Over the next five years, Bogota will inaugurate a series of public and private projects across the city, from skyscrapers to Felicidad Centers, highlighting those resulting from public architectural design competitions, legally managed by the Colombian Society of Architects.
Below, explore the main projects set to open:
Juan Amarillo Park / Ecopolis Estudio
Location: Engativá
Excerpt from the official project description: The current conditions of the area reveal a park disconnected from the wetland, characterized by safety concerns, poor night lighting, reduced weekday and nighttime activity, limited programming, weak connectivity to the transit system, and high pollution levels. Additionally, inhabited areas of the wetland are prone to flooding, and high unemployment rates have been identified, particularly among the youth. In response, the project envisions the rebirth of a productive farming territory in social, cultural, environmental, and economic terms. In fact, Tibabuyes meant "farming land" for the Muisca people.
The project proposes to redefine the city's edge by valuing the Sabana Wetland ecosystem as an environmental, cultural, and landscape heritage site for the city. It also aims to restore relations between the park and its immediate surroundings, the wetland, the citizens, and the existing neighborhood fabric. The park is developed around three zones that enhance its longitudinal character: the wetland shoreline zone; the connection and transition zone (between the park and the wetland); and the recreational, productive, and service zone.
Fontanar del Río Felicidad Center / Sebastián Monsalve + MAPAS Arquitectura y Territorio + Estudio Territorios
Location: Suba
Excerpt from the official project description: In the city of Bogota, there is a quantitative deficit in existing parks and facilities for sports and recreational activities. Consequently, urban projects have emerged as a public policy of the city's Government Plan, aimed at improving the quality of life of all residents and building social and cultural capital.
The project proposes distributing the program across two levels: one connected to the city, and the other to the park's activities. In this way, the sports venues become an extension of the park and its uses, positioning them to offer views of both distant and nearby landscapes. These two venues are built upon a topographical base that houses community, cultural, and technical services.
SuperCADE Manitas / Arquitectura en Estudio
Location: Ciudad Bolivar
Excerpt from the official project description: The construction of transportation infrastructure offers an opportunity to upgrade marginalized areas and integrate them into the urban fabric. The emergence of the SuperCADE Manitas as an auxiliary building to the TransmiCable station presents an opportunity to revitalize the built environment of a sector with significant deficits in public space and institutional presence, creating an urban connector that operates at multiple scales.
Las Cometas Felicidad Center / Arquitectura en Estudio + OPUS
Location: Suba
Excerpt from the official project description: Strategically located inside the park, the Las Cometas Felicidad Center primarily integrates three components: thanks to its location south of the Suba hill, it acts as a node within Bogota's main ecological structure; it serves as a strategic area for water utility infrastructure; and it functions as a metropolitan-scale park designed for recreation, sports, and culture.
Lombardía School / CONVEL
Location: Suba
Excerpt from the official project description: The block comprising the School and the Park becomes an important civic amenity, where both projects complement each other to educate students and citizens through a new pedagogy that teaches in open spaces and in harmony with nature. These are welcoming areas where social and civic individuals learn, enjoy, and share activities that contribute to personal and community growth.
El Tunal Felicidad Center / FP Arquitectura
Location: Tunjuelito
Excerpt from the official project description: The proposal is guided by three organizing principles that establish a large, flexible urban pavilion that is active and open to the landscape:
1. The building is a space that integrates park and city, serving as a major urban gateway to the park through entrance plazas that link the interior and exterior, traversing the new recreational, sports, and cultural program.
2. A perimeter circulation ring allows the project to establish reciprocal relationships with the park and the city in all directions.
3. Activities inside the building extend toward both the park and the city. The project's edge is conceived as an active transition zone—inhabited and urbanly connected; the park folds over and overlaps the building, allowing recreational and cultural activities to interact with it.
Argelia II School and Bicycle Center / David Delgado Architects
Location: Bosa
Excerpt from the official project description: The project forms a neighborhood center, a meeting point that functions as a school and bicycle study center during the day. In the evenings and on weekends, it generates active edges through the program's more public spaces, setting up a pedagogical perimeter by configuring sites for cultural expression, reading, leisure, sports, and contact with nature, complementing the locality's network of public spaces and facilities.
Pedagogy inside (day) and outside (nights and weekends): a meeting place with nature, citizenship, knowledge, and oneself. The pedagogical experience is, above all, an experience of self-directed learning guided by shared actions that seek to foster encounters with others, the natural and cultural environment, and knowledge.
Chapinero Felicidad Center / Alejandro Rogelis Arquitectura
Location: Chapinero
Excerpt from the official project description: The Chapinero Felicidad Center is located in an area with unique urban qualities. The value of the neighborhoods making up this sector of Bogota lies not only in their houses (almost all of which have disappeared) but rather in their urban elements, their public space system, their patterns of occupation, their parks, and their tree-lined avenues. The intense commercial and residential dynamics that characterize the area are made possible by the legibility of a public space system that links various private developments. However, these developments are typically characterized by exclusion and differentiation.
Within this context, the new Felicidad Center is designed as a public space. Conceived as architecture that borders on urbanism, the proposal is not so much a building as it is an urban project—or a map, if you will—where the building serves as an infrastructure organizing the coexistence of different elements. It is an organizational diagram that shares more affinity with a park than with building plans.
EAN Legacy Building / William McDonough + Partners
Location: Chapinero
Covering 85% of the facade, the WonderFrame modular system defines the building, with triangular panels representing sunlight filtered through trees, providing both shade and daylight. McDonough's structural frame was originally designed for the 2016 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, as the ICEhouse™ (Innovation for the Circular Economy). Rebuilt in 2017, it will be reassembled and reused as an official meeting space in 2018. The UEAN WonderFrame will be constructed entirely of commonly available materials and will become the largest structure to date using this building system.
Atrio Towers / Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners + El Equipo Mazzanti
Location: Teusaquillo
Excerpt from the official project description: The project is located in downtown Bogota, at the intersection of Caracas and El Dorado avenues. This is the point where the headquarters of many of the country's most prominent companies converge, an area traversed by over 75,000 people daily. The design of the towers includes a 30-meter-high atrium, creating the feeling of a generous, welcoming, and open entrance.
Universidad Javeriana Laboratories Building / Juan Pablo Ortiz Arquitectos + Taller Architects
Location: Chapinero
This article was written by Santiago Baraya. The translation is powered by AI.
