The project is located in a residential building from the 1970s, in the La Soledad neighborhood in Bogotá, within an urban fabric of high heritage value and with views toward the cloister of El Señor de los Milagros. Areas such as La Soledad and Park Way are characterized by the overlapping of times, styles, and urban memories, where different layers of Bogotá's history coexist in delicate balance. Building on this condition, the project seeks to reproduce that temporal mixture through an intervention that engages in dialogue with the existing traces and reinterprets them from a contemporary point of view.
The commission consisted of dividing a former 190 m² apartment into two 85 m² units intended for a group of friends who conceive of housing as a collective experience. Rather than a simple subdivision, the proposal puts forward a flexible system of multipurpose spaces capable of adapting to both individual use and shared gathering, reflecting new ways of living based on collaboration and adaptability.
The design strategy centers on establishing a constant dialogue between the pre-existing and the new, allowing the passage of time to remain visible and active within the spaces. Materials, textures, and spatial decisions emphasize the historical continuity of the building, avoiding a denial of the past and favoring an architecture that adds layers rather than erasing them.
The dwelling is also conceived through a cooperative logic, where two apartments function autonomously but can, by opening their main entrances, be integrated into a single unit. The kitchens — understood as the domestic and social heart of the home — become the connecting point between the two units, establishing themselves as places of encounter, exchange, and the building of shared habits. Inside the apartments, pivoting doors allow the spatial configuration to be transformed, turning bedrooms into secondary living rooms, studies, or libraries, reinforcing flexibility as an organizing principle.
"Cuatro Amigos" thus stands as an exercise in heritage reuse that explores the balance between preservation and transformation. The existing architecture becomes a material and narrative support for new ways of living, while the intervention takes a critical stance against the indiscriminate consumption of land and resources. In this way, the project proposes a continuity of ways of dwelling that recognizes the value of what has been inherited and projects it toward new contemporary dynamics.
