Al Borde Plants a Three-Story Library in the Ecuadorian Amazon Using Only Chonta Palm

There was no community meeting space in Huaticocha before this building existed. The settlement sits in the buffer zone of Ecuador's Sumaco Biosphere Reserve, deep in the Amazon, where a reading club launched in 2019 by Laboratorio Creativo Sarawarmi and Witoca, a local coffee-focused agricultural association, eventually outgrew its informal setting and demanded architecture. Al Borde responded with Yuyarina Pacha, a name that translates from Kichwa as "Space-Time to Think," and delivered a 186-square-meter library that rises on three levels within a steeply pitched thatched volume held aloft by Chonta palm columns driven straight into the ground.

What makes the project genuinely compelling is not just the material palette or the vernacular silhouette, both of which photograph well, but the way the building was absorbed by its community before the last palm leaf was woven into the roof. Residents began hosting events mid-construction. The library's program, spanning wet workshops on the ground floor, open-shelf book collections on the first, and digital oral-history preservation stations on the second, was shaped by participation rather than prescription. Al Borde designed a frame loose enough to tolerate the irregularities of organic material and tight enough to stand up to equatorial rainfall, and the community filled it with purpose.

A Thatched Volume in the Canopy

From a distance, Yuyarina Pacha reads as an oversized version of the region's traditional houses. The steeply pitched roof, woven from palm leaves, sheds heavy Amazonian rain with the same logic local builders have relied on for generations. Slender Chonta columns lift the occupied floors above the clearing, keeping the ground plane open and ventilated. The aerial perspective reveals just how completely the forest envelops the site: the thatched form sits within a gap in the canopy like a clearing that grew a spine.

Al Borde chose not to import a foreign structural language. Chonta, an Amazonian palm prized for hardness, can be embedded directly in soil without waterproofing, a fact that eliminates concrete foundations and the logistics of transporting cement into a roadless landscape. The material decision is practical before it is symbolic, but it is both.

Ground Floor: Open Air, Wet Hands

The ground level is deliberately unenclosed. Diagonal timber bracing frames views of vegetation on every side while children swing from the upper platform, gather at benches for workshops, or simply pass through on a bicycle. The program here anticipates water and mess: art and science workshops, community meetings for the agricultural association, informal gatherings that do not require climate control. Coffered timber ceilings overhead give the space a sense of compression that contrasts with the soaring thatch above.

Leaving the base open was a climate move as much as a social one. Air circulates freely beneath the elevated floors, and the thick thatched envelope above acts as insulation, moderating the interior temperature without mechanical systems. The building breathes through its skin.

Stacking Knowledge Vertically

The vertical section is the real diagram of the library's ambition. Three timber platforms stack within the pyramidal roof, connected by steep staircases that double as informal seating. Looking straight down through the central void, you can see children reading on mats on one level and seated at desks on another. The void is not decorative; it ties the floors together acoustically and visually, so that the building always feels like a single room rather than three separate ones.

Each floor carries a specific charge. The first floor holds the book collection on open timber shelves, accessible without a librarian's mediation. The second floor, a balcony overlooking the first, houses tablets, computers, and audio recordings that preserve the community's oral memory in Kichwa. Placing digital resources at the top, where the glass ridge skylight pours in the most light, was a smart inversion: the newest media sits under the oldest roofing technique.

Structure Under Thatch

Inside, the exposed timber truss system is the architecture. Diagonal braces in Chonta radiate from the columns to the ridge, creating a lattice that is structurally redundant enough to absorb the dimensional irregularities of organic wood. No two members are identical, and the design was calibrated to tolerate that fact. The steep pitch of the roof, necessary for rain shedding, generates a tall interior volume that Al Borde exploits to stack the three occupied levels.

A continuous glass skylight runs along the ridge, replacing what is traditionally the most complex joint in a thatched roof. The move is pragmatic on two counts: it floods the interior with overhead daylight and simplifies both construction and future maintenance of the ridge line. Light enters from above and filters down through the timber platforms, reaching even the ground floor as a diffused glow.

Community as Client, Builder, and User

Construction was led by AsoAmazonas and local weavers under the direction of Carlos Huatatoca, with building spanning from August 2023 to January 2024. Al Borde's participatory method, inviting users into the design and construction process rather than delivering a finished object, has a long track record in the studio's work, but Yuyarina Pacha may be its clearest demonstration. The community did not wait for a ribbon-cutting. They started using the building while it was still going up, a fact that says more about the project's success than any award citation could.

The images of children reading on floor mats, sitting in circles, and clustering around timber desks are not staged occupancy shots for a portfolio. They document a building that was claimed by its users from day one, a library whose program was authored collectively rather than imposed.

Context and Neighboring Structures

The hillside around the library holds other structures, including a stone masonry building partially concealed by tropical vegetation, that anchor the site in a longer material history. Yuyarina Pacha does not try to dominate this context. Its footprint is compact, its materials are local, and its form echoes geometries already present in the landscape. The upper reading level, with its timber desk and book display framed by bamboo rafters, feels like a treehouse more than an institution.

Plans and Drawings

The octagonal plan, visible in both the floor and roof drawings, organizes circulation around a central void with stair volumes pushed to the perimeter. The section drawings are the most revealing: they show how the triangular roof profile, raised on stilts above the tree canopy, generates enough vertical space for three inhabited platforms within a form that reads from outside as a single story. Early sketches explored pentagonal and triangular variants before settling on the final geometry, and the progression from napkin sketch to physical model to built structure is unusually well documented.

From Model to Construction

The physical models, built first at small scale and then tested as full-size mock-ups on site, reveal the studio's method. Labeled timber joints in the pentagonal model show that every connection was pre-planned to accommodate the dimensional variation of Chonta. The image of three people examining the model under a corrugated metal workshop roof captures the collaborative process at its most tangible: architecture as a negotiation between drawn intention and material reality. The bamboo model visible in front of the rising timber frame confirms that prototyping happened on site, not in a distant studio.

Why This Project Matters

Yuyarina Pacha is not a charity project dressed up as architecture. It is a building that takes its users seriously enough to let them shape its program, its construction process, and its ongoing life. The decision to build entirely in Chonta palm, a material the community already knows how to source, work, and maintain, ensures that the library can outlast its architects' involvement. Self-management is not an aspiration here; it is a structural condition.

The project also demonstrates that sustainability in the Amazon does not require imported technology or green certification checklists. A glass skylight along a thatched ridge, Chonta columns that need no foundation, passive ventilation through an open ground plane: these are low-tech moves executed with high precision. Al Borde has built a library that stores both printed books and oral memory in a structure that is itself a record of how this community builds. That layering of knowledge, material, and participation is what makes the project last.

Yuyarina Pacha Community Library by Al Borde. Huaticocha, Ecuadorian Amazon. 186 m². Designed 2023, constructed August 2023 to January 2024. Photography by JAG Studio.

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