Animated by the construction boom in Lima, a Portuguese enterprise proposed to invest in a high-end apartments project. Following a usual pattern in Lima, a house was bought and replaced by a luxury apartment building in front of the historical Bosque El Olivar(Olive tree forest). Quite unexpectedly, the client decided to organize an architectural competition, inviting Peruvian architects, instead of calling their own architects.
If the house was meant to be replaced, we considered we could keep a magnificent 70-year-old flame tree that marked its entrance, hidden behind a wall. Preserving the tree allowed not only to preserve the memory of the ancient urban texture with houses and gardens, but especially to improve the urban condition through an open square in continuity with the public space.
We suggested that the actual luxury of the building wouldn’t be found in new façades and precious details, but in the generosity of the building with the city, opening the corner to the street and showing the admirable tree (now recovering from a nasty fungus) which was until now hidden by the house walls. Luckily this convinced the jury.
The building proposed is divided in two volumes. The first one, next to a tall building, follows the compulsory alignments. The second one is receded to offer the flame tree and the square to the city. This space is the entrance to the building. Each volume’s floor holds anapartment with two different orientations, as if each of them was on a corner. The entrance and the elevator are between the two blocks, which allows to place an exterior panoramic elevator in the joint that’s formed by the blocks. The roof, provided with a pool and a panoramic view facing the Olivar park,works as a terrace and garden for the two duplex apartments on the last floor.
The great transparency of the apartments towards the park is filtered through a system of sliding wooden shutters, which create a kinetic effect due to the position that the owners put them in, according to the desired degree of intimacy. This changes also according to thedifferent spaces, including the terraces, and to the different time of the day. This effect evidently changes the light and the frames from which the park is visible in each apartment, as well as it changes the perception of the building from the olive park.
