Pietro Belluschi Fellow: Rocio Crosetto Brizzio

MIT Architecture welcomes Rocio Crosetto Brizzio as the Pietro Belluschi Fellow. Named in honor of Dean Belluschi, this fellowship supports early-career architects and designers who are advancing emerging research agendas. Rocio’s work focuses on is exploring multimedia archival of indigenous construction practices in the South American Andes, cultivating a multimedia archive that captures the diverse approaches of these communal construction methods. 

POWER ALLIANCES: 

MINGAS as practices for collective empowerment in the South American Andes

Minga is a practice of collaborative and reciprocal work which comes from the Quechua minccacuni meaning asking for help by promising something. Mingas are strongly rooted in Andean communities and have proven effective as tools to redefine power, land ownership, create networks of communal care and re-signify the relationship between humans and the ecosystems that we inhabit.

Power Alliances is focused on the creation of an audio-visual archive of these communal construction practices across the territory of the Andes, through a series of conversations and site-specific shared experiences, which will be documented in the form of recordings, videos, photographs and drawings. 

The interest in Mingas resides in the complexity of the practice, which articulates powerful strategies that range from the scale of architectural detail - hyper-local and regenerative construction techniques utilizing natural materials - to the scale of the territory, its forms of governance, socio-political and ecological challenges. 

Crosetto is an Argentinian architect, co-founder of Balsa Crosetto Piazzi, an award-winning architecture office based in Argentina and the US. Founded in 2018, their work has been recognized with awards in multiple design competitions and exhibited at the Venice Biennial, Iberoamerican Biennial, Argentinian Biennial, among others. The studio focuses on architecture across multiple scales, from the design and construction of projects; to research, writing and curatorial work.

Rocio has taught studios and seminars at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina; Columbia University in New York; the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia; the Universidad Nacional de Asunción, Paraguay; and the Universidad Andres Bello, Chile; and most recently, Syracuse University, NY.

Crosetto is an Architect from the FAUD at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina; and holds a MS in Advanced Architectural Design from GSAPP Columbia, where she was awarded with the Dean Scholarship, the William Ware Prize for Excellence in Design and Saul Kaplan Travelling Fellowship.