'la pesca' eatery by natura futura revives local dialogues in babahoyo, ecuador

la pesca is conceived by natura futura arquitectura in what is a considered to be a highly central district of the babahoyo city in ecuador, close to its rivers. the client, ms. tania, looks to expand and dignify the twenty-year long seafood business by investing in a local ownership with better service for their customers. the restaurant is located on the ground floor of a collective housing building, adjacent to a small social zone. given how it is a place of great communal use, the project needed to be shared  and discussed with property owners for it to reach a successful outcome. 

natura futura arquitectura la pesca restaurant 
all images © KLIWADENKO NOVAS

for natura futura, the most challenging feature is to carefully blur the line between public and private sectors in order to create the ideal shared experiences. what the team hopes to achieve is to offer the the ground floor as a hub for the inhabitants’ social and recreational lives: children playing, people coming and going, groups interacting. therefore, it was crucial to converge certain factors that opened up room for dialogue and negotiations with no conflict. 

wood material, as used in the riverside fishing town, facilitates dialogue with the urban backdrop

the project is realized as an on-site construction, inviting local labourers to complete the restaurant. the wood, a long-used material in the riverside fishing town, is adopted as a recurrent unifying element that brings out the character of the city. ‘the goal is to generate interventions which respond to a local reality, a more participatory and open architecture where the city becomes lighter, more humane’, adds the studio.

the restaurant is completed thanks to local labor and on-site construction

the absence of walls allows the space to merge with the urban landscape

la pesca restaurant directly opens up to the streets

the project aims to blur the private-public dimension of the city

‘associating the line of the public and private sectors, where the limit begins to disappear’

front elevation

planting plan

exploded axonometric

project info:


architects: natura futura arquitectura

intervened architect: jose fernando gómez
contributors: astrid mite chacon , herman laroze, aparecida argüello, gabriel basin lissete arteaga, fausto quiroz.
location: babahoyo, ecuador

year: 2017


designboom has received this project from our ‘DIY submissions‘ feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: lea zeitoun | designboom