Ms. Barclay, as an architect born, raised and based in Peru, what traditions of your country’s architecture do you hope to keep alive in your own work?
Well, a great work that cannot leave you indifferent, is the Royal House in Puruchuco. It is a mud construction located on the coast, on the edge of the city of Lima, at the foot of the arid Andes. The architecture consists of a series of courtyards, platforms, thresholds, and interior and exterior spaces, all arranged in a sort of labyrinth. The spaces are ambiguous, they have no doors or windows, so everything communicates together under the sunlight of a desert climate. The journey through the spaces is a lesson in architecture in itself, the experience is connecting us with ourselves. It connects us to the sky and the open farmlands, and the foothills of the Andes. It is extremely memorable and responds perfectly to the climatic conditions. As an architect, I like these qualities, and I try to maintain the idea that architecture is more about experience than an object.
Why is that so important for you personally?
It allows us to relate to the place, the culture, light and shadow, and to others… These are lessons we try to carry over into our contemporary projects. We’re also trying to build a trust in architecture, to recognize that it has an enormous capacity to solve problems, improve living conditions, connect people with each other and with their own culture, take advantage of climatic conditions, and be generous by incorporate natural light, shade, space, and materials that are available to us in the specific place where we work.
“What we construct as architects are new layers, new traces that we add and that will remain for a long time. We have to be careful with what we do.”
Your practice often takes inspiration from the landscapes of Peru, its archaeological sites, and its embedded histories, right?
Yes, those archaeological sites and the traces they leave behind show us how to inhabit our territories. There are always lessons we can take and reinterpret in order to work with our landscape and climate. And from this, we acquire a responsibility because what we construct as architects are new layers, new traces that we add and that will remain for a long time. So we have to be careful with what we do.
Environmental sustainability is a growing concern in architecture, especially for your firm. You were even part of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction Jury for Latin America in 2025, a group which recognizes sustainable design.
Yes. The relationship between architecture and its users can be defined as an experience, therefore our priority is to take care of the quality of the spaces we will inhabit. Being a member of the jury for Latin America 2025 was an opportunity to have conversations about the quality I mentioned, the sustainable architecture in our region, and to learn about many projects that are seriously thinking and building with respect and care, making efforts to use the right resources, adapt to very different environments, taking into account the durability of interventions, listening intelligently to needs and responding by solving problems and making fair use of available resources. It was an enriching experience to look at selected projects in other regions, where the problems and ways of solving them are different. As Holcim is a global award, it allowed us to take a global view with an initial understanding of the differences and diversities.
How does that manifest in your work? Is it as simple as using sustainable, durable materials, for example?
Durability is one fundamental condition of careful sustainability, especially in developing countries where we must not only take care of the economies we work with, but also anticipate that we will be able to operate with minimal maintenance; that we will not need to replace what has been done in a few years, that the investment will last. On the desert coast of Peru, concrete is a material that works to achieve this condition of durability, in addition to effectively responding to the seismic conditions of the area and the availability of materials.
It makes me think of your Paracas Museum, which is nestled into the desert sands on Peru’s south coast. It connects so beautifully to the environment, but is also more structurally sound than its previous iteration.
Yes, the previous building was destroyed in the 2007 earthquake. This new building is a concrete structure with brick infill, which is both the most efficient and economical solution for earthquake resistance. The exterior is covered with hand-polished pozzolanic cement that reveals traces and imperfections. This finishing speaks to us of the people who participated in the construction process in a very artisanal way, and as it oxidizes due to the high proportion of ferrite in this cement, it also speaks to us of the passage of time. This cement is naturally reddish and blends in beautifully with the nearby hills, also reddish, where the Paracas culture burials are located. In the extremely arid desert climate, where it never rains, it features a contained outdoor space that accepts the sand that comes and goes during the region’s sandstorms.
This really speaks to the generosity of architecture that you mentioned earlier.
Absolutely. Another example of generosity is more community focused: something like providing a public gathering space for the community and the city. Additionally, when working with private collective housing buildings, we must seek out that generous public space that we can offer to the city, such as a garden and a bench, a small square with a tree, or the removal of property boundaries by avoiding hostile walls. We can also be generous by using resources that do not cost anything. Light, space, shade, and breeze are elements that we can use, that are at our disposal, and that make architecture generous.
I love the use of light in your work, particularly in your Piura University complex, the dynamic of light and shadow is really striking.
Yes. Light is essential to life, we cannot inhabit dark rooms, dark spaces… As I said, architecture is an experience. Many of the benefits we obtain are not quantifiable because they are subjective, but they nourish our soul, spirit, and body, producing well-being and giving us the calm we need to think, the right temperature to rest, read, cook, have fun. It’s one of the essential elements in architecture, but it also costs nothing. It is there for us to capture, bring in, filter, direct, reflect, and frame. It’s there to shape the quality of the spaces we inhabit.
What other elements are essential for the success of a building?
Memory is another essential element, for me. Although it is intangible and not concrete, it allows projects to be rooted in the culture of a specific place. The more layers of memory we can incorporate into the project, the deeper that rooting becomes. We connect with that distant knowledge and bring it into the present. We can also incorporate the memory of the place itself, its pre-existing features, its topography or structure — as in the case of the Paracas Museum, where we worked to connect with the previous building that was destroyed in the earthquake. We can also incorporate the memory of traditional knowledge of materials and techniques, ensuring that they continue to endure and are not lost.
So how was it for you to work on The Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion, a museum your firm designed to honor victims of Peru’s internal armed conflict?
It was challenging. It is a great responsibility to be able to work on a project that has such important significance for Peruvian society, and especially for the victims or relatives of victims of the armed conflict that ravaged the country for two decades in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a great opportunity to collaborate in this titanic task that the Commission of Truth, chaired by writer Mario Vargas Llosa, has set itself: to create a place to remember, so that this never happens again. It plays a profound and educational role in society by conveying a history that many would prefer to forget.
How is it for you to see The Place of Memory now, 10 years later? Is it accomplishing all you hoped it would?
Since winning the competition, there have been several obstacles during construction, implementation, attempts to inaugurate it, closures, and re-openings. Today, we can say that little by little, slowly but surely, it has been gaining more and more presence in society. I am thrilled to see schoolchildren visiting the site. It feels like it is fulfilling its educational and reconciliation role, supported by an active program of use of the auditorium and temporary exhibitions on themes of memory and cultural expressions, demonstrating that it can be sustained over time. I would call it one of our firm’s greatest achievements.