The LAGI 2025 Fiji competition, organized by the Land Art Generator Initiative in collaboration with Marou Village, challenged designers to rethink renewable energy and water infrastructure for a coastal island community increasingly vulnerable to climate change. The competition called for a work of art in the landscape that could provide clean electricity and drinking water for Marou’s 67 households while supporting community life, ecological resilience, and a sustainable future, with two winning proposals selected to advance toward prototyping, funding, and implementation in the village.
Our proposal, Vanua Sun-Well, responds by asking how these essential infrastructures might become more than utilities, transforming water and energy infrastructure to become a new village commons. The proposal draws from the enduring role of the "well" or “watering hole” as both a source of life and a place of gathering, exchange, and social connection. Reimagined for Marou, the well becomes a contemporary communal infrastructure that simultaneously harvests solar energy, collects and purifies rainwater, provides shade, and supports spaces for gathering, learning, recreation, and food production. At its center is the Fijian concept of "vanua", understood as a physical structure that embodies the interconnected relationships between home, land, community, culture, and belonging. Architecturally, these functions are integrated into a repeatable kit-of-parts organized around two circular gathering spaces. Each modular unit combines a butterfly-shaped photovoltaic roof with an integrated rainwater cistern and a customizable inhabited base. The roof produces energy while directing rainfall toward water storage; below, benches, tables, shelving, swings, outdoor showers, and other community-selected elements transform the same infrastructural footprint into spaces for everyday collective use. Arranged radially, the units reinterpret the communal geometry and construction logic of the traditional Fijian bure, while crossing paths extend outward to connect the installation with existing homes, the village center, school, farm, mountain, and dam.
Instead of separating technical infrastructure from social space, Vanua Sun-Well makes their coexistence the basis of the design. A single self-sufficient unit can serve as an initial prototype, or additional units can accumulate over time to form larger communal arrays as energy, water, and social needs evolve. Through this incremental system, infrastructure becomes both productive and inhabitable: a framework through which the harvesting of shared resources can also generate gathering, participation, stewardship, and collective life.
The project deconstructs the traditional Fijian bure (home) into its primary architectural elements, including the yavu (foundation), lalaga (woven wall), doka (roof), and vakasobuduru (first post), and reinterprets each through contemporary material, environmental, and social functions. Rather than reproducing the bure formally, these elements become a flexible kit-of-parts that take on new performative contemporary functions: the doka harvests solar energy and rainwater, the lalaga integrates water storage and enclosure, the yavu supports adaptable communal uses, and the first constructed unit or module becomes the project’s contemporary vakasobuduru, initiating an incremental process of collective growth. As these individual units accumulate and gather into a larger communal array, they collectively reconstitute the idea of the bure as a new contemporary home and commons for the village, one defined not by a singular enclosure or individual vernacular elements, but by shared infrastructure, gathering, and collective life.
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The project's technical system is organized around a standardized, modular unit assembled largely from off-the-shelf components, allowing the project to be locally sourced, incrementally constructed, easily maintained, and adapted over time. Each unit combines commercially available photovoltaic panels, battery storage, a 4,000-liter food-grade HDPE rainwater cistern, standard plumbing and filtration components, and a simple structural frame that can incorporate locally available timber and construction techniques. The butterfly-shaped photovoltaic roof performs simultaneously as an energy generator and rainwater catchment surface, directing runoff through integrated gutters into the central cistern. Water can then be filtered through a passive solids filter and, where potable water is required, an optional PV-powered UV filtration system. The modular foundation and structural system are designed for straightforward assembly with minimal heavy equipment, allowing a single unit to operate independently or multiple units to be linked into larger energy, water, and social infrastructures.
The competition proposal comprises 19 units, each carrying 16 photovoltaic panels, for approximately 550 m² of solar collection surface and a total peak capacity of 112 kW. Solar simulations estimate annual production at approximately 183,000 kWh, with the low-sloped butterfly arrays performing within approximately 4 percent of an optimally oriented photovoltaic field. Each unit can operate with independent power generation and battery storage, or multiple units can be interconnected through a centralized system. Water collection is similarly distributed: each 4,000-liter cistern is projected to collect approximately 3,400 to 11,400 liters per month depending on seasonal precipitation, totaling roughly 80,000 liters annually per unit. Across the full installation, the system has the potential to harvest more than 1.5 million liters of rainwater each year, with overflow available for irrigation, productive landscapes, aquaponics, and other community uses. Together, these standardized components create an infrastructure that is both distributed and scalable: energy and water production can begin with a single prototype and expand incrementally as additional units are constructed, allowing technical capacity to grow alongside the evolving needs of Marou Village.
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