MAC Panamá
Culture - Panama City, Panama
2026
Competition
Lead architects: Ilias Oikonomakis, Angelos Siampakoulis
Team: Claire Dutreuil, Saga Persson
The building for Panama's new Contemporary Museum of Art-MAC Panamá is conceived as a living landscape - an architectural composition of brick cubes, green terraces, and a luminous central atrium that reflects the country’s terrain, climate, and cultural identity. The massing clusters around a triple-height lobby, where filtered natural light enters through a timber-and-glass roof, revealing the project’s core elements: archive, sculptural staircase, and exhibition galleries above. Five types of locally crafted bricks define the façades, celebrating regional craftsmanship while creating subtle variations in texture and color. These are paired with structural timber and expansive glazing, balancing solidity with transparency and warmth. Roof terraces form a “fifth elevation,” finished with vibrant ceramics and planted with native vegetation, contributing to the building’s identity and microclimate. The program is carefully zoned: exhibition spaces occupy the quieter southern edge, while public, commercial, and office functions activate the north and west sides. The main plaza is positioned to enhance urban engagement and frame a gradual spatial experience. Sustainability is embedded in the architecture through passive shading, thermal mass, rainwater collection, and local sourcing. Structurally, the project combines a concrete base and cores, a flexible composite system for the galleries, and a timber atrium -creating a dialogue between permanence and lightness, tradition and innovation.