Conecting nature, architecture and culture
through the fabric of life
Sandra Liliana Cueva Cortez
About me
I move between architecture, landscape, research, and making, following the question of how color holds the memory of a territory.
Background
Three generations of my family grew up on the same farm in Santa Clara, Lima: my grandmother Manuela, my mother, and me. I watched that land give way to concrete, the identity of a small community erased by housing demand. My paternal grandparents left the highlands of Cusco and Cajamarca for Lima, and with that journey left behind their colors: the soil, the language, the knowledge that only makes sense when the landscape sustaining it is still there. Quechua went silent in their children, and by my generation there was nothing left to pass on. Living in the Netherlands gave a name to something I had felt without being able to articulate it: when a language disappears, whether spoken or ecological, what is lost is a complete system for reading the world. That understanding led me to Chinchero, where Nelida Cusiyunca and the weavers of Kusi Kausay showed me that color is the visible evidence of whether a territory's cycle is healthy or breaking down.
Practice
At H+N+S Landscape Architects, I work as a 2D and 3D designer creating conceptual visualizations for landscape projects across scales. My practice sits at the meeting point between technical precision and visual storytelling: making the invisible legible, whether that means a spatial strategy, an ecological system, or a territorial memory.Before the Netherlands, I designed the Sanctuary Memorial in La Hoyada, Ayacucho, Peru, a project where landscape and memory were inseparable from the beginning.Color has been a thread across all of it. I learned to read it first through painting. Then through questioning its chemical and botanical origins. Then through the weavers of Chinchero, who carry five thousand years of color knowledge in their hands.
Visualization: Toekomstbestendige Heuvelrug · H+N+S Landscape Architects
"My research lives at the meeting point of two positions: the distance that lets me see, and the roots that make me care."
Color Living System: Weaving Bridges in the Andes