7 DE OCTUBRE COMMUNITY CENTER

Cabudare, Venezuela | 2026

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​Architecture as a Collective Process

In mid-September, Dislocal, in conjunction with the Faculty of Architecture and its Barquisimeto campus, established a working agreement with the Palavecino Municipality. This partnership aims to accompany the 7 de Octubre community in the reflection and projection of its habitat, as well as in the construction of a Community Center intended for civic gathering, cultural exchange, and the neighborhood's collective life.

The project began through working meetings, conversation sessions, and shared concentration spaces with the community, where needs, local knowledge, daily dynamics, and common aspirations were identified. These encounters were not merely informative instances, but active moments of project definition, where architecture was built through dialogue and collective experience.

From the start, we operated under a clear premise: the project is not a finished object, but an open process of social habitat production. The proposal focuses on the design of replicable, scalable, and appropriable construction systems, designed to be understood, transformed, and maintained by the community itself. Rather than delivering a closed work, the goal is to strengthen local capacities, build shared knowledge, technical autonomy, and continuity over time.

In this context, designing does not mean imposing a form, but activating a living system capable of growing, adapting, and evolving alongside its inhabitants.

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Strategy and Local Knowledge

One of the initial premises of the project was to anticipate monetary inflation by allocating available resources to the early purchase of materials by the community itself. This decision reinforced the autonomy of the process and allowed the project to be anchored to the actual conditions of the territory.

To achieve this, a detailed observation of the site was conducted, aimed at understanding local knowledge, existing construction techniques, and the capacities already installed within the community. Far from starting from external models, the project developed from what the people already knew how to do, recognizing their practices as forms of technical and cultural knowledge. Through drawing and a "reverse project" process—starting from what is built and known to reach a systematized proposal—the architecture was defined in a progressive and situated manner.

The project relies on a specific understanding of the territory, where vernacular knowledge is not understood as precarious solutions, but as technical-social knowledge built over time, deeply linked to the climate, economy, and daily life of the place.

 

Design Principles

Three design principles emerge from this analysis:

• The Cool-Roof Porch: An intermediate space that generates shade and ventilation, articulating daily social life. Passive thermal comfort and coexistence are understood as the same condition of habitability.

• The Sidewalk (Vereda): More than a circulation space, it is conceived as social infrastructure: an active edge that regulates the transition between the domestic and the public, sustaining proximity and community exchange.

• The Stream (Quebrada) and Water: The water system is assumed as an organizing structure of the landscape, a guide for land use, and a base for active environmental management. Water is not conceived as an obstacle, but as a territorial and design resource.

In combination, climate, culture, and urban form are articulated as a single system, resulting in a situated, replicable architecture deeply rooted in its context.

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Prototype, Self-Construction, and Future

The construction of the Community Center (October 2025 – June 2026) is the first step. It serves not as a final work, but as a living prototype and space for collective learning.

Self-construction allows for:

• Testing simple and modular systems.

• Transferring technical knowledge.

• Adjusting and improving prototypes through practice.

The methodology recognizes that the most durable and sustainable infrastructures are those that communities can understand, master, transform, and maintain with their own resources. Therefore, design is thought of as a process of strengthening local capacities rather than the simple delivery of a finished architectural object.

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Local Governance and Sustainability

The implementation of the project is supported by a $30,000 USD grant from the Palavecino Municipality, along with technical accompaniment from the FAU-Barquisimeto Extramural Teaching Unit and the Dislocal collective.

This assigned budget allowed for the total acquisition of materials and ensured their safeguarding on-site. The materials acquired include 156 bags of cement, reinforcement steel, and aggregates; 5,000 solid bricks for pavements; as well as 190 zinc sheets, 65 square tubes, 17 trusses, and structural piping. Additionally, it covered the labor for preliminary works, topographic surveying, and the construction of reinforced concrete foundations (excavations, formwork, footings, and pedestals).

 

Thanks to previous support from small donors, the fabrication and assembly of the metal structure is already underway. Currently, we are in a phase of seeking external collaborations with a fundraising goal of $10,000. This fund will allow us to continue the construction and cover the labor and specialized material objectives for the following stages:

• Completion of the roof and enclosures.

• Construction of the interior floor slab.

• Execution of the community assistance module (services and bathrooms).

• Development of the electrification and technical lighting project.

This entire process is optimized and made more affordable thanks to the community's commitment to self-construction sessions, where professional and local knowledge integrate to guarantee the technical, cultural, and economic relevance of the interventions. From the domestic to the territorial scale, Cabudare proposes a contemporary community urbanism capable of adapting, replicating, and sustaining itself over time.