Project material
- Category
- Urban Design
- Typology
- Planning
- Year
- 2019
- Area
- 1.450 m²
- Program
- Public space and landscape design
- Location
- Bogotá
- City
- Bogotá, Cundinamarca
- Status
- Portfolio
Public space and landscape renewal
Parque Central is an existing residential complex in Bogotá: four towers of pale stone and dark glazing raised on columns, with the savanna's cool air and high light passing underneath. The commission was not the towers but what lies between them — the ground plane every resident crosses several times a day — which is why the project reads as a new floor slid beneath an architecture left untouched.
The strategy was organised as two layers that cross. One is the paving grid: pale stone in long, narrow pieces laid in continuous bands that read as a single mat. The other is the planted layer, which does not settle into separate beds but bites into the grid: the edges of the planting step forward and back within the paving, so that walking through the complex means moving among grasses, ground cover and low shrubs the whole way, with no hard border between floor and garden.
The site's changes in level are resolved with low stone walls topped by hedges, and the benches — timber planks on stone bases — grow out of those same walls instead of sitting on top as loose furniture. The mature trees already there were kept, and the lawn and brick path on the lower level were tied into the new route. In the photographs the complex is already in use with the planting grown in: the vegetation has covered the edges and the project has begun to look like part of the building.
More about the project›
Parque Central is a project that rethinks the material, stylistic and urban ties of a pre-existing common space.
The proposal brings together the architectural and landscape context by integrating and modernizing materials which, in this case, bind the existing architecture to the new landscape design.
Pedestrian and planted surfaces are also set at the same level, so that direct relationships arise between people and nature.
Two layers: grid and green.
The process is recorded in the file names themselves: in April 2019 the project was drawn as two overlaid plans, a base grid and a "green" layer, and that duality ended up being the whole idea. Before that came a three-dimensional model of the complex, in February and March, to understand what is seen from below the towers; afterwards, in May, came the sections and details, which is where a ground-plane project is really decided: thicknesses, edges, how the paving dies against the planted soil and how each step is negotiated. Day and night renders closed the decision phase before construction.
