Project material
- Category
- Commercial & Institutional
- Typology
- Commercial & Institutional · Colombia
- Year
- 2007 - 2008
- Area
- 4.600 m²
- Location
- Bogotá
- City
- Bogotá, Cundinamarca
- Status
- Portfolio
A circulation core that turns toward the park and frames the Bogotá hills
Akori is an office building in the Chicó neighbourhood of Bogotá, on a 650 m² infill lot next to a corner park. The street still has tall trees, clay-tiled roofs and low houses that the city gradually replaced with offices; late in the afternoon the low light of the savanna comes in at an angle and travels across the whole façade.
The project is organised around a single move: the circulation core breaks the main volume and turns toward the corner park, so that the passageways stop being an interior corridor and become a lookout toward the hills. Two stone walls leaning outward frame that rotation and give the crossings between volumes the character of bridges.
The glazing runs floor to ceiling and is composed of squares that read as random. That pattern answers a double demand: the offices can be reorganised inside — subdivided, joined, given a new use — without changing the image of the building, in a commission with a very tight ratio between saleable and built area and a high parking requirement.
More about the project›
Akori is an office project in Colombia whose design frames, through an intersection of planes, the vertical core as an integrating, meeting space, exposing it toward the building's main facade.
The windows were modulated so that manually operable glazed sections could be placed throughout; the strategy responds to the facade's modulation criteria and makes it possible to regulate indoor temperature and renew the air.
The project won first place in a private design competition and was built between 2007 and 2008.
The rotation that opens up an infill lot.
A lot squeezed between neighbours, with demanding commercial numbers, usually ends up as a compact box with a core in the middle. Akori's first sketch tests the opposite: it pulls the circulation core away from the office block and rotates it toward the free corner, the only façade with a landscape. That shift set everything else — the stone walls that hold the rotation, the circulation bridges left in plain view, and a skin of glass and framing that could be modulated independently from the interior partitions. What was built keeps the gesture of the drawing.
