Palo de Agua

Pale brick, private courtyards and a block that grows in stages

Palo de Agua sits in Cota, Cundinamarca, on the Bogotá savannah: flat ground, high light and gardens that stay green all year. The project is not delivered at once but sector by sector — Macarena 1 through 4: the first stages of Macarena 1 are already built and the next one is under construction, so the development is lived in while it is still going up.

The houses are two storeys and follow two types, A and B, repeated across lots of between 296 and 510 square metres. Repetition does not produce a row: volumes shift and are cut back, the car shelter pulls away from the house as a pergola of dark profiles, and every home ends up with its own courtyard and its own frontage. Walking the block means moving from corner to corner rather than from door to door.

There is a single material: pale exposed brick, laid with projecting courses at the sills so that raking light draws out the texture of the wall. Windows recess into the thickness of the brick and earn their own shade; the same material forms the boundary walls and the planters along the sidewalk. Above, the flat roof becomes a planted terrace: the fifth façade is the one most lived on.