Cholets of El Alto
Last year, I spent a month in Bolivia doing mountaineering expeditions in the Andes. While I was there, I saw these psychedelic buildings scattered across the city of El Alto. They made a lasting impression on me, so I decided to do some building portrait studies of them.
The City in the Sky
El Alto is unique for a few reasons: it’s the highest major city on Earth, and is widely considered the major city with highest percentage of indigenous people. It sits at 4,150 meters above sea level, higher than most mountains in the Alps and any city in North America. The Aymara, an indigenous people native to Bolivia, make up nearly 80% of its population.
The city began as a periphery, a place where Aymara migrants from the Altiplano settled in the mid-20th century fleeing poverty. The La Paz government largely ignored it, so in 1985, El Alto declared its autonomy and became its own city. Since then, El Alto has grown to a metropolis of over a million people.
El Alto carries a radical political history. It was the epicenter of the 2003 Gas War, a popular Aymara-led uprising against the privatization of Bolivia’s natural gas reserves that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, toppled a president, and reshaped Bolivian politics. This movement was rooted in the same neighborhoods where the buildings in this series stand.
What Is a Cholet?
The word cholet is itself a small act of cultural reclamation. It fuses “chalet” with “cholo”, a slur used against indigenous people. The term was initially coined pejoratively by the architectural establishment to dismiss these buildings as kitsch, as the tasteless ambition of people who didn’t know the rules. The Aymara builders kept the word and discarded the shame.
The Anatomy of a Cholet
Each cholet is a vertical society, with each floor serving a different purpose.
The Neo-Andean movement of cholets takes cues from Aymara iconography and intricate geometry, and is designed in a way to serve the family’s full life. It refuses the colonial separation of function from symbolism and rejects the cookie-cutter gray boxes of the west. This architecture both a celebration of indigenous culture and a machine for living, working, and celebrating.
Bolivia’s indigenous majority was once framed in colonial discourse as destined for disappearance. Instead, it has undergone countless reinvention and produced cultural forms on indigenous terms. Since the construction of the first cholet two decades ago, Aymara architects like Freddy Mamani have built over seventy such structures, turning El Alto in an architectural destination of international relevance and demonstrating that modernity does not have to mean losing identity and conforming to western norms. I hope to see architects across Latin America (and the world) taking note.