Uno62

Brick studio apartments to start out in, right in Britalia

Uno62 stands at Carrera 55C # 162-61, in the Britalia-Cantalejo neighbourhood of northern Bogotá, between Avenida Boyacá and the Autopista Norte. This is a settled part of the city: four- and five-storey housing blocks, brick everywhere, cables crossing the street and a tree-lined pavement the project sets out to keep active. The plot holds a little under two thousand square metres of usable area, and a corner the building decides to take seriously.

The project is conceived as social housing in studio apartments aimed at young residents, and that choice can be read in how the building is divided. The ground floor is mixed: a commercial strip facing the street, with shopfronts that keep the pavement active, and beside it the residential entrance with lobby, gatehouse, bicycle store and management office. The residential floors repeat a single unit type — including one adapted for people with reduced mobility — and the shared facilities are gathered on the top level, with communal areas comfortably above the minimum required by regulation.

The construction is direct and free of gestures: piles, a conventional frame of beams and columns, and coloured brick façades ordering the volume with floor-to-ceiling vertical windows repeated like a stave. As the afternoon fades, that grid lights up room by room and the building explains itself.