Semillas Builds a Preschool as an Educational Ecosystem for Peru's Nomatsigenga Community

For years, the children of the Nomatsigenga community of Sonomoro attended a preschool built from scrap wood and roofed with a patchwork of sheet metal and palm leaves. That structure, erected by the community in 2012 as a stopgap, was never meant to last. Its replacement, designed by Semillas under the lead of architect Marta Maccaglia, is something categorically different: a 596-square-meter campus that treats architecture itself as a pedagogical instrument, conceived through participatory workshops with mothers, teachers, local authorities, and the children who would use it.

What makes the Sonomoro Preschool genuinely compelling is not the fact that it is a socially engaged project in a remote Amazonian setting, though it is certainly that. It is the spatial intelligence with which the architects dissolve the boundary between classroom and landscape. Three classrooms, a multipurpose room, a kitchen, and toilet facilities are organized not as a single block but as a constellation of volumes linked by covered walkways and open courtyards. Each classroom has a garden on one side and a circular orange courtyard on the other, so that the outdoors is never backdrop but always participant. The result is a school where movement, play, and direct contact with nature are structural conditions of learning rather than afterthoughts.

A Campus Rooted in the Canopy

Seen from above, the school reads less as a building and more as a settlement: red tile roofs nestled among palm trees and dense tropical vegetation, with pathways weaving between them. The aerial view reveals how deliberately the campus was inserted into its central community site, preserving existing trees and allowing greenery to press in on every side. Low-slung pitched roofs keep the profile below the canopy line, avoiding the institutional gesture of a single monolithic volume.

At ground level, stepped timber retaining walls and elevated concrete walkways manage the terrain without flattening it. Children circulate between buildings on paths that feel more like village lanes than school corridors. Vertical timber screens filter views and sunlight, creating a layered edge between built and natural that shifts as you move through the complex.

Thresholds and Covered Walkways

The covered circulation spaces may be the most generous rooms in the school. Open timber colonnades with slatted wood ceilings create shaded gathering areas where children play, run, and socialize. These are not leftover corridors; they are programmed in-between spaces that acknowledge a simple truth about equatorial climates: the best place to be is outside, just out of the rain.

Dappled sunlight filters through timber beams and sloped ceiling panels, producing a quality of light that is warm without being harsh. Concrete columns provide the structural rhythm, but it is the woodwork overhead that gives these walkways their character. The sloped ceilings also serve a practical function, shedding the heavy rains that define the central jungle's wet season.

Brick, Shadow, and Craft

The material palette is deliberately restrained: reinforced concrete for the primary structure, handcrafted clay bricks for partitions, and wooden carpentry throughout. That simplicity allows the few expressive moves to carry real weight. Protruding brick patterns on the red facades generate texture and shadow, turning what could have been a utilitarian wall into something worth looking at. In the corridors, perforated brick screens cast patterned shadows on the concrete floor, and the effect is almost theatrical as children move through shifting geometries of light.

The entry portico, framed in exposed timber rafters above concrete steps, signals arrival without grandstanding. It is a gesture that feels proportionate to its context: welcoming, clearly built with care, but not imported from an architectural vocabulary that has nothing to do with this place.

Inside the Classroom Pyramids

The classrooms are crowned by pyramidal wooden roofs that serve a double purpose. Structurally, the steep pitch evacuates rainfall efficiently, a non-negotiable requirement in the Amazonian climate. Thermally, the peaked form generates a chimney effect, drawing hot air upward and out while cooler air enters at the lower openings. Cross ventilation is permanent, supported by polycarbonate partitions and windows that admit light while allowing air to circulate freely.

Inside, the exposed timber rafters converge at a vertical skylight, framed by oriented strand board panels, that pulls a shaft of daylight deep into the room. Children sit at low wooden tables beneath this soaring ceiling, and the proportional contrast between the intimate furniture and the expansive roof gives the classrooms an almost ceremonial quality. A fluorescent tube supplements natural light, but the architecture does most of the work.

Edges and Boundaries

The school's perimeter is handled with particular care. Curved concrete walls with vertical slatted screening mark the boundary between campus and community without creating a fortress. A tower-like portal punctuates the wall, framing the entrance as a distinct moment of passage. Elsewhere, a raised concrete seating ledge along the boundary wall doubles as informal gathering space for parents and neighbors. These edges acknowledge that a school in a tight-knit indigenous community is a civic building, not a secured compound.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan confirms what the aerial photograph suggests: building clusters are dispersed among existing trees along two intersecting avenues, forming an organic rather than orthogonal arrangement. The floor plan reveals curved circulation paths connecting classroom volumes around a central courtyard, with tree symbols indicating where vegetation penetrates the plan. The isometric drawing labels courtyards and gardens explicitly, underscoring that outdoor spaces are not residual but are named, intentional rooms of the school.

The section drawing is especially instructive. It illustrates the chimney effect through the pitched roofs, rainwater collection at the eaves, and the relationship between floor level and ground. These are not decorative diagrams; they document a building that must withstand earthquakes, flooding, and torrential rain while protecting groundwater. The north and south elevations show gabled volumes set against a backdrop of mountains and trees, with human figures lending scale to what is, by any measure, a modestly sized project that punches well above its weight.

Why This Project Matters

The Sonomoro Preschool matters because it takes seriously the idea that architecture for children in a remote indigenous community deserves the same rigor and spatial generosity as any urban cultural institution. Semillas and Marta Maccaglia did not parachute in with a prefabricated solution; they engaged the community in the design process and built with local materials and techniques, meeting Peruvian seismic and flood standards along the way. The result is a school that serves more than 70 children and does so within a spatial framework that respects Nomatsigenga ways of inhabiting and learning.

More broadly, this project demonstrates that participatory design need not produce architecture that is tentative or compromised. The covered walkways, perforated brick screens, pyramidal roofs, and garden classrooms are spatially ambitious moves executed with modest means. They prove that constraint and invention are not opposites. For communities across the Global South contending with deteriorating school infrastructure, Sonomoro offers a replicable lesson: start with the people, build with what is at hand, and never settle for less than architecture that teaches through its own presence.

Sonomoro Preschool by Semillas, lead architect Marta Maccaglia. San Martín de Pangoa, Peru. 596 m². Completed 2023. Photography by Eleazar Cuadros.

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