Mushroom Pavilion, an architecture that cultivates community

Designed as “an incubator for both food and community,” the Mushroom Pavilion joins Fundación Casa Wabi as a new presence within a campus that, since its founding by artist Bosco Sodi, has been conceived as a place of dialogue between artistic practices, territory, and community.

With this intervention, the OMA studio completes its first built work in Mexico, choosing a project that reflects a precise ambition: to combine a concrete function - the cultivation of mushrooms - with a broader cultural and collective dimension.

Cultivation as a visible and shared practice

Set within 26 hectares of natural landscape stretching between the mountains and the coast of Oaxaca, in Puerto Escondido, the pavilion appears as a discreet yet striking presence. Its essential, compact elliptical form translates an organizational need into architecture: optimizing cultivation processes. Yet what could remain a purely functional device becomes an experiential space, where production, observation, and encounter coexist.

Inside, the domed structure is organized into three main areas - fruiting room, incubation, and storage - arranged around a central space that acts as a social hub. It is here that the project reveals its broader ambition: not only to produce food, but to generate relationships. The lower stepped seating, conceived as a circular amphitheater, hosts terracotta vessels made by local artisans, transforming cultivation into a visible and shared practice. The panoptic configuration makes the entire mushroom lifecycle legible at all times, dissolving the boundary between work and experience.

Natural light, filtered through a central oculus, spreads throughout the space, evoking the atmosphere of a contemporary cave, while openings along the perimeter ensure constant passive ventilation. At the top of the steps, a square opening frames a view that extends beyond the vegetation toward the ocean, reestablishing a continuous dialogue between interior and exterior, between human activity and the landscape.

Productive architecture and civic space

Particularly significant is the way the pavilion meets the ground: the volume curves inward at its base, minimizing its impact on the terrain and preserving native vegetation, such as the tropical guaiacana tree. The choice of materials also reflects this intention of integration: the in-situ cast, smoothed concrete envelope features a jute-imprinted texture capable of retaining the site’s iron-rich water.

Over time, weathering and environmental agents will transform the building’s appearance, oxidizing its surface and inscribing the changes of the surrounding context into the material itself.

The Mushroom Pavilion thus emerges as a hybrid architecture: a productive infrastructure and a civic space, an ecological device and a cultural gesture. In the words of Shohei Shigematsu, partner at OMA, “it is an incubator for both food and community, designed to host all kinds of activities for the local population, visitors, and the foundation.” It is precisely in this dual nature that its strength lies: a project capable of rooting itself in its context without imposing on it, activating relationships, and transforming a simple act - growing mushrooms - into a shared experience of knowledge and belonging.

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