Architects:Estudio Garúa,Héctor Ayarza

Area:135m²

Year:2023

Photographs:JAG Studio,Alfredo Martiz

Category:Learning

Project Team:Héctor Ayarza, Álvaro Guerra Jované, Adams Acevedo, Fernando Rivas

Construction:Francisco Rodríguez

Client:Fundación Avifauna Eugene Eisenman

City:Gamboa

Country:Panama

Text description provided by the architects. This project arises from a simple question: how to create architecture in the tropics without competing with the forest, but rather learning from it?

The refuge is located along the Pipeline Road, in Gamboa, within one of the richest ecosystems in Panama. More than a closed building, we proposed an open and essential space, where the roof becomes the main gesture: protecting from the sun and rain, allowing cross ventilation, and framing the experience of the landscape.

The architecture of the refuge is reduced to the essentials: a large lightweight roof with a hyperbolic paraboloid geometry, an elevated wooden platform, and a minimal structure that frees up space for multiple uses —meeting, resting, training, observation— without imposing a rigid program. Here, the forest completes the work.

This project was conceived as a place for living learning, both for the future tour guides who inhabit it and for those who come to understand how contemporary tropical architecture can be climatically responsible, constructively honest, and deeply connected to its context.

This refuge represents a way of practicing architecture from the essentials: working with what exists, building with care, and allowing the space to teach as much as the people who occupy it.

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