Bosque Nativo Apartamentos

The same brick and the same gable as the houses, stacked up

The Bosque Nativo apartments share site, climate and site works with the houses of the scheme, on the Bogotá savanna. From the street the entrance is announced by stone walls, a dark steel canopy to leave the car under cover and the name of the development cut into a low wall; behind it rises a brick building whose top floor repeats, as its crown, the same pitched roof as the houses. That is the device tying the two parts of the project together: anyone walking through the neighbourhood recognises a single family of roofs.

The section solves the most thankless problem in a housing scheme — the cars — by tucking them into a semi-basement. Above that plinth runs a terrace planted with grasses and shrubs, so the vehicle frontage sits at one level while the life of the building, a floor higher, faces the garden. On the other side there are no pavements pressed against the facade but lawn, hedges and branching paths. On the volume, the balconies are dark steel boxes hung off the brick plane, and the circulation core is marked by a perforated brick lattice that ventilates and lights it without opening windows.

Inside, the apartments are organised as a single space of kitchen, dining and living opening onto a floor-to-ceiling window that ends in a balcony, with treetops as the only backdrop; the cabinetwork is pale timber and the counter a continuous piece of white surface. The shared areas work the brick indoors: a double-height lobby of exposed walls, herringbone brick flooring and a planter hung from the mezzanine, and a long gym with mirrors along one side and windows to the garden on the other.