Urutum Community Primary School

2023

Rondon do Pará, Pará, Brasil.

In the rural area of Rondon do Pará, 140 kilometres from the city of Marabá, a community of around 46 families lives at the edge of the Amazonian arc of deforestation. The Urutum Community Primary School was conceived to serve these families, in a region where access to industrialised building materials is constrained by distance, cost, and the carbon weight of long supply chains. Reading the geography, the available labour, and the construction traditions already present in the territory, the project adopted compressed earth bricks as its primary material — a technique that allows the soil of the site itself to become the substance of the school. The decision is at once pragmatic and political: it lowers cost and environmental footprint, while affirming that the materials of the Amazon are sufficient to build for the Amazon. The school provides primary education to children from the surrounding rural households and stands as a small piece of public infrastructure rooted in the conditions of its own place. The project was published in the special edition of Projeto magazine dedicated to spaces designed for education.