Designing and building for everyone
57UNO and CEELA at Construverde 2026: diversity, equity and leadership in action
On 29 and 30 July, 57UNO took part in Construverde 2026, the 17th edition of the Colombian Green Building Council (CCCS) forum and the central event of Sustainable Construction Week in Bogotá. We were there as a studio and as part of the team of CEELA in Colombia.
Across the two days the agenda covered the themes of the moment: city leadership, climate action, the circular economy, regeneration and new ways of dwelling on the first day; applied solutions, success stories, resilient infrastructure and sustainable housing on the second. One thread ran through the whole gathering: sustainability is a condition of development, and building it demands dialogue among everyone in the chain.
The panel: designing and building for everyone
Within that agenda, Natalia Carrero moderated, on behalf of CEELA, the panel Designing and building for everyone: diversity, equity and leadership in action, alongside Esteban Tobón (Arquint), Patrizia Laplana (Women In Real Estate Spain and Women Action Sustainability) and David Mora (Ecoaldea Mi Tribu). The conversation turned on the premise that projects are not set down on empty plots but on human ecosystems, and that we have to acknowledge the ground and the culture if a project is to last.
Care, the role of women and the architecture of housing
Spaces for dialogue are where the line gets drawn between inclusion, diversity and equity on one side and design decisions on the other; designing for everyone begins with understanding how roles are distributed inside the home. In many cases that comes down to women’s leadership and its relationship with care —of the community and of nature— a role that has historically tended to be matriarchal. In rural housing, the lack of services and infrastructure means the domestic work of subsistence falls on women. Kitchens and bathrooms are the work that sustains other people’s lives.
What the panellists left behind
The closing round produced messages and reflections on sustainability in the region:
Culture eats strategy. Green and sustainable architecture strategies only work when the culture sustains them.
Integrated, regenerative and collaborative. Everything that gets done has to be done in collaboration with the community.
Sustainability is cultural too. Sustainability includes culture. A project can be efficient in energy and water and still fail if it ignores the people who live in it.
Thinking about scale, starting with oneself. Sustainability begins with each of us: less makes more. So we have to think about our own risks and threats.
CEELA: mentoring that reaches the territory
The panel had a particular value for us, too: David Mora and Ecoaldea Mi Tribu are among the communities CEELA has supported through its mentoring programmes. That is the best evidence of what the programme is after: that knowledge is transferred, taken up, and returns to the sector as experience.
CEELA is a Swiss government project channelling resources to Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, and it aims to be an accelerator of decarbonisation in construction. Its focus is the warm-climate territories of the tropics, where it works on thermal comfort and energy efficiency across three fields: capacity building, work with ministries and governments, and delivering concrete tools for design and construction.
In Colombia that work has just taken an important step: CEELA supported Cali on the Cali Construye Sostenible seal (SCCS), an award given to projects that implement measures to reduce the use of energy, water and natural resources, as well as the waste generated during construction.
The programme’s presence at Construverde was not limited to this panel either: on the second day Paola Valencia, from the CEELA team, took part as a panellist in Decarbonisation success stories: projects transforming construction in Colombia.
Beyond bioclimatics
Events like Construverde produce dialogue, the transfer of knowledge and the articulation between developers, designers, academia and government to build for the good of a country. Concepts like sustainability and resilience came up constantly: what it means to build on what is already built, and the capacity to adapt at once to changes in society and changes in the climate.
Among the announcements the gathering left us, we would single out the regional projection of CASA: the sustainable housing certification created by the CCCS is moving towards becoming a Latin American standard, backed by Green Business Certification Inc. (GBCI), the global certifying body behind systems such as LEED, which gives the tool international verification without losing its local origin — a certification conceived from and for Latin America.
So site diagnosis, simulation and passive design release their full value when they are articulated with the economy and with the social life of the people who inhabit them. Environment, economy and society are not three parallel agendas: they are the three conditions of a genuinely integral project. At 57UNO, that is the work we want to keep doing: an architecture that cares —in every sense of the word— for people, for the territory and for the resources that sustain them.
