After completing the first phase of the Center for Culture and Ecology—and amid the ongoing struggle to defend their communal land tenure—the community of Santa Catarina Quiané launched a second stage of the project. In this effort, the Front for the Defense of Land, along with Quiané’s Ejidal, Communal, and Municipal authorities, as well as campo CAMPO, invited again the Munich University of Applied Sciences to contribute through its designbuild studio, with atarraya as guest professors.

As in the first phase, a team of architecture and engineering students and faculty designed and planned the construction in close dialogue with the local coalition. On site, the designbuild methodology integrated with the tequio, the communal system of reciprocal labour, to complete the construction in five weeks. The work was carried out mainly by students, faculty, and community members, with a few remunerated local workers appointed by the community.

The priorities were to build a larger classroom and to refurbish a self-managed community kitchen run by 12 families, which had been operating under extremely precarious conditions. Integrating this kitchen into the Center would benefit these families as well as other community organizations—primarily led by women—focused on food sovereignty and traditional cooking.

Following the approach used in the first phase, we evaluated alternatives together with the community and decided to maintain the previous layout: structures along the perimeter, connected by a corridor that links them to the central esplanade.

While an enclosed classroom was among the priorities, it became clear that the corridor had been more intensively used than expected. Its acoustics proved better than the existing, enclosed aula for music rehearsals involving bass drums, trombones, and trumpets. In Quiané, corridors serve multiple functions: drying crops, shelling corn, and hosting wakes and celebrations, among others.

As a result, the classroom became a large portico—a widened corridor for rehearsals, workshops, and assemblies. Built from Oaxacan pine wood, it uses deliberately visible earthquake-resistant strategies, consistent with the rest of the project. At the rear, a storage volume reinterprets the traditional bahareque or quincha technique, simplified as a cladding system over the wooden load-bearing structure.

The kitchen follows the same layout as the aula and restrooms from the first phase, integrating seamlessly with the rest of the Center. Its cladding is a wooden lattice that adapts traditional kitchens, and their woven carrizo (reed) enclosure , allowing for natural ventilation.

In collaboration with instructors and students from a local construction training program, CAMPO, and Quiané’s cooks, we designed a fuel-efficient wood-burning stove that preserves traditional cooking methods while reducing costs and health risks from smoke exposure.

Both practically and symbolically, the Center for Culture and Ecology concentrates and foregrounds the various community efforts to strengthen Quiané’s communal fabric. Amid the ongoing defense of their land, the space embodies the networks and communal practices that sustain life in this territory.