Project Name: Casa Wabi Mushroom Pavilion

Location: Puerto Escondido, Mexico

Design Team: OMA / Shohei Shigematsu

Total Floor Area: 200 m²

Completion: 2026

Photography：Rafael Gamo

Design Features: OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu has completed the Mushroom Pavilion at Fundacion Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, marking the firm's first built work in Mexico. Located within the foundation's 65-acre natural landscape between the Sierra Madre mountains and the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, the pavilion transforms a specific agricultural brief into an architectural meditation on growth, community, and time.

At its core, the structure is a pure ellipsoid, a form chosen to optimise the interior conditions required for mushroom cultivation. Inside, the dome is divided into three operational chambers: a fruiting room, an incubation room, and a storage area. These orbit a central gathering space whose lower bowl is stepped like an amphitheatre in the round, providing tiered shelving for handmade terracotta mushroom pots produced by local artisans. The stepped geometry combined with the elliptical plan produces a panopticon-like visual field, making the entire growing cycle legible from a single vantage point.

An oculus crowns the interior, drawing daylight into the cave-like space, while perimeter openings facilitate passive natural ventilation. At the upper platform level, a framed portal offers unobstructed views across native scrubland to the ocean. Critically, the volume tapers inward at ground level, minimising its footprint to allow native guayacan trees to persist undisturbed.

The concrete shell is cast in place and trowel-finished, with burlap imprinted into the exterior surface to retain the site's iron-rich water. This deliberate surrender to oxidation means the pavilion will gradually rust, its patina deepening with each passing season, an architecture that is, quite literally, still growing.

Design Team: Founded in 1975 by Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis, OMA — Office for Metropolitan Architecture — has grown into one of the most intellectually rigorous and formally inventive practices in contemporary architecture. Operating across scales from civic infrastructure to cultural institutions, the firm consistently interrogates the social, political, and urban conditions that shape built form, working within and beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism.

Today the practice is led by seven partners: Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, Chris van Duijn, Jason Long, and Managing Partner-Architect David Gianotten. With offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, and Brisbane, OMA sustains a global portfolio spanning cultural, residential, commercial, and infrastructural typologies across six continents. The Mushroom Pavilion at Casa Wabi marks the firm's first completed project in Mexico and represents a significant extension of OMA's presence in Latin America.

Complementing its built practice, OMA operates AMO, a research and design studio that applies architectural methodology to disciplines including exhibition design, visual identity, urban policy, and curatorial practice. Together, OMA and AMO articulate a model of practice in which critical research and material production are inseparable, ensuring that every project is grounded in both analytical rigour and spatial ambition.