Príncipe Eco-Village

Sustainable resort development, Príncipe Island

Year: 2025
Site: Príncipe Island

A resort that builds its ethics into its structure. Príncipe Eco-Village organizes tourism, craft, and local livelihood beneath a single system of overhanging roofs, tuned for passive climatic performance and threaded together by a mediating street that follows the site's own topography.

Pre-stressed local stone and reciprocal timber construction reduce the project's carbon footprint while doing double duty as vocational infrastructure — construction methods that generate skilled labor for the community that will inhabit the finished buildings.

Public program sits at the points where the land itself already gathers and expands: a cultural center, a gastronomy pavilion, a shared pool, courtyards shared between visitor and resident. The building section is the argument here — craft, climate, and communal life resolved in a single structural logic, not layered on afterward.

Hand-drawn site response sketch showing a mediating grain looping through the site between public space, housing, and back of house. — Site Response Strategy — A mediating grain threads through the site's topography, existing buildings, and primary road, guiding movement between old and new. It establishes a rhythm of compression, expansion, and gathering across the site.

Site Section.

Street culture rendering at Príncipe Eco-Village — an open-air market and dance festival along the mediating street corridor, with the cultural center and housing units beyond. — Experience Of Street Culture Along the Mediating Corridor.

Physical model photograph of a Príncipe Eco-Village housing unit with timber slat screens and a deep overhanging roof. — Physical Model Photography.

Exploded axonometric of the housing unit's construction, layering basalt roof tiles, plywood sheathing, wood-framed roof structure, plywood ceiling, sourced wood envelope and panels, and basalt stone substructure. — Tectonics and Embodied Carbon Analysis.

Exploded axonometric of the cultural center's curved roof assembly, layering basalt roof tiles, plywood sheathing, a wooden grid-slab structure, a basalt stone core, a compacted earth vault, and basalt stone substructure. — Tectonics and Embodied Carbon Analysis.

Interior rendering of the cultural center's gallery space, visitors moving among crafts on display beneath a timber roof structure and a basalt stone wall. — A moment within the gallery space of the cultural center, capturing the interplay between the composite materials of the building and crafts on display.

Rendering of the cultural center's curved terrace opening onto the beach, visitors seated above stepped seating, with the ocean and palm trees beyond. — The cultural center’s terrace frames a seamless indoor-to-outdoor transition towards the ocean.

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