Create Your First Project
Start adding your projects to your portfolio. Click on "Manage Projects" to get started
Plaza Cantera
Location
Panama City, Panama
The plaza came first. Everything else followed.
Rather than a single museum building, Plaza Cantera proposes a shaded civic ground — a space where visitors, students, and the city can gather under deep overhanging roofs. Three pavilions frame this shared space on three sides, but the plaza between them is the project’s true
architecture.
The composition draws from Panama’s basalt geology. The site is conceived as a carved canyon: the ground terraformed into levels, an
amphitheater bowl, and stepped thresholds, with dark layered facades rising on either side like exposed rock strata. Moving through the plaza feels like moving through a large canyon surrounded by natural basalt formations.
The overhanging roofs do two things simultaneously. They provide essential shade in the tropical climate, projecting 3metres beyond the facade line to cool the ground below. And their radiating steel structure — fully visible from inside each gallery — references the silhouette of indigenous Panamanian pitched roofs, where it is the act of sheltering and defines communal space.
Plaza Cantera is a quarry of culture: carved from the geology open to the city of Panama.
