DAVID BECERRA
ARCHITECT/DESIGNER
CASA
LUGARES
CONCURSO VIS
CCU
01 CCU
Bogotá, Colombia
Built Project
February 2019 - October 2021
Firm: Konrad Brunner arquitectos info@konradbrunner.com
Team:
Konrad Brunner
Cristián Undurraga
Daniel Guzmán
Alejandro Acosta
Daniel Meléndez
Camila Gutiérrez
ABOUT ROLE
Awarded to the office in a 2016 competition, the Centro Civico Universitario (CCU) is a new 32.000m2 building for Universidad de Los Andes, a complex multi-use project located at the edge of Bogotá’s historic centre.
During the first eight months, I worked in Phase I of the project, producing and supervising information for construction. In the following two years, I was the Project Architect of Phase II, designing the project from a basic scheme to a fully coordinated stage, working together with the many disciplines involved in this complex building. I developed a detailed BIM model from scratch, up to a coordinated technically detailed stage.
THE COMPETITION
The project won the competition due to its strategic implantation at the intersection between the historic centre and the modern city. As a homage to the rational colonial tissue, the structure is arranged in an 8x8m grid, providing a flexible module that accommodates the complex program requirements.
The building has the responsibility of articulating many existing buildings, and to create public spaces and services, open to the city.
The project was developed in two constructive phases, both in which I was involved. These projects required designing for different scales, users and constructive stages.
PHASE ONE
Area:
10.302 m2
Current status:
Built
Programme
Exhibition hall
Institutional bookstore
Classrooms
Study lounges
PHASE TWO
21.770 m2
Technical coordination and Detail elaboration
Library
Flexible auditorium
Law faculty
Data Centre
Restaurant Classrooms
PHASE ONE
When I joined the team, Phase One was undergoing the excavation stage. Despite this, the project was still having many changes due to incomplete coordination, additional requirements from the client, budget adjustments and final coordination with various contractors.
Throughout this process, I incorporated design changes alongside the construction progress, requiring high precision, coordination, and efficiency to to avoid any delays or design defects in the construction process.
Most of the project’s details were completely redone from the original versions. I was in charge of updating most of the stairs, the windows and part of the wooden carpentry, as well as defining the concrete casting moulding layout.
FEBRUARY 2019
PHASE TWO
I took charge of Phase Two from a basic scheme, and developed it to a fully coordinated stage. This project posed significant challenges due to its complex program, which required integrating multiple uses with often conflicting demands. As a result, numerous changes were made to the original project, where precise coordination between the project members was essential. (see floor 1 transformations on the left.)
As the Project Architect, my responsibilities included developing a BIM model from scratch, designing spaces, producing technical coordination with other disciplines, and leading a team of up to four architects.
NOVEMBER 2020
COORDINATION
Being in charge of a project implies having a deep understanding of its components to determine how can it be adapted to meet the demanding technical requirements of the building’s subprojects. As an architect, my responsibility was to have a general picture and strive for spatial and distribution coherence. I applied this principle from rearranging an entire floor to the support of a stair’s handrail. This was particularly challenging given the project’s complex programme:
• Tier III classification
• 236.2 Kw critical load
• 42 racks
• 8 NOC operators
• 86 Open office seats
• 52 Private offices
• 2 Simulation courtrooms
• 12 Meeting rooms
LAW FACULTY DATA CENTRE LIBRARY
• 15.000 linear meters of bookshelves
• 2.200 seats in classic reading rooms and learning commons
• 50 study rooms
• Virtual reality and video-game room
• 4 Audiovisual rooms and small cinema
• Open office for staff
FLEXIBLE AUDITORIUM CLASSROOMS
• 600 people in frontal configuration
• 700 people in arena configuration
• Up to 1.000 people in grand salon
• 12 x 12m scenario
• 8m high Fly tower
• 19 classrooms
• Capacity for 776 students
02
ST. GEORGE’S WELLBEING AND HEALTHCARE HUB
London, UK
Project under construction
October 2022 - February 2023
Firm: Bryden Wood Architects
info@brydenwood.com
Team:
Laura Caponi
Ewelina Kuciel
Vasiliki Gkevrou
ABOUT ROLE
A state of art Healthcare Hub in Suttons Lane, Hornchurch, built to provide primary care, mental health and prevention services, along with some early diagnostic services for cancer for communities in East London.
I joined the project at RIBA Stage Four - Technical Design. As a Part II Architect, I was in charge of elaborating details for multiple building components through multidisciplinary collaboration, while ensuring compliance to rigorous medical standards.
My tasks included working closely with the client to convey their requirements into the design, coordinating with technical disciplines to create efficient, functional spaces, and communicating with manufacturers to incorporate their knowledge into the building’s components.
Fig. 4INTERNAL STRATEGY
At this project stage, the project’s layout was reviewed to comply with technical, safety and manufacturing requirements.
I was in charge of developing the design packages for Fire, Access and Maintenance, Doors, Partitions and Sanitaryware. This task involved liaising with relevant stakeholders to obtain technical feedback and coordinate them into the project’s design.
This process required adjusting some features in the layout without compromising the design intent.
EXTERNAL STRATEGY
The building’s envelope had a prominent prefabricated component which required precise coordination to ensure optimal performance in terms of water-tightness, fire compartmentalisation, acoustic and visual comfort.
I developed some of the facade details, collaborating with manufacturers and technicians within the firm. Throughout this process, it was critical to maintain a balance between functionality and aesthetics in how the different systems, materials and planes came together to consolidate the building’s envelope. Understanding construction sequencing was fundamental to designing the components’ interfaces.
MEDICAL REQUIREMENTS
As a healthcare hub, medical equipment coordination and compliance with healthcare standards were essential drivers for design. Opportunities for standardisation were embraced to develop repetitive room types across the project.
My responsibilities inclueded developing some Room Data Sheets and specialised sanitaryware details in conformance with the Health Building Notes. I developed specifications for some of these components, ensuring they were fit for purpose. I also oversaw some coordination processes to ensure specialised MEP were systems seamlessly integrated into the architectural design.
LUGARES DE PASO
03 PLACES OF PASSAGE
Bogotá, Colombia
BArch final project
July - December 2017
Thesis director: Lorenzo Castro
castroarquitectos@gmail.com
BRIEF
The topic given for this project was the collision between infrastructures, with a particular focus on the recently approved elevated metro for the city of Bogotá. The task was to develop a personal approach to the topic, ultimately resulting in an architectural project.
CONTEXT
Bogotá has a population of 7,4 million people and a saturated transport system. Past administrations have tried to build a metro system to help solve this problem but had failed, while the city kept growing without planning for its materialization.
Implementing an infrastructure of this kind necessarily implies a collision with the existing urban tissue, social dynamics, and mobility flows. The purpose of this project was to understand the nature of these collisions, and how could they be turned into a positive income for the city.
UNDERSTANDING COLLISION: RE BRIEFING THE TOPIC
Collision was reviewed as a concept through creative writing and photography, drawing inspiration from renowned artists.
Collisions happen in multiple scales and temporalities. They are unavoidable in a world in constant change, where people, infrastructure, and nature clash and collide in our urban contexts.
The implementation of a megaproject such as the metro system comes with significant amounts of these collisions, as it affects many aspects of the city’s life beyond transportation. This is especially true in a city like Bogotá, with almost 500 years of urban growth and transformations without planning for this system. Suddenly, a vast apparatus must be fit in between existing streets, buildings, and people’s lives, which, in time, will create its own version of the city.
Two kinds of collisions were identified, acting on different scales and temporalities. A first one will be the impact on the existing city’s network, and a second one will be the impact on the people’s habits and interactions.
INFRASTRUCTURE CITY
The first kind of impact will be a violent one. Demolitions opening space. Construction sites across the city. Like a shockwave, the areas surrounding the stations will be modified, adapting to a new urban scale that will put them at a few minutes distance from remote districts of the city. Transportation and economic fluxes will be suddenly changed.
When these collisions occur, bodies and masses will be displaced, destroyed, truncated. This impact will then expand into the urban tissue.
INFRASTRUCTURE PEOPLE
The second kind of impact will put strange bodies to coexist. Functionality and spontaneity. Infrastructure and people. The need to solve fast transportation will provide new spaces designed for movement, but the city will also require new spaces for permanence, where singularities happen and the city is appropriated. A city unified by distance still needs diversity and changes of rhythm and uses to stay lively, safe, and improve the lives of its inhabitants.
CAI GUO QIANG
FAN HO THE AUTHOR
INNOPORTUNE (2004)
SUN RAYS (1959) COLLISION (2017)
INFRASTRUCTURE VS. CITY: NON-PLACES
Bogotá’s infrastructure has changed considerably throughout its history, trying to keep up with the city’s growth, changing technology and people’s needs, and as a reflection of the political and economic fluxes of its time.
In a fast-growing city with large amounts of informal development, a prominent role of infrastructure has been that of reaching already organized communities as best as possible or finding a way to expand where its capacity became surpassed. As a result, infrastructure surges as a problem solver and not as an integral part of the city.
This functionalistic approach to urbanism creates spaces with few, or one function, becoming what anthropologist Marc Augé defines as non-places:
As opposed to places, non-places are transitory; their importance lies in their connection to a network, not in themselves. Places create identity, non-places do not. Urban non-places discourage the use of public space, become unsafe and, by definition, undermine the city’s identity.
However, there is not an inherent dichotomy between infrastructure and non-places. How can the metro system generate places?
LONGITUDINAL NON PLACE: STREET PROFILE
The most immediate and recurrent impact between the metro system and the city will be the street profiles where it will be inserted. In areas with already limited capacity, the new infrastructure might worsen urban conditions, creating a longitudinal non-place. Thus, a question arose: ¿How to create places along the street profile with the insertion of the metro system?
SAME SYSTEM, DIFFERENT CITIES
Bogotá changes remarkably along the metro line. Placemaking must stimulate a dialogue between the uniformity of the system with the needs and particularities of its surroundings. By embracing and adapting to the city’s particularities, the positive impact can be stretched far out into the urban tissue.
Current street profile with proposed metro line inserted. Avenida Caracas and calle 50.
PROJECT STRATEGIES: CONNECTING INFRASTRUCTURE AND CITY
1. RE-ACTIVATION
To track and modify spaces were physical infrastructure can be activated to provide lively interactions in the city, as opposed to residual non places.
2. COUPLING
To couple infrastructure with the city’s specificities. Although much of the system’s efficiency relays on standardization and repetition, a project of this scale is a great opportunity to enhance existing conditions and provide new public spaces.
3. BRIDGE
To create a transition between distant points in the city, by designing a place in the insertion point, a particular in a network of universals.
FIRST APPROACH: PROFILE MAKING
By focusing on the urban profile, this approach was based on developing a strategy of front pieces facing the metro to open up space, studying minimums were urban life and transportation can coexist and nurture each other.
The final goal would have been to develop new typologies as a guideline for the city’s upcoming renovation. However, this approach was replaced by a specific intervention to study how can the existing urban tissue increase the positive impact of infrastructure.
SECOND APPROACH: EXTENSIVE IMPACT
The focus of this strategy was on individual connections with the city were a series of interventions can be stretched out far into the urban tissue, supported on other infrastructures, urban equipments, natural features, land uses, and other particularities.
It is because of these particularities that cities become exciting and dynamic. What if the metro could embrace and potentiate them? The metro’s construction will bring many changes on its own, creating the perfect opportunity for strategic interventions between the shifting landscape, not only modifying the way we move, but also the way we live and perceive the city.
CARRERA 7
CARRERA 7
CREATING PLACE: AN URBAN CAMPUS
The selected sector of intervention was Chapinero. It is diverse and a prominent commercial and university hub. As such, it is lively and a constantly moving part of the city, a day home to a vast floating population.
Transmilenio (BRT)
Hybrid buses
CARRERA 13
Bicycle lane
CALLE 45
Public buses
AVENIDA CARACAS
Metro
CARRERA 13
AVENIDA CARACAS
Transmilenio (BRT)
Specifically, the project is located in front of the metro station Calle 45, where three main avenues run parallel to each other, carrying most of the city’s public transportation systems, merging in this particular point, turning it into an exchanger.
A previous street widening required the demolition of the buildings facing the street on these blocks, leaving blind walls behind, as a reminder of an infrastructure detached from places, creating non-places.
The combination of becoming an urban scale given by its transportation hyperconnectivity added to its current status of non-place is seen as an opportunity to create a public building for culture and education, complementing the existing university area, an “urban campus” with a public library, auditorium, gallery, open workshops and working spaces.
As one of the possible city’s responses to the new infrastructure, this project intends to reconcile the act of moving with the act of permanence, creating human-oriented places.
MELENDEZ HOUSE
Guasca, Colombia
Built project
January - June 2018
Collaboration with: Daniel Meléndez
danielmelendezj@hotmail.com
CASA MELÉNDEZ 04 BRIEF
Daniel is a fellow architect and a friend. His parents wanted to build a country house in Guasca near Bogotá, with room for their three children, a studio, and a social area. The final design had 240 square meters.
Daniel had developed a basic scheme for the house and handed me over the design process, where I developed the design intent to a coordinated project. This involved redistributing spaces, modulating them with traditional constructive materials to reduce waste, and developing the house’s enclosure.
Through this process, I developed a complete set of general plans, had constant client feedback, and adjusted the design to meet budget, functional and aesthetic requirements. I developed the process until we submitted the documents for approval to the Local Authority’s planning department.
DESIGN PROCESS
The design process involved developing the volume, the structural scheme, and the facades, an integral element of the project, where we considered how natural light would behave throughout the house, how would the enclosures work, and what would the relation with the outside be, connecting the house with the environment.
ROLE
SOCIAL HOUSING COMPETITION
Bogotá, Colombia
Architecture competition
November 2018
Firm:
DDA Arquitectos
info@daviddelgadoarquitectos.com
Teamates:
David Delgado (Director)
Fabian Tocancipa
Laura Marroquín
Xilena Vega
Tatiana Valenzuela
CONCURSO VIS 05 BRIEF
Three major organizations joined efforts to rethink the way social housing is made in Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes, through its housing research observatory, Compensar, a family welfare fund that facilitates house acquisition to its affiliates, and Ingeurbe, a large constructor specialised in housing projects. They joined their complementary knowledges on today’s social housing deficiencies to organize an architectural competition, seeking to create a new typology with more humane, sustainable and accessible architecture.
Along with David and Fabian, we set to understand the project requirements and translate them into architecture. The rest of the team joined on the final stretch for image production. I was particularly focused on processing valuable information from the competition brief to determine how the project would satisfy the key points, generating diagrams in the process. I developed the individual units and their aggregation from a basic scheme, thus determining the buildings’ volume.
CHALLENGE
Social housing in Colombia (VIS) is defined as that which its cost does not exceed 135 minimum legal wages. In most cases, this results in soulless, repetitive blocks on the city’s periphery with difficult access to public transport and the city’s services, little or no spaces for communal activities and recreation.
This competition’s challenge was to undertake the same economic and spatial limitations with a different output, offering better life conditions. In this particular case, the project will be located on a primarily industrial area in between two of the city’s main water bodies, currently contaminated. Part of the city’s development plan is to decontaminate these water bodies and turn this industrial area into a residential one, profiting from its central location and easy accessibility.
This project is meant to be a pilot for further developments. It should contain 985 housing units, 485 of them VIS, and 490 non VIS on independent buildings, of which only the VIS units are included in the competition’s scope. It should also have a complimentary services building for the community. The required parking spaces is 421 for automobiles and 245 motorcycles. These requirements had to be met while complying with the city’s building regulations and regarding construction efficiency to maintain the costs as low as possible.
PROJECT STRATEGIES
1. VOLUME
The two main buildings were proposed as opposed “L”s creating a central patio. The complimentary services building is located at the corner between the water bodies to activate the new waterfront.
2. TEMPORALITY
The central patio has a public character during the day, allowing the city to pass through, opening a smaller, human scale in a future high-density neighbourhood. At night, the project closes to a communal, intimate scale.
3. CONNECTIVITY
The replication of the proposed typology will generate a highly permeable city model, weaved across the water bodies, giving them the importance that has been denied for decades, by creating active fronts and places for meeting and recreating along the shores.
4. SYNERGIES
The extensive experience of Compensar of Ingeurbe has given them metrics of their potential users for new projects. They have profiles on their age range, occupations, habits and needs. Creating spaces where users can meet, offer and consume services or products that others need will create stronger, closer communities.
BASIC SCHEME MOVE/MEET
The housing units 1 are the structure. Circulations between them become bridges, allowing light and air through the building.
Every two floors, some units are removed to create common areas where the residents can meet, be it a yoga classroom, a nursery, a laundry room or working spaces.
PUBLIC/COMMUNAL
The central plaza opens during the day, creating a porous model of city while maintaining a high density. At night, the project recedes to a smaller, communal scale.
Flexible communal spaces 2 can be found every three floors, offering a wide range of activities and exchange opportunities.
The green roof offers opens spaces that can be turned into an urban farm managed by its residents.
PARKING TOPOGRAPHY
In Bogotá’s unstable soils, excavations raise construction costs significantly, which is why most social housing projects have the parking space on the first floor. This paradigm is pushed in this project by locating them on a semi-basement, creating a platform for communal use on top. A surrounding green belt with infiltrating soils allow rainwater back into the ground while distancing cars from people.
Circulation core
Common areas
Circulations
1 UNITS
The units’ perimeter is defined by load-bearing concrete walls, which save space and construction time, as the structure solves most of the interior partitions. Non structural walls leave room for adaptation, adjusting to the resident’s requirements.
Public / comunal
Public circulation Private
2 COMUNAL SPACES
Semi basement (VIS)
Basement (non VIS)
The need for reduced areas inside the units its compensated by offering numerous communal spaces where life can be taken outside, shared with the community. These spaces can be the scenario of learning, recreational, productive and social spaces, allowing exchange of experiences and talents, while keeping a human scale in a large project.
1.
2.
Wooden Table
1. Wood selection and pre-cutting
2. Board assembly
3. Wood-turning of table’s legs
4. Hole chiselling
5. Leg insertion and levelling
6. Channel milling
Ceramic planter
7. Mold elaboration
8. Unmolding and smoothing on turntable
9. First baking
10. Enameling and second bake
Metalic bowl
11. Steel pressed with generic mold finished with electrostatic paint.
Wooden table
Metalic bowl
Ceramic planter
Plant
