Words Nick Ramos
Image Patrick Kasingsing (Hacienda Community Center)
Editor’s note: I first met the Hacienda Community Center the same time architecture writer Nick Ramos did. It was 2015, and Jorge Yulo’s design had just landed a shortlist spot at the World Architecture Festival. I was there to art direct a shoot. I’d seen plenty of beautiful buildings as creative director then—but I wasn’t prepared for what this one did. The way it held both presence and porosity, fullness and restraint, caught me off guard as I moved through its open corridors and halls.
Yulo’s response to the site—anchored by four old mango trees—still feels astounding. He inserted three connected “rooms,” all straight lines in metal, stone, and glass, but the severe geometries didn’t fight the landscape. The architecture slipped into it, conversed with it. The louvers and glass gave it a kind of lace-like quality; it could fade into the green if you looked long enough. Even with its material weight, the building felt like part of the terrain, not an interruption.
I visited the site twice back then, but years after seeing and shooting hundreds of other places, this one stuck. I kept thinking about it. Which is what made me reach out to a good friend ten years later, to direct his gaze once again at the Hacienda Community Center—not with a critical eye, but with a bit more of himself in the mix. I didn’t want a rehash of his first piece, but something closer to what he actually felt navigating its spaces.
Nick’s words are testament that even a typology as overlooked as a community center or events space is no barrier to a poetic hand ready to shape a spatial narrative. It’s the kind of space that reminds you how architecture can stay with you, long after you’ve left it.
The Shape of Remembering
by Nick Ramos
I first visited the site a decade ago, to write about it.
My father was still alive then, already bedridden. I remember describing the place to him—its quiet, its calm.
Even then, the architecture felt less like an addition to the land and more like its quiet resolution. It didn’t draw a line between the rhythms of human life and those of nature; it allowed them to flow together.
The structure didn’t simply sit on the site—it became part of it, as if completing something already there, something that could not have been fully itself until architecture gave it form. It was not a gesture but a listening—an act of patience, precision, and care.
The buildings unfold slowly, in measured sequence. Spaces are shaped by thresholds and pauses, by shadow and reflection. Paths turn gently, offering glimpses before revelations. The architecture invites movement, but never rushes it. It reveals itself gradually, through silence and grace, becoming clearer the longer one stays.
Materials—concrete, steel, timber, glass, stone, light, and water—have settled into the site with quiet assurance. Their textures and tones resonate with the terrain. Weather has softened their surfaces, if not their edges. Time has become part of the architecture, absorbed into its grain and rhythm, inseparable from the landscape’s own.
“Spaces are shaped by thresholds and pauses, by shadow and reflection.”
Sometimes, when the light falls a certain way or the trees stir just so, I remember not only the place—but the season, the silence, and the man I once came home to tell about it. The architecture still feels as rooted, as attuned, as it did then—a quiet union of intention and environment.
In the end, it’s not only time that has shaped this place, but memory, too. And in that continuity—of land, light, trees, and form—something enduring persists. •
