Project material
- Category
- Affordable Housing
- Typology
- Social Housing
- Year
- 2026
- Area
- 135.244 m² (área neta urbanizable)
- Program
- 396 apartments
- Location
- Tunja, Boyacá
- City
- Tunja, Boyacá
- Status
- Portfolio
Modular social-housing towers, seven minutes from the center of Tunja
Tunja, on the cold high plateau of Boyacá, is one of Colombia's highest capital cities, and this compound rises about seven minutes from its center. Facing the street, the towers do not begin with housing: regulations required freeing the ground floor, and the project turns it into an urban plinth of gatehouse, amenities and shops that bring the sidewalk to life.
Above that plinth, three towers with eleven residential floors repeat a clear module: twelve apartments per floor, three hundred and ninety-six in total, resolved in just two unit types of around sixty square meters — mid-block and corner — with living-dining room, kitchen with laundry, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The third bedroom allows an independent entrance, a flexibility designed so that social housing can also hold a small business or a rental.
Shared life is completed inside the gated compound: social and sports areas, plus a set of amenities designed by the studio — games room, gym, sauna and steam room on the ground floor — that bring to a social-housing program services rarely found in its segment.
More about the project›
Bosques de Ponderosa is a multifamily social housing project developed for the CER construction company in Tunja, Boyacá. It comprises three towers of 12 apartments per floor and 11 residential stories, for a total of 396 units. The design ambition was to deliver the best social housing project in the region, with the largest apartments in this market and the best common areas.
To comply with local regulations, the ground floor holds only the gatehouse and the project's amenities, plus retail units that activate the pedestrian scale and bring life to the street. The project is also laid out to take advantage of the views and to meet the client's brief for housing units and common areas, establishing a clear articulation with the place and creating spaces for community life and social interaction.
From the 2nd to the 12th floor of each tower, every apartment offers the same program: living-dining room, kitchen with laundry, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The third bedroom can also be given its own entrance, independent from the home's main access.
Repetition as a tool.
The project was built on an early decision: a single, carefully drawn typical floor, repeated upward across three towers. That module was modeled in Revit — tower, amenities and site plan — and defended before Tunja's Municipal Planning Office, answering review reports between 2021 and its staged license in 2022, while the commercial plinth and the café corner, present since the first sketches, anchored the towers to the street.
