How can we keep our identity? why should we keep it?, even more, What is our identity? I asked myself many times those questions, basically because we need to understand who we are, and to be honest, our Coliving in La Isleta is helping to find many answers.
This traditional house talks about how our families overcame many difficulties in the XX century and turned La Isleta into a healthy community, full of people caring for each other…
The identity of La Isleta is strongly connected with our traditional architecture. We have been working in the protection of these old houses for more than 10 years.
It is one of the most important heritages we have, and if you want to understand our identity and our community, you have to protect these houses.
Traditional houses
This typology is simple, but very strong, useful, and self-constructed by the owners, mainly with only one floor, and one big patio to keep animals like goats and to grow some veggies…
They have this feeling of love, care, uniqueness, art, perseverance, hard work…
We love these houses. Our Coliving in La Isleta is an opportunity to understand and experience the way workers and their families lived in our neighborhood 100 years ago…
We kept the old structure, hydraulic floors, wood ceiling, doors, etc… The renovation process lasted 3 years, we ran out of money twice and because we wanted to keep many old parts of the house, problems showed up every second…
We did almost everything ourselves inside the house, we built a small workshop in one room, and with the help of Mamadou, a good friend of ours, we worked to renovate the house and build all the furniture. We did welding, plumbing, painting, electricity, etc…
But most importantly, this is an opportunity for our local community to understand the importance of these traditional houses, that’s why we always invite neighbors to visit the house.