In presenting their work, a number of speakers at the ninth Mundaneum conference on architecture charted personal journeys of finding their professional voices. These tales included moments of doubt and self-criticism, along with humor and discovery. The event—organized by Fund_ARQ, the Costa Rican Foundation for Design, Art, and Architecture, in collaboration with the Nicaraguan design magazine Estudio 505—brought speakers from Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Australia to Managua, Nicaragua, to address an audience of students, architects, and people interested in the built environment. Titled “Essential Architecture,” it continued the series of conferences that Fund_ARQ founders Alvaro Rojas and Guillermo Honles had run originally at the Universidad del Diseño in Costa Rica, the architecture school Rojas established in 1993 and closed in 2009.

Phil Harris, a partner at Troppo Architects in Adelaide, Australia, started off his talk with photos of the road trip he and a few university mates took in the late 1970s from the south of the continent to Darwin in the north. The shaggy-haired friends drove more than 1,600 miles in a Volkswagen van and researched tropical housing in Australia’s so-called Top End. Then, Harris and Adrian Welke established Troppo in Darwin. They named one of their first houses the Green Can, because its corrugated-iron roof reminded them of the container for their favorite beer. As many journeys do, Harris’s has come full circle with him back in the south of Australia, where he runs the firm’s Adelaide office.