Diseño de Anteproyecto Arquitectónico de un Centro de Procesamiento de Fruta, Santa Cruz, Galápagos, Ecuador

Abstract

The Bellavista Parish, located in the agricultural zone of Santa Cruz Island, Galápagos, Ecuador, concentrates most of the canton's productive activity. Despite having 357 active Agricultural Production Units with an average of 23.70 years of continuous operation, local production covers only 44.8% of the island's food demand, while the territory receives 290,404 tourist arrivals annually. The Santa Cruz County Development and Land Use Plan 2021-2032 confirm a lack of strategies to add value to agriculture and infrastructure. The proposed solution advocates designing a Fruit Processing Center in the Guayabillos area of Bellavista Parish, applying agro-industrial architectural principles and sanitary criteria consistent with the special regime of the Galapagos Islands. The research adopts a mixed qualitative-quantitative method with a projectbased approach, based on Groat and Wang (2013), structured in four phases: identification of the territorial need within the cantonal PDOT (Territorial Development Plan); analysis of the feasibility of responding to the need with a preliminary architectural design; expert validation using the Delphi method, with semistructured interviews processed in Atlas.ti; and triangulation of criteria to produce project guidelines. The main result is the preliminary design of the Center, organized into two independent circuits that share the same volume: the certifiable production circuit on the ground floor and the visit and administration circuit on the upper floor, structured according to the forward march principle of Casp Vanaclocha (2004) and the thought of dwelling by Heidegger (2015).