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When Peruvian architect Kevin Malca had the opportunity to learn from the Quispillacta indigenous community in Peru, he was fascinated by its water harvesting practices—specifically how the community’s farmers had unobtrusively inserted “qochas,” or rain basins, into the surrounding countryside. They reincorporated ancestral techniques that had been passed down for generations, creating more than 200 artificial lagoons fed by natural depressions in the landscape and contained by traditional stone masonry walls.  

“For all these techniques, there’s so much knowledge embedded, it’s an inheritance over time for generations. It’s more of an ecological way of living and thinking,” Malca says. “There’s an infrastructure and a system of practices both technical and sacred, very personal for the community.”  

He adds, “I’m interested in how these ancestral sites and practices can teach us ways of embracing ecological thinking in architecture.” 

Malca aims to incorporate these ideas as the 2025 Jeanne and John Rowe Fellow at Illinois Tech’s College of Architecture. The Rowe Fellowship was established in 2022 to support promising faculty at the beginning of their careers. Fellows spend two years teaching in the College of Architecture while pursuing a funded research project intended to advance the study of the built environment across a number of issues—ranging from architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture, to structures, building systems, professional practice, and more. 

Malca plans to teach courses that explore indigenous and contemporary spatial practices—from buildings to landscapes—showing how they work as connected ecological systems and how architecture can blend ancestral knowledge and contemporary innovation. 

“We have embraced this binary thinking of past-present in architecture, and I don’t think it’s true,” Malca says, noting that ancestral practices are often closely tied to recent sustainable design approaches and techniques. 

The intersection of these interests began early in Malca’s life. Growing up in Lima, Peru, he watched as his father designed the house he eventually grew up in.  

“At four or five years old, I decided I wanted to be an architect...I saw our house being built and changing over time, and I was fascinated by seeing architecture as a process,” Malca says. 

His mother and grandmother, on the other hand, would tell him stories about the “magical landscapes” of the Andes mountains in Peru, where they grew up. More importantly, they told him about the symbiotic relationship between those environments and their native communities.  

These early experiences continue to inform his architectural approach, guiding the projects he pursues. 

“I’m interested in the relationship between territory and communities, recognizing its critical role within interconnected ecological, cultural, and social systems,” Malca says. He was particularly fascinated by how centuries-old Incan and pre-Incan communities strove to work with the land, designing structures that were part of an integrated landscape system. 

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in 2016, Malca developed his architectural practice, leading the design of public architecture projects in heritage landscape sites, for the Peruvian government. 

When he decided to pursue a master’s degree in architectural studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2023, he focused his studies on how ancestral knowledge shaped sites and practices across different Peruvian geographies—particularly those relating to water.   

It was while studying at MIT that he learned from the “water nurturers’ of the Quispillacta indigenous community—including nurturer Marcela Machaca and her sisters—in the region of Ayacucho, south of the Andes. 

“Water is connected to everything,” he notes. “It carries multiple meanings—playful, untamed, celestial, sacred—while at the same time being finite.”

Image: Kevin Malca, center in green shirt, mapping with Kichwa communities in the Peruvian Amazon, as part of the project “Representaciones Cartográficas Sub-alternas: Visiones Territoriales Kichwa en San Martín.”