Del límite al espesor habitado. Estrategias compositivas para la articulación ciudad vivienda en altura

Abstract

In recent decades, housing production in Villavicencio has been dominated by gated complexes and multifamily towers shaped chiefly by real-estate market logics and security-driven enclosure. This model privileges the building as an autonomous object and weakens its relationship with the street—through opaque edges, poorly legible entrances, and ground floors that function as barriers rather than interfaces—producing a persistent disconnection between everyday public life and high-rise dwelling. In response, academic literature and project-based evidence propose compositional strategies and design operations to repair the building–city link: activating ground floors, grading thresholds, structuring pedestrian routes, and promoting active frontages to sustain continuity and mixed use. Converging across these approaches is the need to give the architectural boundary “thickness,” understood as an intermediate domain mediating between public and domestic spheres. Within this framework, the thesis critically evaluates and adapts that corpus to the tropical conditions of Villavicencio, translating it into criteria for high-rise housing design and confirming them through an architectural pre-project. The result is a coherent system articulating ground, volume, and program—extending from the platform to towers and unit layouts—toward a single aim: building boundary thickness to improve city–housing articulation. More than a singular form, the research advances a replicable design protocol for warm-climate cities experiencing residential expansion, recognizing the urban ecosystem—wind, water, vegetation, and shade—as a formal and environmental structure guiding integration between architecture and its context.