Life after fences: Negotiating low-income gated communities in Bogotá

Low-income gated communities have become increasingly popular in Bogotá, despite the contradiction that lies at their core: that life in a self-sufficient and closed type of housing is an unsustainable endeavour for a population that cannot pay for a privatised life. To navigate through this paradox, residents constantly negotiate those...

Reinventing the (green) strips: An investigation on urban in-betweenness

The green strips can be found in many roads/streets in Bogota as an urban infrastructure for dividing vehicles and traffic. However, on top of this regulating function, it can be observed that the citizens of Bogota have the tendency to spontaneously appropriate the green strips in ways that’s convenient for them.

Informal Network: A urban strategy for embracing difference and otherness in Bogota

Informal actors possess a practical knowledge of the city, a sort of ‘secret know-how’, of how to move and operate in an environment that is unwelcoming to them. How could this knowledge be used as a tool or input of urban design? By considering the knowledge and ways of operating of the informal actors in a city, the following research has...

The Curtains: On the Private-Public Street Boundary

Probing into the parameters of a ‘wall’, this project seeks to empower the boundary wall in reactivating street life along the private-public street boundary, where front-yards were originally planned but now missing. In Teusaquillo of Bogota, people have regretfully took ‘walls’ as mere devices to define territories. Yet, there are latent...

Dramatising Rio Arzobispo

During the study visit to Bogotá, I discovered Rogelio Salmona’s architecture – as fascinating once I got to know it, as it had been obscure before the trip. There were many buildings of his that shared an intriguing quality of slowly revealing itself in space rather that disclosing everything they had to offer at once, but one in particular...

Urban Amplifiers

This graduation project explores the act of listening to “noise”, to develop a new critical attitude to understanding sounds of the contemporary city. The essential aim is to create ears which separate, abstract and re-organize the myriad of sounds of the environment, which often ends up in a cacophony. The sounds of the surroundings are...

Thickening the threshold: Public spaces for encounter in the entry squares of Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

In September 2018 I have traveled to Bogota - the capital of Colombia with a group of Methods & Analysis students and teachers. During the trip to Bogota I have repeatedly visited the campus of Universidad Nacional de Colombia – a national higher education institution. What stayed with me the most after these visits were...

Levels of Publicness: The Mambo art museum and its city

In Bogotá, the capitol of Colombia, the museum of modern art Mambo needs an extension. This graduation project is a proposal for that extension, which has a focus on the relationship and interaction between the building and the public domain. The result is a building complex that has many different levels of publicness, an open building that is...

LITERARY BOGOTA: The Literary Description of Spaces Negotiating With a Past

Freedom and Control in a Contested City

The graduation project addresses two parallel themes - the observation of everyday life in an unfamiliar context, and an investigation into the relationship between the architectural interior and the city. The design project uses observational drawings to reflect on this relationship, and modifies it using a system of simple, repeatable parts in...

The Urban Retreat: Constructing a place of seclusion in Bogota, Colombia

Within the densely populated metropolis of Bogota, there are few places one can go to escape the chaos of the city. Spaces and places that provide seclusion from the rigorous, repetitive and stressful urban life are fundamental in the composition of a flourishing city.<br/><br/>This project tries to answer this need for seclusion within the city...

2.5D Playgrounds for Bogota: Stimulate Playful Actions in Public Spaces by Redesigning Ground Surfaces into 2.5D Architectural Compositions

How to construct the commons with the power of play? How to reactivate leftover public spaces in central Bogota by architectural interventions that stimulate playful actions? <br/><br/>I shift my focus from buildings to the ground surfaces, and redesign them into a constellation of “2.5D architectural composition”. “2.5D” refers to an abstract...

Generating a common framework between polarities: Bogota

Both the research and project proposal deals with the presence of urban polarities and possibilities of generating commons between them. The main goal of the project is to find connecting points between contradicting areas of the city without dismantling differences or diversity. By integrating different kind of activities into alternative type...

Restoring the Multitude: A Polycentric and Connected Bogota

The platform tower building, a tool for creating new centralities and public space across the sprawling city of Bogota, with an emphasis on the plinth as a point of convergence for the urban multitude.

Access to the city for everyone: Spatial and planning strategies to counteract residential segregation in Bogotá

The study and comprehension of cities development processes becomes nowadays more relevant not only for academics but also for planners involved in practice, policy makers and other groups concerned with urban space shaping. On one hand, it is already known by the ‘state of world population report’ of United Nations, that about one in two...