The project is located on a paradisiacal beach in the Panamanian Caribbean, about two hours from Panama City, and about half an hour west of Colón, on land currently well known for going to spend the day at the beach. It has a somewhat precarious infrastructure of services for tourism (restaurants) where you can taste typical dishes of the area at very affordable prices. For this reason, it is a place very frequented by popular classes of the environment.
We are commissioned to do a complete design of a complex that includes:
Two low landscape impact hotels
A tower (7 levels)
Foodcourt
Housing Area
Pool Area
Chillout
Beach bar
Marine
Cabana and Marina Warehouse.
Common Areas and
Parking lots
The first decision is to keep cars and parking lots as far away from the beach area, through two entrances. It is played with the change of level between the access road and the beach to generate underground circulation and parking.
It begins with a lattice Grid where the different programs previously described are organized according to their public or private use, proximity to the beach or the road, passage and communication areas, terraced areas, etc.
Later some of these programs are grouped, the circulation network is simplified and the different programs within the field are scaled.
You are also asked to take advantage of any of the existing buildings. After visiting the terrain and analyzing the current buildings, it is seen that it is practically not worth reusing almost anything since they are very precarious constructions with basic metal structures and zinc roofs without any interest, except for construction that has stone walls, which if we use it for one of the restaurant buildings.
For the organization of the MasterPlan, a packaging parameterization technique is used. Some square surfaces of the m2 of each program are placed and some are randomly rotated depending on the sun, existing vegetation, views, etc., always allowing both squares to overlap in one of the corners, providing the connection between them.
The approximate position of these programmatic surfaces is defined by the initial Public-Private grid and circulations. From there, the paved parts are selected and then the occupation of the program on the grid.
The formalization and volume of the architectural pieces are defined by criteria of tropical architecture: large covered spaces that protect from water and sun, but open to allow maximum ventilation.
The large roofs that are proposed are defined by a continuous web of gabled roofs (classic water protection scheme) but which is unevenly cut by the web of surfaces, which gives great variability to the classic concept. covering.
The structure of the roofs is defined by a gridded grid on which the sheet is placed, in which certain holes can be opened to allow the passage of light in the central parts.
As for ventilation, walls are proposed with lattices of concrete building blocks, placed in a way that allows the passage of light and air.
With these criteria, very clean and simple architecture with very fine lines is achieved, which allows responding to all the necessary design criteria