Bambuco Square.

Ibagué, Tolima, Colombia — 2024 — Published in ArquiFolio 4.0

The design studio on high-rise construction set an unusual starting condition: before proposing a building, each student had to define four specific challenges the project would have to solve. That constraint became the generative logic of Bambuco Square. The first challenge was urban integration. The site on Avenida Pedro Tafur sits at the edge between two very different urban conditions — the Villa Café residential neighbourhood and the Ibagué Sports Park — with no architectural element connecting them. The project proposes a central pedestrian walkway as a community spine, threading through the complex and stitching both sides of the city together. The second challenge was cultural identity. Rather than applying Tolimense references as surface ornament, the tower volumes are shaped by the folded geometry of the traditional skirt worn in the region’s folkloric dance — a form that is at once local and structurally expressive, generating organic façades that respond to solar orientation. The third challenge was programmatic logic tied to context. The ground-level commercial units activate the pedestrian walkway, capitalising on its high footfall. Residential towers face the Villa Café neighbourhood, responding to its domestic scale. A hotel tower faces the Sports Park — a deliberate decision grounded in the park’s continuous flow of athletes and visitors attending national and international events. The fourth challenge was flexibility. The hotel tower adopts a core structural system that divides the floor plate into three zones: a fixed service core, a social zone, and a fully flexible zone that can be reconfigured to host different events, accommodating the unpredictable demands of a building tied to a major sports venue.