Project 05 Quito, Ecuador 2026

Civic Quarry

Type Museum and National Archive
Status Competition Proposal
Class Vertical Studio
Partner Guoyu (Leo) Li
My role Site, massing and diagrams
Scroll to explore

Overview

Four solid wings stand apart, and the city enters between them.

Civic Quarry, a museum and national archive in Quito, Ecuador, is a large mass at the southern tip of Parque La Carolina. Vertical fins close each wing, so from the street only the cut between them speaks. That cut, one floor below the street, is the main public room: crossed, sat on, climbed. Wide steps rise from the plaza over the foyer to an auditorium facing the park. The wings hold the archive. The void holds the public.

Emanuele Di Paola and Guoyu (Leo) Li · Vertical Studio, Marcelo Spina · SCI-Arc B.Arch, Spring 2026

Program
Museum and national archive
Site
Quito, Ecuador: full city block
Strategy
Subtraction: the block as raw material
Seam
Civic program exposed in the cuts
Massing
Angular shards around a public crossing
Model
Sectional: sliding black volumes, orange seams

Site

Where
It Sits

A dense block off the southern end of Parque La Carolina in Quito, at 2,850 metres in a valley ringed by volcanoes. The project treats the block not as a plot to build on but as material to cut into.

0.1914° S, 78.4861° W Drag to pan, +/− or Ctrl + scroll to zoom © OpenStreetMap contributors

Interactive Extraction Sequence

01 The Cube One volume at the scale of the block: the museum begins as a single found mass.
02 The Axes Two axes are drawn through the center, rotated and shifted off-grid: vertical cuts split the cube into four shards.
03 The Strata Random horizontal planes section the shards: the cuts become the orange seams of civic program.
04 The Building The shards go back into the ground and four wings stand apart in their place, wrapped in fins. Wide steps climb from the park over the foyer, under the raised galleries and auditorium.
05 Below the Plaza The ground opens too: the lower void one floor below the street, the foyer under the steps, four parking decks down to -19.62 and the metro tunnel along the north edge.
Scroll to extract · Drag to orbit

Concept The City as Raw Material

"A museum and national archive extending Parque La Carolina, treating the existing city block as raw material and civic program as the exposed seam within."

A quarry produces form by extraction: what remains is shaped by what was taken. Applied to a dense block in Quito, the operation generates a museum whose galleries are the leftover mass and whose public spaces are the cuts themselves, a museum and archive housed in a geological act.

Process

Quarrying
The Block

The massing comes from a single, repeatable operation. One cube; two axes drawn through its center, then rotated and shifted just off-grid; a set of random horizontal planes. The vertical cuts open the public crossing, the horizontal cuts produce the strata of galleries.

01 One cube: the block taken as found mass
02 Two axes through the center, rotated and shifted by a little
03 Vertical cuts split the cube into four shards
04 Random horizontal planes cut the shards into strata: the seams of civic program
Civic Quarry, massing: a key plan of eight cuts through the block, the eight February 2026 cuts as black sections of building and ground, and the final building as an axonometric

Precedent

Villa Giulia,
Quarried

Vignola's Villa Giulia in Rome is read as a proto-quarry: a solid figure whose courtyards and exedra are cut into the mass rather than added to it. The precedent study decomposes its plan and section into figure and void.

The same operation, scaled to a Quito city block, generates the museum.

Precedent study: plan, section, and massing decomposition of Villa Giulia, Rome (Vignola)

Stop Motion Assembling by Hand

The Quarry,
Reassembled

The process in reverse: starting from the loose extracted pieces, the massing is rebuilt by hand one volume at a time. Each orange fragment is a piece of civic program; each black slab is retained mass. The building is only ever the sum of what was taken and what was kept.

Section A-A

Through
the Void

Cut through the lower void and the auditorium, looking west: the archive and the galleries above, the parking and the metro below the street.

Civic Quarry, Section A-A looking west through the lower void: the archive floors beside an orange stair core, the galleries and the auditorium above the public steps and the foyer, four parking levels and the metro tunnel below the street, with the neighbouring buildings either side

Section A-A, looking west

2 Galleries · 3 Auditorium · 4 Archive · 6 Lower void · 7 Metro tunnel · 8 Foyer · 9 Parking · 10 Public steps

Drawing Set

The Building,
Drawn

Nine drawings of the developed building: from below, in the layers of the city around it, on its site, in section, by program, in plan at three levels and in the city.

Civic Quarry, worm's-eye axonometric cut at +4.25: the four wings seen from below around the lower void, the cut walls in black, the cores in orange and the facade fins rising behind
Worm's-eye axonometric, cut at +4.25
Civic Quarry, context map of Quito drawn as four stacked layers around the site: places of culture within a 15 minute walk, the streets reached on foot in 5, 10 and 15 minutes with the metro station La Carolina, the parks with Parque La Carolina, and the ground with its contours
Context map, the city in layersMap data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Elevation: Copernicus WorldDEM-30.
Civic Quarry, site plan of Quito: the four wings in black on the dark plaza at the southern tip of Parque La Carolina, the cut lines dashed across the block, planting islands and trees, the city blocks in light grey
Site plan
Civic Quarry, Section D-D looking east: the public steps in orange climbing over the foyer, the galleries and the auditorium above, the parking levels and the metro tunnel below the ground line
Section D-D, looking east
Civic Quarry, program: the section with its rooms named and, under it, the floor area of each program drawn as a band, the public route in orange
Program
Civic Quarry, plan at +4.25, ground floor: the four wings around the lower void, the public steps and the cores in orange, the entrances marked
Plan at +4.25, ground floor
Civic Quarry, plan at +8.00: the public steps in orange climbing over the foyer wing, the other three wings around the lower void
Plan at +8.00, public steps
Civic Quarry, plan at -1.53, lower ground: the floor of the lower void with the foyer, the shop, the tickets desk and the bar, and the archive
Plan at -1.53, lower ground
Civic Quarry, axonometric in the city: the building with its fins among the neighbouring blocks and towers, with a scale bar and a key
Axonometric in the city

Physical Model

The Sectional
Model

The model works like the building: black volumes slide apart to expose the orange seams of civic program within. Every extraction the design proposes can be performed by hand on the model itself.

Sectional model: the full massing with orange roofscape and fins
Sectional model: black shards around the orange core
Sectional model: gallery interior with figure, opened by hand
Sectional model: hand sliding the orange roof plates
Sectional model: lit section through the galleries and seams
Sectional model: hand opening an orange program drawer
Vertical Studio Museum Competition Subtraction Urban Quito

Site Model Quito

The Quarry
In The City

The massing model sits in a gray context model of the Quito site. Against the neutral city, the black shards read as retained mass and the orange seams mark where the block has been opened to the public.

Massing model in the Quito context: the cut block among gray towers
Massing model at street level: the orange seam against the city
Massing model: elevation in the site model
Hands adjusting the massing model in the site context

Next Project 06

SCI-Arc
Extension

↗