How Nomadic Architect Camilo Cerro Lives and Works in Spain, Dubai, and NYC (Oh My!)
Camilo Cerro lives in Barcelona, works in Dubai, and operates a studio in New York. All images courtesy of Camilo Cerrro.
Architect and Interior Designer Camilo Cerro has seen 66 countries and lives and operates in three of them. From the glass tower high rises in New York, to the breathtaking mountain ranges near Barcelona, to the ultramodern architecture in Dubai, he has one perspective that he brings with him everywhere: renunciation, or non-attachment. Each of his houses are museums of sorts, representing his life and travels, yet he clings to nothing, in particular — a philosophy that he picked up from studying Buddhism in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and many other places.
As the founder and principal of Dharmatecture LLC and Associate Professor of Design at American University of Sharjah, Cerro’s career choices are boundless, with his ultimate aim being toward humans living as a multiplanetary species. (Woah, a person can dream!)
At the forefront of his designs is a disruptive reimagining of what the planet and humankind can look like in the future — because sustainability is no longer enough. “My job is being as pessimistic as possible, so that I can understand what problems are coming toward us and solve them,” he says. “An optimistic person thinks that things will be okay tomorrow. I think tomorrow is going to be terrible. So how does architecture and interior design adapt? I have absolutely no idea, but I am working on it.”
Here, Cerro shares the loops and turns of his career path, including how his nomadic lifestyle informs his work; why he hopes his role as a Professor will prepare a new generation of Emirati students to be agents of sustainable design; and what the future of the planet might look like with climate change.
Cerro and a team spent five days underground in the world’s largest cave, the Hang Son Doong in Vietnam. The white dots are their headlamps.
You travel back and forth between Dubai and New York and have helped coordinate study abroad programs in Barcelona. Why do you choose to live a nomadic lifestyle?Today, I live in Barcelona. I work in Dubai. And when I come to New York, it’s either for business or for seeing family and things like that. But by now I’ve been to 66 countries in my lifetime, and I want to see at least 100 before I die. My home is wherever I am. I’m not leaving a home behind when I travel, instead I take the home with me. And I have a partner that appreciates the same lifestyle.
Nowadays, I can work from any place. I started being a nomad 20 years ago, when Skype was a brand new way to communicate and no one was using it yet. It was a tool that allowed me to go to Costa Rica for a month and still have a relationship with my clients in New York, because they didn’t know I was in Costa Rica. I would wear a suit from the waist up and Bermuda shorts from the waist down. And as soon as I hung up the Skype, I would go surfing. What that did was give me quality of life. If you work in a job where everything you do is your job, you’re going to burn out at some point — it doesn’t matter if it’s today or tomorrow. I just found a way of utilizing technology in my favor to create a formula that worked for me. My formula has also allowed me to have four free months every year paid to be able to travel or do other projects like research or pro bono work. I’m very fortunate that way, because teaching is just eight months of the year. In general, I’m afforded a lot of free time in Sharjah in the UAE, since it’s a very forward thinking place. For example, we now have a four-day work week. And the data has come in, and research tells us that we are 30% more successful by having that day off.
Can you take us back to the beginning? Where did your journey start from?
That’s a long story. I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where my dad taught as a professor. My parents are Argentinian, so when I was one, we moved to Argentina. But then Argentina was having these military dictatorships, so we left when I was six. And then I lived in Brazil for a year, and Panama for a year. And then eventually my dad found a job in Mexico City and I lived there until I was 17, when I finished high school. And I went backpacking through Europe for a year. And then my dad found me and said that I had been accepted at the University of Minnesota, and classes started in two weeks. So I packed my very few belongings, and I went to the University of Minnesota.
At this age, I had never really lived in the U.S., so I didn’t know how the American education system functioned. I was a terrible, terrible student for a year. But the silver lining was that I would go to listen to Prince for $3 every Friday night. Anyway, in my sophomore year, I moved to St. Louis to study at Washington University, and they were incredibly helpful. The Dean of the School of Architecture, Jim Harris, took me under his wing. He explained to me what I needed to do to become a good student, and I did everything he taught me. That helped me get accepted to multiple great schools, including some Ivys, to complete my masters. One day, a certain letter arrived, saying that I was accepted to Columbia. And immediately I went there — Harvard had no appeal, because it wasn’t in New York City.
I was in New York in the middle of the 90s, which was the best time ever to live there. And if you ask me where I’m from today, I’ll tell you I’m from Brooklyn. It’s the place I love the most — mainly because all my life, everywhere I went, people wanted to know where I was from because I have an accent. And Brooklyn was the only place that didn’t give a damn. That made me feel at home.
During the course of your career over the last 20 plus years, what is most memorable for you?
As a professor of architecture and interior design in the UAE, I mostly teach young women, because in the Middle East, boys usually become engineers. So about 85% of my students are women. And that means I help to prepare incredibly strong females for some of the highest positions in the field. After they’ve gotten their degrees from our program and gained some experience and higher education elsewhere in the world, they come back to the Emirates, helping shift the level of testosterone of the nation by adding their own energy. See, teaching is creating a huge change, especially in a part of the world that needs that change around sustainability. What I’ve also found is that women in this part of the world have a lot to prove. But we are helping create incredibly good students that go out, come back, and are changing the culture for good looking toward the future.
Cerro walking around the Maya site, Kabah, in Yucatán, Mexico.
How did you get into the world of teaching?
I was never too interested in teaching. While I was in New York post graduate school, I was at a point in my career where things had turned stagnant. I was doing what an architect is supposed to do. And when you’re studying in university, architecture can be a lot of fun, because you’re using your imagination. But in the real world, architecture is not like that at all. 80-90% of architects are doing cookie cutter type of stuff — the only type of architecture that makes money is retail. So in New York, I was designing for Chanel, Estee Lauder, and Givenchy, because that type of work produces a bigger check than designing a house does. And sadly, retail work like that becomes a repetitive endeavor. Every single Chanel store looks exactly alike. Right? And if you are not having fun and enjoying it, there’s something that has to be tweaked. So the “tweak” for me was that I got recruited to teach in the Middle East. I had never taught before, so it was going to be an experiment. And the big incentive was that they offered me an incredible lab, with tools and equipment and robots and things that build themselves. It was my flavor of Disneyland. So even if the teaching didn’t work out for me, I would still have access to this “playground” where I could do a lot of really interesting stuff. So I went, and then I realized that I enjoy teaching more than the playground. But the two are complementary, so I make them function together. And I’ve been teaching there for 10 years already. But if you ask me, I’m not a professor by career, I’m a design thinker by career. And one of my gigs, one of my hats, is to be a professor.
What is your biggest goal right now?
Right now, the only goal I’m interested in is the survival of the human race. And the path that we are on doesn’t fare well for that long-term vision.
Why does your research suggest that it would be a good thing for the human race to become a multi-planetary species?
Carl Sagan used to say you can’t have all your eggs in one basket. And we learned that from Covid-19 — just what one cold could do to the population of the planet. We cannot have the human race in one place. The next stage for our civilization to evolve is really to migrate to other planets. Math tells us that there just has to be extraterrestrial beings out there. And right now we’re boring creatures because we live on one single planet. If you were investing in us, we would be a terrible choice, because if something goes wrong at a cataclysmic level here, then we’re gone, like, say, the dinosaurs. Right now, nothing is preventing the demise of our species because we are tied down to one single planet.
So, we are designing ideas for how to migrate to the Moon and Mars and to space. You might be wondering, “Well, why don’t you just fix this planet instead of thinking about others?” And the nice thing is, the technologies that we’re inventing for this expansion are the same ones that will fix this planet. If you think about it, solar panels were invented for satellites, or water filtration systems were invented for the space station. In that sense, most technology can be used for sustainability: thermal insulation, new materials, all of it links directly or indirectly to space exploration.
And not only are we going to safeguard the human race for the future, we’ll also save the Earth. For example, one of the ideas that we’re working on is creating hydroponic food on the moon that can be shipped back to Earth, so that farmland can be given back to forests and jungles. This way, the planet can mend itself with time.
Shipping Container Water tower, with atmospheric water generators (producing 20,000 litters of water a day), hydroponic urban farm, mushroom farm, and commercial space. The idea is to place ten of these towers in a neighborhood lacking water to work as a hive bringing water and cheap food to the community.
Modular, prefabricated, self-sufficient dormitories with commercial space on the ground floor and a vertical hydroponic farm.
Adaptability sounds promising, but maybe a little abstract at first. Do you have a couple of other concrete examples?
The type of house that we build should be one that gives back, instead of one that takes away. How does your house take away? Well, if you’re renting, in rent. If you own the house, in maintenance, in electricity bills, in water bills, in gas bills. But what if your house was 100% self-sufficient? And this doesn’t require you to put a huge amount of money on the house — it can be done with analog technologies or through do-it-yourself videos on YouTube. As an architect, I like to use technology that is accessible, that already exists on the shelf.
Right now, I’m giving a series of talks about the kitchen, for example. Every house in the world has a kitchen, and of course they’re all a little bit different. But if you were to do any interior design program today, they would tell you that there’s five zones to a Western-style kitchen. There’s a cooking zone, a preparation zone, a cleaning zone, and so on. Well, we are proposing three new zones.
The first zone is food production. How do you produce food in your house? One way is through a seasonal garden, in your terrace or in your backyard, because the seasons are changing. Now there’s more like six seasons around the world. So people need to start becoming farmers to some degree and understand seasonal food production. It can even be a little amount of farming, but if you really want to be sustainable, you won’t eat food that doesn’t grow locally during that season. Another thing is that, the more food you produce at home, the more money you’re saving. If you live in an apartment and you don’t have a backyard, then you can produce food in a hydroponic garden. You can buy a premade appliance that will do it for you. And if you don’t have the money, you can build one by yourself for about $30. You can also grow water out of the humidity of the air if you install an atmospheric water generator in your house. And not only can it make the water you drink, but if it’s big enough, it can produce all the water you use in your household. Another way to produce your own food is on a slightly bigger scale. If your neighborhood created a community garden on the roof of a building, and everyone in the neighborhood donated two hours per month to the garden, then the neighborhood would have really cheap vegetables growing locally.
The second zone of the kitchen is composting. If you compost organic food yourself, you will eliminate 60% of your waste production. My favorite way of composting is one that you can do in any kitchen, which is to get a composting unit with worms. Now, don’t be scared. The worms will not escape the unit and attack you at night. In fact, you will never see them. But in that unit, you can put all your organic food, and they’ll eat it, and they’ll love you for it. And they’ll create compost of two types, liquid and solid, which you can use in your garden. But if you don’t have a garden, you can sell it to farmers. Compost is like gold to them. So then that would be another little check that goes back to you at the end of the month, and then the house keeps giving back by saving you money.
The third and last zone has to do with energy — any type of alternative energy generator that you can use at home to save you money. And these three things might increase the cost of a house right now, but they will pay for themselves within five years. Also, the beauty of these solutions is that you don’t have to implement them all at once. Do them at your own pace, as you find the money or the time to build them.
Your research and designs make for a unique life. What defines an enriching career for you?
At the end of the day, it’s the job that doesn’t feel like a job. So if I’m having fun doing what I do, I keep doing it, and I don’t mind working an extra hour here and there. I do what needs to be done, to be able to fulfill whatever my goals are, but I’m at a point where my career doesn’t put a strain on my life. If your job is something you are actually enjoying, you’re going to do much more for that job and suddenly you’ll become a more productive person. And yet you won’t even see it as something separate from yourself — your career becomes entangled with who you are, it becomes part of your life. So if you stop seeing it as a job, it just becomes you in a way, and then you can do it forever.
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