TRÊS PROJETOS, UM PROGRAMA. Habitação social em Bogotá: contexto, crítica e experimentação

Abstract

The present work is born from an academic experience in Colombia, where a social housing design exercise was developed. The location of its intervention area, the center of Bogotá, constitutes its most important characteristic, justified by a set of premises and issues raised in the design discipline. From an abrupt end of the semester and the consequent incompleteness of its final product, what was left was a set of doubts, curiosities and restlessness about the themes approached that justified the option for certain project ideas on which it was developed. From this situation arose the desire to understand in a more comprehensive way the issues addressed only very superficially in the course of the exercise, in order to, at a later stage, "finish" the project started in a more structured, reasoned and realistic way. This dissertation is thus based on the search for the understanding of these themes, focusing on the urban, social, cultural and housing realities of Bogotá, contextualizing them with the explanation and critical analysis of two existing projects: El Vacío, developed under the exchange program, and Plaza de La Hoja, the only social housing building ever built in downtown Bogotá, in order to justify the elaboration of a third, experimental one. All three are common in their program and location, constituting the central theme of this thesis: social housing in downtown Bogotá.