BAMBOO LAB
WHAT IS EKAWA?
Ekawa is at once a territory, a dream, and a life project... a passion for living in symbiosis with nature, and a vision to create a new normal, rooted in adventure, creativity, and an imagination of what it means to truly thrive. It is a place where sculptural bamboo architecture meets the arts of personal and planetary healing: ecological regeneration, edible forests, expanding bamboo groves, spiritual practices, and a general opening toward insight and wholeness.
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Ekawa is a living experiment. Experiencing the everyday as a magical reality is a founding principle, transforming ordinary life into a space of vibrancy and aliveness. ​​It evolves with each home built, each family who joins the vision, each workshop or retreat hosted. It is a mirror held up to life, reminding us that architecture itself can be alive.
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Over seven years of inhabiting this land, we have explored how bamboo architecture can root itself in the rainforest while nourishing the human condition. This exploration has given rise to several unique homes, some of which now form the Bamboo Sanctuary, where visitors are invited to experience life here.
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When others began to ask: “How can I also make a bamboo home and live here?”, the Lab grew into the Bamboo Village, where like-minded families are building their homes and reimagining ways of living in wild nature.
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Ekawa continues to evolve through collaboration. We welcome co-creators interested in alternative education, organic food systems, bamboo regeneration, and lifestyle experiences that weave architecture, community, and nature into one.
Since studying to be an architect at the Universities of Manchester and Bath, I have been exploring how our built surroundings can facilitate in us a heightened sense of aliveness. After working at various British architecture practices such as Feilden Clegg Bradley, this search took me to participate at Arcosanti, an ‘urban laboratory’ in Arizona and then to work at the practice ‘Natural Architecture’, South Africa, where I relished in the subtlety of designing with the formative geometries of nature. Returning to the UK became a deep inner journey of converting a van as a mobile home for the practice of on-site architecture combined with an exploration of frugality. These ideas to do with the art of living and design-build architecture are evolving everyday as, through the Ekawa project, we connect with the wildness of nature, the beauty of the creative process and the wholeness of the human condition.
co-founder
Eleanor McIntyre
Before the Ekawa project, I was an architect, academic and researcher based in the UK, where I lived for 18 years. I first went there to study architecture at the Architectural Association in London, and afterewards I worked at Foster + Partners and other practices. From 2009 I led research and teaching projects, mainly at Cardiff University, and also at the Architectural Association. As a design researcher I collaborated with artists and scientists including choreographers, musicians, hydrologists and crystallographers. A number of life-transforming experiences made me question my own dharma, and where it intersects with world dharma. This led to the co-founding of the Ekawa project in the Colombian rainforest, in a wild space of purpose, where humans thrive in symbiosis with nature.
co-founder
Sergio Pineda
HOW EKAWA BEGAN...
2017
The seed of Ekawa began as a feeling when we (Elle and Sergio) met in the UK, each of us on a journey of questioning how to live differently. We wondered how everyday life itself could become a path of transformation, where nature and the human condition could thrive together in synergy.
2018
Our search led us to San Blas, to the land of Sergio’s grandfather. We initially came to run a bamboo architecture workshop with British university students, and then felt the question: "why don't we call this home?!". Sleeping in a tree-tent for the first 18 months, we felt the calling of the forest, an invitation to step more fully into life in symbiosis with nature.
- 2022
What followed was a four-year pioneering phase: immersion in bamboo construction, reforestation, and the challenges of living wild. Our passion as architects and adventurers became the Bamboo Lab, an exploration into architecture that nourishes the spirit. These first years have been very much about exploring bamboo architecture and sharing the knowledge through workshops.
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Out of this came the dream of a Bamboo Village, sparked when friends and visitors began to ask how they too could live in this way. Now the focus is growing to include how we can nourish the process of living here - through growing food and supporting the children with forms of collective unschooling. The Bamboo Sanctuary has grown as a natural expression of Ekawa’s original impulse: to offer a taste of what it feels like to live awake, connected, and fully alive.
WHERE IS EKAWA?
A Place of Transformation: San Carlos, Antioquia, Colombia
The region is part of a transformational process, located where the Andean mountain geography dissolves into the ecology of the tropical planes in Colombia. Beginning as natural wildness, over the last century the territory has gone through a number of phases: first damage through exploitative farming; then pausing in stillness due to exodus caused by war; and now in a time of peace, looking towards a healing.
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The Neighbourhood: San Blas Valley​
Historically a home to rainforest, the region of San Blas has an abundance of natural springs and sunshine. A gentle transition is beginning, moving away from a culture of cattle farming and rainforest destruction, towards reconnection between humans and nature. Now we see reforestation and the emergence of alternative living. ​The previously farmed land of Ekawa is now home to many bamboo sculptures for inhabitation, edible gardens and all sorts of wildlife. Several families live here and our lifestyles evolve through re-connection with the wildness of the earth, in a space of active, creative flow. Ekawa connects with the locality of San Blas and global ideals through workshops and lifestyle experiences, bringing together deep nature and creativity with humans from all walks of life.
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The Territory of Ekawa
The territory of Ekawa spans over 300 hectares in four watersheds: Naranjos, Cristales, Uaicurú and Constelaciones, which all feed into the larger watershed of the Valley of San Blas. There are untouched areas where old forest combines with new forest as the ecology re-wilds alone, as well as symbiotic areas where humans dwell with nature. Here, we are creating bamboo sculptures for inhabitation nestled amongst rainforest, inspiring a natural, creative, rooted and spiritual culture of living.