Urban Fabric - LOJA [N°01]

The area seen in the pictures is between Avenida Alonso de Mercadillo and Calle Teniente Maximiliano Rodríguez in the city of Loja looking uphill in the west direction. The first picture I took in the afternoon and the other one in the evening. That is what I see when I look outside the big glass front on the 4th floor of my workplace teaching about architecture and design. It makes me think.

In the front layers are some commercial buildings, there follow apartment buildings in the middle layers with a maximum of four floors and smaller buildings with fewer floors in the back. It´s a pattern of mostly rectangular shapes. The facades are very flat because of the thin walls, very typical here, brick used with its narrowest side to construct a wall of at most 10 cm thickness if sealed with a layer of plaster on both sides. There is usually an underlying steel frame structure or one made out of reinforced concrete. The pattern of rectangles seems homogenous. In the picture taken during nighttime, the hard shapes of the buildings dissolve in the darkness. There remain some rectangular openings shining in mostly white light. On the outside are orange-colored streetlights.

To be continued (shooting other places in Loja to get a wider picture and to compare different places)