21st Floor Penthouse

摘要

I constructed a penthouse to replace the demolished bowling alley on the top 3 floors that formerly catered to a membership club for lawyers. This is a building from the 70s designed using the parameters of Le Corbusier, who was hired in the 1950s by the local government to make a master plan for Bogota. He proposed to demolish the entire historic center and build a grand high-density city with tall buildings made of concrete. Fortunately, we are a poor country and never had the money to follow his master plan. The building is an H on plan, with its center point as the circulation area connecting the 2 wings. On the ends of the H, I constructed 2 homes: one home for each client, a father and his adult son. The father's home has 250 m~2 with only 1 bedroom, while the house of the son has 200 m~2 with 2 bedrooms. The construction system employs a mixed technique, using 11.5 cm diameter metal pipes and bamboo Guadua of similar diameter to form large ellipses. I am not a fundamentalist, and I also like steel and concrete. To make precise geometric curves in bamboo is very difficult, but with the combinations of all these materials, I find myself very fortunate as I managed to make the structure lighter and stronger than the demolished original.