Arrecife Visitor Center
A research station and public education center for the Mesoamerican Reef, built from reclaimed limestone and engineered to fund its own coral nursery through visitor admissions.
Commissioned with a marine biology cooperative, the center had to do three things at once: withstand category-4 hurricane conditions, educate up to 400 visitors a day, and host a working coral nursery lab, all on a narrow dune lot a few meters from the high-tide line.
The solution is a single curved roof of laminated, salt-treated timber, lifted on a colonnade of reclaimed limestone piers salvaged from a demolished hotel two kilometers down the coast. The structure floats above the dune on pilings, allowing storm surge and sand migration to pass beneath it undisturbed, a strategy drawn from traditional Yucatán palapa construction rather than imported coastal-engineering norms.
Funding the reef, not just protecting it
Visitor admissions and a rooftop solar array (covering 140% of the building's energy demand) fund an on-site coral propagation lab, which has out-planted over 6,000 coral fragments onto the adjacent reef since opening. The building isn't just low-impact. It actively finances restoration.
