Project material
- Category
- Affordable Housing
- Typology
- Social Housing
- Year
- 2022 - 2025
- Area
- 23.170 m²
- Program
- 312 apartments
- Location
- Cali, Valle del Cauca
- City
- Cali, Valle del Cauca
- Status
- Portfolio
Social housing in the heart of the city
Céntrico sits in the Primitivo Crespo neighbourhood of Cali, on the flat, hot strip that runs between Calle 25 and the Autopista Sur. The site — 7,675 square metres — was once a paint factory and is still ringed by infrastructure: the EMCALI power station to the east, its Navarro operations centre to the south and, to the north on Carrera 18, the Primitivo station of the MIO bus network. This is not a landscape site: it is a piece of finished city, with mass transit on the corner.
The project is organised into five structural units and two phases. Two thirteen-storey residential towers, with twelve apartments per floor, stand towards the back of the site; in front, along the pavement, a low band unfolds with eight commercial units split between two buildings, the gatehouse with its basement, and the community building holding the social area and the pool. That low platform acts as the urban façade: it hands shops to the street and keeps the communal life at the heart of the block. Towards the EMCALI properties the complex steps back twelve and a half metres, and along Carrera 18 it leaves a five-metre front garden.
The materials take on the valley sun without drama: Santa Fe brick in a cappuccino tone across most of the façades, and Graniplast panels running in a gradient of warm colours, with a flat roof finished in white sheeting and polycarbonate skylights. There is a coincidence that is hard to ignore: the site was called Colors, and Colors was the project's working name throughout design.
From a paint factory to a residential block
The project was called Colors throughout the design years — that is the name in the design report, the drawings and the office folders — and only reached the market as Céntrico. That change of name sums up the work: turning an industrial site wedged between an electrical substation and a motorway into a piece of neighbourhood. The layout was decided by subtraction, pulling the housing away from the hard edges with generous setbacks and giving the urban frontage over to what actually wants to be on the street: the shops and the gatehouse. The design report went through client revisions in February 2022, and the complex was assembled chapter by chapter — report, specifications, drawing schedule — up to the sales kit it went to market with.
- 01 / 01
Aerial view of the complex at dusk: the two towers open at an angle around the communal platform — the pool and social area stay protected inside the block — while the plinth of shops lights the pavement and meets the avenue.
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