PLAYA HIPPIE DESALINATION PARK

PLAYA HIPPIE, CHAÑARAL, ATACAMA, CHILE

The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth. Desalination is rapidly becoming the region's primary source of fresh water, but every plant built along Chile's coast is owned by a mine, walled off from the public, and designed with no consideration for the landscape it occupies.

At Playa Hippie, a remote coastal cape south of Chañaral, I proposed an alternative: a desalination plant designed as a public park.

The building organizes the six stages of the desalination process (intake, pretreatment, reverse osmosis, brine discharge, post-treatment, storage/distribution) as a sequence visitors can walk through, turning industrial infrastructure into civic space.

A solar park surrounds the plant and extends the site as a coastal boardwalk. The project argues that necessary infrastructure need not be intrusive or exclusionary, it can simultaneously serve the land, the water, and the community.