Please, Step on the Planters

Year: 2026

Location: Quito, Ecuador

Type: Professional - Competition

Public space often limits how people can fully inhabit it. When access is restricted, so are the possibilities of use: staying, playing, gathering. In Latin American cities, this condition is common: fenced plazas, isolated elements, and spaces with great potential that end up being merely traversed.

Plaza de San Marcos functions well in its everyday life and is closely tied to its neighborhood. Yet within this normality, some constraint areas cannot be accessed, and elements that can be seen but not touched. The project begins from this tension, both as a critique of what is allowed and forbidden, and as an invitation to re-engage.

The proposal occupies the plaza’s most present yet restricted element: the planters. Instead of surrounding them, it invites people to inhabit them. A system of elevated walkways crosses the site, creating new paths and relationships. These walkways form a porch-like structure that allows for pausing, observing, and discovering new interactions between vegetation and space. Raised 60 cm, the system transforms existing barriers into opportunities, enabling a previously limited contact. Access is integrated through steps connected to existing paths, linking the new circulation with everyday use. The structure is conceived as a permeable filter rather than a closed object.

The project engages the Japanese concept of Ma (間), understanding architecture as the relationships between body, movement, and environment. It activates what already exists, voids, transitions, and boundaries, suggesting rather than imposing. It invites exploration, questioning established norms, and discovering new ways of relating to the city and landscape. In this process, especially for children, space becomes a tool for critical thinking through experience.

San Marcos is a neighborhood shaped over time by its community. The intervention seeks to engage with this condition, acting as a subtle addition that contributes to the collective memory without displacing it.

New Path Perspective

1. 1x1m Grid I Main Structure

2. Perimeter Rails| Secondary Structure

3. Framework and Final Form

Conceptual Model I Plaster and Steel Reinforcement

The Plaza is the Pavilion

The intervention does not seek to introduce an autonomous object; it aims to reveal and amplify what already works. It adapts to the existing dynamics of the neighborhood, proposing a light and porous system that integrates with them.

The object is understood as a condition: a layer that activates the in-between space, transforming restrictions into opportunities for use. In this way, the plaza as a whole becomes the true pavilion.