Project material
- Category
- Multifamily Housing
- Typology
- Multifamily Housing · Colombia
- Year
- 2025
- Location
- Colombia
- City
- Cartagena, Bolívar
- Status
- Portfolio
White curves opening onto the green of Serena del Mar, Cartagena
Castelo is the Serenísima 4 block of Serena del Mar, in Cartagena. The humid Caribbean heat shapes every decision here: the project rises on open ground, with the low coastal scrub and palms closing the horizon and a boulevard running along its front. It shares the area with Trevi and Strada, two neighbouring projects from the same portfolio.
The block is organised around two families of buildings that can be told apart at a glance: oval-plan towers and elongated bar buildings, all with a basement level. Between them a courtyard concentrates communal life — open-air amenities on the ground floor, a pool, footpaths, courts — held, though never fully closed off, by the curved façades.
White surfaces and shadow do the rest. Continuous balconies wrap the oval towers floor by floor, casting an unbroken band of shade over the glazing; the railings, resolved as glass panels, let the view and the light through without adding weight to the façade. Planters on the roofs carry the green of the surroundings up to the last slab.
From the oval to the block
The starting line was the oval plan: a geometry that breaks the continuous street front, lets air pass between buildings and gives every apartment a façade of its own. Bringing it to site meant patient adjustment, recorded in the studio's planimetry update: accessible parking bays, access to the vertical cores and service rooms, storage units, footpaths and amenities, the shift from balusters to glass panels, and the handling of the embankment towards the boulevard. With stage 2 already approved under permit, the oval stopped being a drawing and became a city block.
