Moving through the world with one's eyes, mind, and heart open is to realize the challenges confronting most people. Uncontrolled rural migration renders urban agglomerations ungovernable. Immigrants -- with limited finances, unconventional construction materials, and no direct access to electricity -- continuously build illegal housing.

Still . . . opportunity awaits. Urban waste, in the hands of local men, women, and children can make a good dwelling. Architectural communities of practitioners, professors, and students exist in large cities.

We believe an architecture of acupuncture must have local roots; a way of making must originate with the makers. We think the potential of cross-pollenization and imported ideas can be found through collaboration and participatory processes. We make award-winning buildings with waste materials. And we question our roles in a world obsessed with consumeristic growth; precarious habitat and high design culture are connected, in part because both subvert such 'progressive' capitalistic efficiencies.

Four of us came together in 1997; a fifth joined in 2002. In recent years, we visited informal settlements in Beijing, Cairo, Colombo, Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Buenos Aires, with special attention given to people, life conditions, and architecture. Now, as pharmakon, we respond with small buildings and installations that require minimal money, hand tools, and little time. Working as architectural acupuncturists, we practice bottom-up informal processes and value atypical architectural work that releases new relationships among people and built environments.

Projects #1 and #2, in the US, included minimal budgets, local craftsmen, and wholesale or found materials. Both received awards from the American Insitute of Architects, both created controversy: 'This is not Architecture,' claimed many practitioners. In London, England, discarded materials found outside the Bartlett School of Architecture were configured to revitalize spaces near the building (#3). One year ago in Sri Lanka, seventy local students and professors built timber and mud pavilions (#4) with scavenged materials, little money, and no electricity. Six months ago, in Buenos Aires and Rosario (#5) we built with no tools and no-cost material: string. Now, we act as architectural catalysts and collaborators, respecting local knowledge and focusing on informal and spontaneous construction with scavenged material.

We five architects -- four US citizens and one Argentinian -- will return to the La Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires in 2004. Argentina is a precarious place. In the 'dark years' of military rule, 30,000 citizens disappeared, forever. Two years ago, banks in downtown Buenos Aires came under siege as panicked customers lost life savings; steel walls quickly erected around glass lobbies bear scars from citizens' assaults. The country recently defaulted on its national debt. The city's slum population doubled between 1991 and 2001;p 125,000 live in shantytowns today.

La Boca presents opportunities. The tango was invented there and tourism is lively. Around the corner, an informal settlement grows. We will bring procedural and physical references from our previous efforts, conducting ten one-day workshops, moving through the neighborhood, designing and building with scavenged materials, supporting the needs, skills, and means of whomever wants to work with us: men, women, the cartoneros (garbage-collecting children), craftspeople, architects, and students.

Buenos Aires means more than 'good air.' Good opportunities wait for us there and call to us . . . they bring us back to Buenos Aires.