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Architects: taller de arquitectura de bogotá
- Year: 2014
Text description provided by the architects. More than a building project is a construction operation of urbanism; and although it initially started as the development of an integrated care building for the University, it soon became a project of public space, urban design and integration with the La Candelaria neighboorhood. This was made possible by a joint operation of "public" space and three buildings (Integrated Care Center - CAI, entryway to the eastern sector and coffee area), where the main objective was to seep the public space in between buildings, weaving a new project.
The open public space was designed as an enhancement to the existent urban layout, but when characterizing it as a public space for meeting, and by taking advantage of the existent configuration of the buildings, we blurred the idea of a walled street, and instead designed a stepped plaza that meets the different access points, and the urban layout with a prominent sloped topography.
We thus designed ramps, staircases and flat sub-spaces that as a whole promote meeting and rest in formal and informal ways. This new space of cohesion is the product of a design that evokes the old space in front of the architecture library inside the university, but in this case, as it has no access controls, it becomes a public space even though it is private in its ownership.
As the predominant material we use bricks, creating a dominant monochrome, which is extremely versatile and allows us to design steps, steep planes and flat areas. So, the unbuilt project is consolidated with a landscape operation where the flow is always continuous through Yarumos that give shade and gardens that appear between the cobblestones and buildings. Similarly, it clarifies and enhances the opaque party wall of a neighbor, with a vertical garden, which consolidates the landscape of the whole.
Regarding the building, we use a basement material to harmonize the diversity of scales and typologies (Access vs CAI vs cafe). Weathering steel allows us to develop different types of buildings, which through the materiality retain a thread that allows them to be read as a whole. For the Center for Integrated Care, we propose a nearly cubic prismatic volume, with a perforated facade, creating a filled-void rhythmic and variable relationship through the alternation of concrete walls with an earth color (trying to mimic the earth walls) and the floor to ceiling windows.
Of course the buildings and the public space are proposed with sustainability and stability parameters of the time.
