Building from Place: Inside the Work of RAMA Estudio

Carla Chávez, Carolina Rodas, and Felipe Donoso began collaborating while studying architecture in Quito, Ecuador, and went on to found RAMA Estudio, one of the winners of the ArchDaily Next Practices Awards 2026. For more than a decade, their practice has moved between housing, public spaces, adaptive reuse, and community initiatives. Their work is guided by an understanding of architecture as a service. For them, a project begins with the circumstances of a place and extends to the people who will build it and those who will live with it for years.

That idea has taken the architects into parts of a project that architects rarely reach. They have lived in a house to understand its neighborhood before transforming it, built with local craftspeople using earth dug from the site, and returned to an island community years after finishing their first homes there. In each case, their involvement continued long after construction ended.

+ 31