Parque Arbórea

San Bernardino, Paraguay

Ongoing

Parque Arbórea is a landscape-first design for a mixed-use, predominantly retail complex in San Bernardino, Paraguay. Designed as lightweight pavilions that move along a green spine from the edge of the Ypacarai Lake to the inner Arbórea hills, the complex is built as a ‘kit of parts’ from local materials. The design is flexible and expandable, acting as infrastructure to a vibrant and connected public life.

Timber tower landmark and elevated walkways over the wetlands at Parque Arbórea, San Bernardino, Paraguay. By Sordo Madaleno.

Sunken amphitheatre and retail walkways at dusk at Ánima Village open-air cultural district, Los Cabos. By Sordo Madaleno.

Ánima Village is another project in which landscape leads. Located along the strip of the Baja California Sur, Ánima straddles a natural context of desert and forest landscape. This contrast defines the area’s unique and magnetic beauty, and has been harnessed into a space where architecture, people and nature mingle freely.

Just under 50 kilometres away from Asunción, San Bernardino is a popular holiday destination for families looking to escape the pace of the city. Parque Arbórea is envisioned as a nature-led destination, with the surrounding landscape and lake directly guiding its design. The region’s subtropical climate favours hybrid spaces that offer both sheltered and exposed conditions. The complex is therefore designed as a suite of porous elements integrated intuitively with the landscape, creating a range of conditions that invite exploration and humane discovery of space.

Timber lattice walkway over the wetlands connecting rammed earth pavilions at Parque Arbórea, San Bernardino, Paraguay. By Sordo Madaleno.

Parque Arbórea lies within a protected conservation area, embedded into a place defined by long-standing ecological, social, and touristic value. Its design accordingly rests on three pillars: community, people, and space; understanding how people travel into the site, how they use it, and how they shape the way it grows. Units and commercial spaces are imagined as open systems, able to expand as community needs evolve, to combine spaces and encourage agile functionality.

Timber jere corridor walkway linking pavilions at Parque Arbórea, San Bernardino, Paraguay. By Sordo Madaleno.

Elevated timber walkway and rammed earth pavilions alongside the landmark tower at Parque Arbórea, Paraguay. By Sordo Madaleno.

The idea is to create an architecture of responsiveness, where unknown futures are supported by openness, vernacular legibility, and structural flexibility and possibility. Spaces can move around, accommodate more than one use at once or across the different hours or the day, and eventually be dismantled without overt pressure on the site’s natural terrain. The central ethos of the project is ecological preservation—to demonstrate how the conservation of nature can live side-by-side with gentle urbanisation.

Curved terraced landscape and football pitch at Canadian School, Cholula, with Popocatépetl volcano beyond. By Sordo Madaleno.

The design for The Canadian School exemplifies Sordo Madaleno’s belief in nature as teacher: a school whose footprint is impressed into the land, allowing the forces of terrain, climate and geography to frame the students’ development.

Architecture models and archival material on display at Obra's Memory as Material exhibition, Sordo Madaleno London Studio, King's Cross.

Material as Memory is the first exhibition to be launched as part of Obra–Sordo Madaleno’s transdisciplinary laboratory, open library, and public living room. The exhibition drew focus onto the studio’s deep commitment to research into materials– their role in nature first, architecture second, and the shared meaning they carry in between.