One site, several scales
Ábaco is a countryside condominium in Cajicá whose urban layout was designed around solar-orientation criteria; the urban plan and the 88 two-family homes form a single operation on the same site.
Ábaco occupies a long lot in the Canelón district of Cajicá, in the middle of the Bogotá savanna: flat ground, a cold dry climate, greenhouses and pasture all around. Its western edge is defined not by a street but by a creek and its wooded floodplain; that edge became the soft side of the development, where the layout loosens and turns into parkland.
The layout was not drawn from the geometry of the lot but from the course of the sun. The main road crosses the site diagonally along the solar path, rotated ten degrees to the south, and the secondary streets hang off it at right angles. Those streets are offset from one band to the next: visual continuity is broken on purpose, and each street ends in a planted closure rather than a long vanishing line of asphalt. The result is eighty-eight houses arranged on parallel bands that all take the sun on the same face.
Outdoor life is organised as a circuit rather than a set of separate zones: a continuous pedestrian and cycle route runs around the whole perimeter, linking activity stations one after another — community vegetable garden, camping area, dog park, football pitch, tennis court, open-air theatre, children's area — until it closes on itself. Alongside it, the layout carries its own environmental infrastructure: rainwater collection, greywater recycling to the sanitary fixtures, and a recycling point beside the entrance.
How the ensemble reads
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First the sun, then the streets.
Urban design sketch
The order of the decisions can still be read in the series of diagrams: first the lot and its creek, then the solar chart, and only then the first line of asphalt. Once the main diagonal was fixed, everything else followed from it — the perpendicular secondary streets, the offset that breaks continuity, the planted closures, the position and rotation of every house, the pedestrian circuit left over along the edges. The aerial night photograph shows that reasoning turned into a place: the lit bands follow the sun's diagonal, and the creek edge stays dark and green.
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The outline of the lot: a long rectangle whose only irregular edge is the creek to the west, which the project chooses to keep as a floodplain.
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The solar chart laid over the site. The main axis answers not to geographic north but to the path of the sun, rotated ten degrees to the south.
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Visual closure: every secondary street ends in a mass of trees, so the eye finds landscape rather than the end of the asphalt.
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The secondary streets hang perpendicular to the main road and drain movement toward the two long edges of the lot.
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Offsetting the streets breaks continuity from side to side: the straight corridor is avoided and each band gains privacy.
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Pedestrian and cycle routes are resolved as one continuous, uninterrupted circuit that embraces the development along its perimeter.
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The connection between spaces and functions: the circuit links garden, camping, dog park, courts, open-air theatre and children's area through stations.
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The siting of the houses: paired houses all turned toward the same solar face, with the football pitch and tennis court leaning on the park.
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Resource management: rainwater collection and greywater recycling to the sanitary fixtures, with the recycling point beside the entrance.
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Drone view
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View of the project
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The projects within the development
Ábaco Casas
Ábaco is a country condominium located in Cajicá, Cundinamarca, in an area of the city from which it is possible to contemplate and enjoy the conditions of the rural natural landscape.
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