Conceived as an eco-tourism and education center, the building is strategically sited along the dwindling Rio Grande between El Paso, Texas. The project uses the industrial process of desalination—which forcefully separates salt from water—as a powerful architectural analogy for the artificial disconnection between human development and natural ecosystems. Ultimately, the design explores this divide and highlights the urgent need to reconnect humanity with nature.

Spatially, the project embraces the concept of “osmosis” by creating a highly porous architecture filled with interstitial openings. This approach creates an immersive spatial experience where visitors feel as though they are exploring within the ground itself. The building’s form acts as an allusion to the El Paso landscape, capturing the realities of water scarcity and soil salinization, while also celebrating nature’s innate ability to restore itself.

From a technical perspective, the building features a continuous, undulating roof designed to mirror the uneven ground. To make this organic form constructible, the design translates the analog bending behavior of paper strips into a rigorous geometric system based on conical logic. The surfaces are mathematically rationalized into ruled conical shapes, allowing a structural grid to be mapped along the straight-line generators of the cone. This clever geometric rationalization means that complex curvature is achieved efficiently using straight structural members. The final assembly utilizes steel beams that follow the roof’s calculated curvature, with modular panels seamlessly inserted between them and gutters elegantly concealed within the roof’s edges