Carmen Ortega: “The future is designed”, a commitment to raising the quality of Dominican architecture

Dominican architect Carmen Ortega González, a member of the committee that created the “Jaragua Awards”, highlighted that this initiative seeks to recognize professional best practices that contribute to culture, society, and the quality of inhabited spaces, by promoting excellence in Dominican architecture and design.

Ortega explained before the start of the awards that the recognition transcends the scope of industry professionals, by seeking to generate awareness among authorities, developers, commercial companies, and academies about the influence that design decisions have on daily life and on the configuration of public and private spaces.

“Really, every design decision influences our way of life, it influences our spaces, our public spaces. So, the quality of design is fundamental for us to have better built environments where we constantly develop ourselves,” he/she expressed.

Under the motto “The future is designed”, the initiative raises the need to place architectural quality at the center of the decisions that influence the country’s growth and development.

When referring to the main challenges of Dominican architecture, Ortega pointed out that the accelerated growth experienced by the Dominican Republic in recent decades has generated increasingly complex projects, greater heights in cities, and large-scale tourism, agricultural, and logistics developments, which demands professional responses capable of integrating the different variables of the environment.

In that context, he emphasized that sustainability must be an inherent principle of every architectural practice.

“All architecture must be sustainable, because it must all respond to its environment appropriately, with the least possible impact,” he stated.

Carmen Ortega calls for preserving the identity of Dominican architecture

The Dominican architect called to strengthen the identity of Dominican architecture, avoiding the indiscriminate reproduction of foreign models that do not necessarily respond to the country’s cultural, social, and environmental characteristics.

“We also need to connect a little more with our culture, with our ways, whether it is the color, whether it is the rhythm, to look for that which can make a Dominican architecture,” he maintained.

For Ortega, building a unique architectural identity implies recognizing the particularities that distinguish Dominican society, even within a Caribbean and tropical context shared with other territories.

“The Dominican noise is something only we have”, he expressed, highlighting that local culture and ways of life must also find their space in architecture.

With this proposal, its organizers seek to consolidate a platform that not only rewards excellence, but also contributes to raising awareness about the responsibility of design in building better cities, spaces, and living conditions for Dominican society.

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