During the winter of 2012, I traveled to Ecuador with students from the architecture department at RISD. We spent time in Quito studying the properties of bamboo and how it is properly used as a building material. We then traveled with students from UTE (Universisdad Tecnologica Equinocal) to the coastal village of Pile to design and build an open air pavilion. It was meant to serve as an informative structure about the towns history (they were the original weavers of the "panama hat") as well as a place for the local citizens to wait for the bus. We broke up into several groups to present the town with several different options. The design chosen by the community was my groups'. From here we went from a scale model to a fully finished structure in two weeks.
