Panamá en Capas — Architecture as Atmosphere

In the tropics, architecture begins with the body: with heat on the skin, humidity in the lungs, the weight of still air, and the instinctive search for shade.

Panama is encountered physically before it is understood visually. The intensity of the sun, the density of the atmosphere, and the scarcity of moving air shape the city as decisively as its streets, towers, and infrastructure. Within this climate, comfort becomes a civic resource, and shade becomes one of architecture’s most consequential materials.

Our proposal for the new Museum of Contemporary Art grows from this elemental condition. The museum is conceived less as an autonomous object and more as an inhabitable atmosphere: a building defined through climatic experience, spatial depth, and the gradual modulation of light, temperature, vegetation, and air.

The project unfolds as a sequence of environmental transitions. From the exposed street, visitors pass through successive layers of shadow, filtered daylight, planted thresholds, and moving air. The journey culminates in the centre of the building, where a naturally tempered public plaza forms the museum’s social and climatic heart. This space operates as an urban refuge: a generous interior landscape in which the pace of the city changes and the tropical climate becomes hospitable.

The concept, Panamá en Capas—Panama in Layers—draws from the traditional Guna mola, where form, depth, and meaning emerge through the accumulation and incision of multiple layers. This cultural logic is translated into architectural space. Materials, programmes, structures, and environmental conditions overlap, filter, and reveal one another. Each layer carries a practical and experiential role: it casts shade, moderates heat, directs breezes, softens light, frames views, and creates moments of pause.

Here, environmental performance becomes the architecture itself. Deep overhangs, naturally ventilated circulation, planted terraces, permeable thresholds, and carefully controlled daylight establish the building’s primary formal language. These strategies reduce solar gain and mechanical cooling demand while producing a spatial richness that sealed environmental systems rarely achieve. Climate is treated as a generative force, capable of shaping both the building’s performance and its character.

The museum extends the public realm through its interior. Streets, gardens, terraces, bridges, and shaded gathering spaces flow through the building as a continuous urban landscape. Exhibition galleries appear as concentrated destinations within this broader field of movement, encounter, rest, and discovery. Art is therefore experienced within a larger civic and climatic sequence.

Panamá en Capas proposes a museum for a warming world. As cities face higher temperatures, stronger solar exposure, and increasingly unstable climatic conditions, architecture must create more than enclosure. It must construct microclimates, offer relief, and establish places where public life can continue with dignity and pleasure.

Architecture’s most profound gestures are sometimes its most elemental: a field of shade, air set into motion, filtered light, and a place where the body can breathe.

Project: New Museum of Contemporary Art

Project title: Panamá en Capas – Panama in Layers

Location: Panama City, Panama

Year: 2026

Project type: International architecture competition

Status: Competition proposal

Area: Approx. 3,100 m²

Architect: POETIC

Project team: Rudy Giese, Hans-Petter Bjørnådal, Olga Skrbénska, Kinga Ewa Hartmann, Hanna Zherenkina, Paolo Rossi, Francisco Camargo, Emmanuel Ortiz

Main concept: Panamá en Capas is conceived as an open, layered museum shaped by Panama’s tropical climate. Shade, vegetation, filtered daylight and natural air movement create a gradual sequence of transitions between the city, the museum and its central public plaza. The architecture establishes a cooler microclimate and offers a public refuge from the heat and humidity of the city.

Programme: Exhibition spaces, public gathering areas, gardens, terraces, bridges and naturally ventilated circulation spaces.