0003_Ecological Classroom — Office for Repair | Systems and Spatial Design Studio

Organizacion Ecologica Sol y Verde

The Ecological Classroom

2024

DATE: 2022–2024
STATUS: DELIVERED
BUILDING TYPE: Institutional & Public

LOCATION: Paxcamán, Petén, Guatemala
CLIMATE ZONE: Tropical humid
CLIMATE STRESSORS: Deforestation; soil degradation; biodiversity loss

Commissioned by: Organización Ecológica Sol y Verde (GUATEMALA)
FUNDED by: THE Honnold Foundation; THE Evoca Foundation
In collaboration with: THE Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture (MAGA)

OFR ROLE: Lead designer; Engagement Specialist
OFR WORK STRANDS: Groundwork; Spatial Design; Capacity & Co-Design; STRATEGIC & SYSTEMS DESIGN

OFR designed and co-built the Ecological Classroom, the first building of Sol y Verde's Community Centre; the first of its kind in Péten. Completed in 2024, the building was the proof of concept for the whole site, and has become a demonstrative site regionally.

The Ecological Classroom was co-designed and co-built with the community it serves, from biobased materials, sourced almost entirely within a 34km radius. Its construction doubled as a bioconstruction training programme, and the building system was simplified so that local families and local organisations could reproduce it themselves.

Paxcamán sits at the edge of the Maya Biosphere Reserve, part of the largest tropical forest in Central America, where more than a third of forest cover has been lost in 20 years to illegal logging and industrial agriculture. Land degradation, failing rural schools, gender inequality and child labour from the age of 12 reinforce one another, and migration northward is the region's primary response (more than 30% of arrivals at the US-Mexico border come from the Northern Triangle).

The Classroom hosts Sol y Verde's educational programmes: training in agroecology and conservation, bioconstruction skills, and wellbeing, taught through instruction and hands-on application for a community that is mostly women and young people. Free childcare runs during sessions so that women can attend fully and freely. The single room was designed to be modular and adaptable, its walls, windows and openings reconfigured for different group sizes and degrees of shade, so that a women's group and a children's programme can share one space and move between uses. More than 350 workshops have run since completion.

Sol y Verde's site is a working permaculture farm, and the Classroom was conceived as one element of it: the line between building and land was removed by design. It sits among agroforestry orchards, community allotments, medicinal-plant beds and conservation forest, and every structural decision (roof orientation, floor elevation, overhang depth...) was calculated with the same rigour and care as the growing systems around it. The relationship runs both ways: harvested rainwater irrigates the allotments, and the orchard canopy lowers the temperature inside the structure. Building and landscape are a single productive system, designed through permaculture and local ancestral principles.

Building the Classroom first was a methodological decision. It gave OFR three years to pressure-test every assumption (materials, supply chains, structural performance, community dynamics) under real use, producing a body of site-specific knowledge that no amount of prior research could have replaced.

Gathered through monitored operation and a structured post-evaluation, that evidence base is what the design of the centre's next building now rests on. The Classroom is a working prototype: what it taught circulates back into the next design.

To deliver on these principles and the ambition of the project, OFR had to rebuild a brand new supply chain. Over eight months the team mapped and vetted every supplier within a 34km radius, working around political blockades, illegal logging networks and disrupted production to source 86% of materials locally: manchiche and pucté timber, bamboo sustainably harvested and treated, limestone from the local quarries, and earthen plaster mixed from local clay and the local farms’ agricultural waste. Concrete footings were the one traced exception, chosen over timber for the site's extreme humidity.

The architecture works with the climate rather than against it: an elevated, air-permeable platform and a split roof draw cool air up from shaded soil, and wall openings are oriented to catch the cooler winds travelling down the valley. The construction system was reduced to six materials and a modular logic, tested against one question at every decision: could a local family reproduce this at home, with the tools available to them? Where the answer was no, the design changed. The result is documented as open-source manuals, produced during the build itself and now taught across the region.

The building was also designed to be made by everyone. Children mixed plaster beside their mothers; women who had never held a carpentry tool helped assemble the building’s inner frame; older community members carrying ancestral Maya building knowledge worked alongside younger craftsmen trained in contemporary methods. For many, handling clay, timber and bamboo in construction was a return to material knowledge their families had been separated from for a generation. OFR's role was to design the conditions for that authorship, not to stand in for it.

CO-DESIGNED FROM INCEPTION WITH WOMEN AND CHILDREN AS CORE BENEFICIARIES

REBUILDING SUPpLY CHAINS AND SUPPORTING LOCAL ARTISANSHIP

CAPACITY-BUILDING THROUGHOUT CONSTRUCTION, TRAINING OVER 25 INDIVIDUALS IN BIOCONSTRUCTION

CO-BUILDING, WITH USERS AND BENEFICIARIES INVOLVED THROUGHOUT CONSTRUCTION , ADAPTING THE DESIGN THROUGHOUT THE PROCESS

Partner Credits: Office for Repair, with Organización Ecológica Sol y Verde.
Supported by the Honnold Foundation and Evoca Foundation, with the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture.
Photography: Kalin Steen, Lou Elena Bouey, Vector Delgado and Rony Rodriguez.