Landscape Infrastructure for Mostardas: Timber Boardwalks That Let the Wetland Set the Terms

Some landscapes punish ambition. Along the flat, wind-swept strip of southern Brazil between the Lagoa dos Patos and the Atlantic, the most radical gesture an architect can make is to build almost nothing at all. Landscape Infrastructure: Cultural and Tourism Improvements for Mostardas City takes that restraint seriously. Instead of a visitor centre or a signature tower, it proposes a distributed system of boardwalks, docks, observation points and modular lodges. Together they let people move through a fragile ecosystem without breaking it.

Designed by Pedro Terra Oliveira, the project is set in Mostardas, Rio Grande do Sul, a town bracketed by the Lagoa dos Patos and the Lagoa do Peixe National Park. The park is a RAMSAR-listed wetland on migratory bird routes that cross continents. The brief Oliveira sets himself is precise: support an emerging eco-tourism economy, give researchers somewhere to work and live, and strengthen local cultural identity, all while treating architecture as a system embedded in the territory rather than an object placed on top of it.

Reading Mostardas as a Hinge Between Lagoon and Town

The opening board sets out the project's tone. A low timber boardwalk runs along the lagoon edge while a kayaker passes and pedestrians stroll. Small plans and sections of the housing and observatory modules sit around the image, showing that the infrastructure and the buildings belong to one kit of parts. Behind this scene is a territorial study that maps waterways, urban centres, lighthouses, harbours, beaches and protected zones. That mapping is what reveals Mostardas as a strategic hinge between ecological systems and human occupation.

That analytical groundwork matters because it justifies the scale of the response. Once the RAMSAR site and its bird corridors are understood as the real protagonists, a methodology of landscape infrastructure follows naturally. Pathways, decks, housing and laboratories are woven into the ground with minimal disturbance, so the architecture extends natural systems rather than competing with them.

Decks That Stop Short and Curve Away: Connecting Without Intruding

The strategy rests on three verbs: connect, activate, integrate. These two renderings are the clearest expression of the first. In one, a wide timber deck ends at a rock-lined edge, with birdwatchers gathered at its tip, sailboats moored nearby and storks crossing the grassland beyond. In the other, a boardwalk bends around the lagoon so that visitors with raised cameras face flamingos and an egret, with a white lighthouse on the horizon. In both, the deck is a viewing instrument. It sets distance, direction and pause.

This is where Oliveira's argument about non-extractive tourism becomes spatial. Walkways, bridges and navigation points form a continuous network linking lagoons, the town and ecological landmarks such as the lighthouse. The curated route steers bodies along fixed lines and leaves the wetland itself undisturbed. Access improves for residents, researchers and visitors alike, but the habitat keeps control over how close anyone gets.

Slatted Timber Volumes as a Reversible Construction System

The photomontage of a deck threaded between slatted wood volumes, with a willow, visitors and a figure leaping in mid-air above a section strip, shows the constructive logic at its most legible. The structures are built from locally sourced eucalyptus and treated pine with regionally manufactured components, which keeps costs low, makes assembly simple and cuts carbon impact. Thermo-acoustic insulation comes from regional by-products, including rice husk and cementitious mortars, which ties the envelope to the agricultural economy around Mostardas.

The most important word in the material strategy is reversible. Modular construction means these volumes can expand, adapt or be removed entirely as environmental conditions change. In a wetland where water levels and habitats shift, a building that can be taken away is arguably more responsible than one built to last forever. The slatted skins also keep the volumes light and porous, so they read as part of the deck rather than as enclosures set apart from it.

Activating the Edge: Cafés, Music and a Living Laboratory

The final montage moves from observation to occupation. A covered pavilion and café umbrellas sit on the deck, with diners and musicians gathered above a north elevation drawing. This is the 'activate' move in action: strategic insertions such as docks, observation towers and temporary housing bring new rhythms of use to underused areas without overwhelming them. The image shows a social life for the infrastructure that goes beyond birdwatching.

Behind this public face sits a more serious programme. It includes observatories, rehabilitation and research laboratories, researcher lodging, educational spaces and visitor services. Together these support field studies, ecological monitoring and environmental education, turning the site into a living laboratory. The café and the lab share the same timber language, which suggests that leisure and science can occupy the same edge if both follow the landscape's rules.

Why This Project Matters

Eco-tourism often fails at the moment of construction. The lodge gets too big, the access road cuts too deep, and the attraction degrades the thing people came to see. Oliveira's proposal avoids that trap by treating infrastructure, not architecture, as the primary design material. Boardwalks, docks and modules do the work a single landmark building would normally claim, and each can be calibrated to the sensitivity of the ground beneath it.

Its value also lies in how transferable it is. Local eucalyptus and pine, rice-husk insulation and a modular, removable system make up a kit that a small municipality could realistically procure, build and maintain. For coastal and wetland towns across Latin America weighing tourism against conservation, Mostardas offers a convincing model: build lightly, follow the water, and design every structure so it can leave without a trace.

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Project credits: Landscape Infrastructure: Cultural and Tourism Improvements for Mostardas City.