the pattern subset, the form-language grammar, his design narrative, Chapter 11, his 30 concept images, and complementary hand sketches by Pablo Álvarez Funes. An earlier, shorter draft of this article was deleted (superseded, no unique content).
• images-salingaros/ — his 25 ChatGPT-generated concept images illustrating his narrative. Unrelated to our docs/images/ (which illustrates docs/counter-proposal.md and follows the originals/JPEG + pandoc export convention described above) — his images have no equivalent processing pipeline in this repo and aren't referenced from any of our Markdown.

Status

The full pipeline is complete: brief condensed (ref/brief-condensed.md), critique failures mined (ref/critique-failures.md), shared chassis extracted and reconciled (ref/project-chassis.md), all four stakeholder narratives drafted (narratives/01-visitor.md through 04-community.md) and cross-checked for pattern/brief/grammar fidelity and mutual consistency.

Those four narratives have been combined in full (not condensed — repetition across viewpoints describing the same spaces is intentional, not trimmed for brevity) into the public presentation document docs/counter-proposal.md, stripped of ref/ citations, pattern numbers, and grammar codes. 13 illustration prompts were written (docs/illustration-prompts.md), the images generated externally (by the user, via Midjourney) and downloaded to docs/images/, and all 13 are now embedded in docs/counter-proposal.md in place of the illustration placeholders. docs/counter-proposal.docx is the current send-to-Nikos export (regenerate via the pandoc command in Deliverable above after any edit to the Markdown or images).

Open/next: no outstanding pipeline steps — future work is likely editorial revision based on Nikos's feedback on the docx, or replacing individual illustrations if a generated image doesn't hold up (e.g. the entrance portal image shows three arches, not the five bays described in the text — the text is the design intent and stays as-is; only the image's caption was adjusted to not assert a bay count).

Since then, Salingaros' own parallel narrative/image/article material has been added to docs/ and ref/ (see "Salingaros' parallel process" above) — separate from, not merged into, docs/counter-proposal.md.