Preserving traditional construction techniques and materials as an answer to future energy-fuel crisis

Once a highly skilled and experienced professor told us: the future of architecture is in its handcraft past. We were not able to completely understand him at that time. Looking forward to the future where architecture and engineering professionals will perform facing energy fuel crisis and global warming, an endogenous approach, working with what is available, may be a subsistence tool. Preserving and further development of traditional construction materials, methods and techniques now has become a must, not form the cultural heritage stand point but as a survival instrument. In this paper we will analyze three different roofing systems, two of them ancestral techniques; toquilla leaf roof and straw thatch roofs, using them in real contemporary construction circumstances by incorporating them into the professional life through real construction projects and the educational system through Con lo que hay¹, a design-build class room in architectural school in Ecuador, facing them with conventional zinc metal roofing. This study will show the impact of recovering these techniques and materials within the academic, the professional, scientific development and on the local economies.