How a single building design can positively or negatively affect an urban neighborhood sector in Cali, Colombia?

KURABÚ de Juanambú is a project that takes place in Cali, Colombia. It started as a project at the office where I did my internship (TAG Estudio Arquitectónico) with the professional support of Vincenzo Tirelli and the work team, the first idea was to develop a residential building that would comply with the regulations of the place, economically, socially and environmentally viable project. That is why I selected this project as my thesis project, not because I have overseen it and I feel a great responsibility with myself, and with my work team, but also with the people who will inhabit the space because I am a faithful believer that a project, whatever it may be, can have a positive or negative impact on the sector. Cali, Valle del Cauca in general has given me a lot, and as a representation of the love and respect, I have for this wonderful country, even though I am now a master’s student at the Politécnico di Torino I wanted to develop a thesis in Colombia because I feel that everything I learned during my career and nowadays in my master’s degree must be the fundamental pillars to create, build and develop a better future in my native country. Valle del Cauca is one of the most important departments in the country and the one that has accompanied me personally for practically my entire life. From the hand of Professor Mario Artuso and Professor Silvia Gron, the idea is to further analyze the urban part and how to make a city from a project, that is why we started the thesis with a key question: ¿How a project can positively or negatively impact a sector? My interest turns to understand which are the points that make a project a beneficiary for the community and which are not, and why. The idea is to base me on references that I have been able to analyze and to understand what things they have had developed and in what way to be able to use it and implement the positive aspects in my project. The project is not only habitable inside but can create a city from the outside and from what it can provide to the neighborhood community. Then started from a larger scale, the city of Cali in general, finding the important points of it, the dispensable places, the busiest, we continued down the scale to a neighborhood scale such as “Barrio Juanambú”, to find the particularities of the sector. What we find, how it is developed, how are the accesses, the connections, the inhabitants, and even what are the competencies of neighborhood projects to see what we must do differently to be the ones who draw attention to having a differential building that can create a city and not just an interior experience At this point, when I feel like I have all the proposed scenarios to face a project that will begin to be built at the beginning of 2022 and that will not only remain on paper as a project of a university career, but rather a project that will create history, and that in my hands it is capable of meeting the expectations of everyone who is an inhabitant of the building itself, a citizen who passed by and is attracted to the quality of the building that it is, and the quality of life that implies in the sector, having carried out not only a building but also a master plan to give greater benefits to the sector by developing a sustainable project not only with the environment but also with the city, economically, and with the society. ¡Let’s begin!