Once a highly skilled and experienced professor told us: the future of architecture is in
its handcraft past. We were not able to completely understand him at that time.
Looking forward to the future where architecture and engineering professionals will
perform facing energy fuel crisis and global warming, an endogenous approach,
working with what is available, may be a subsistence tool. Preserving and further
development of traditional construction materials, methods and techniques now has
become a must, not form the cultural heritage stand point but as a survival instrument.
In this paper we will analyze three different roofing systems, two of them ancestral
techniques; toquilla leaf roof and straw thatch roofs, using them in real contemporary
construction circumstances by incorporating them into the professional life through real
construction projects and the educational system through