Project Name: Rehabilitation of Casa P. Colina

Location: Medellín, Colombia

Design Team: DARP - De Arquitectura y Paisaje

Floor Area: 250 m²

Year of Completion: 2025

Photography: Mauricio Carvajal

Design Features: DARP - De Arquitectura y Paisaje has completed the Rehabilitation of Casa P. Colina in Medellín, Colombia, a project grounded in a regenerative approach to architecture. Rather than replacing the existing fabric, the intervention treats the building's inherited frameworks, carpentry details, and structural strata as active design inputs, reconciling the natural, the constructed, and the historical within a unified spatial system that redefines the terms of contemporary domestic life.

The most spatially consequential move of the project is the reorganisation of the original wooden mezzanines, which formerly resolved approximately 30% of the home's public areas, into a layered sequence of double and triple-height volumes. These soaring voids channel natural light deep into the interior while exposing the primary load-bearing structure, producing a material language of industrial and agricultural honesty that lends the dwelling its singular architectural character. The metal staircase, suspended dramatically over the double-height living room, transcends its circulatory function to operate as a scenographic device, choreographing the dynamic relationship between body, light, and structure as occupants move through the home.

Nature is elevated from backdrop to constitutive element throughout the project. A former service area is reconceived as an interior garden, drawing light and vegetation into the foyer; the kitchen's relocation consolidates a new service core directly linked to the terrace, threading the original dining and social spaces into a continuous contemporary living sequence; and a skylight at the bedroom hall closes the spatial journey with an atmosphere of quiet luminosity. During the rehabilitation, oak and carob timbers salvaged from the original floors and structures were converted into bespoke fixed furnishings and freestanding pieces, a tectonic gesture that both extends the material life cycle and establishes a legible narrative continuity between past and present. Casa P. Colina stands as an exemplary meditation on responsible architectural intervention within an ageing urban fabric.

Design Team: DARP - De Arquitectura y Paisaje was co-founded by architects Jorge E. Buitrago and Jaime Cabal and is based in Medellín, Colombia. The studio regards architecture and landscape design as intrinsically integrated and mutually complementary disciplines, a position that underpins its entire professional methodology. Both co-founding principals jointly lead the practice's design and consultancy operations across a broad range of project typologies, including institutional architecture, public space, social housing, and urban design, in cities and regions throughout Colombia.

Buitrago holds a Master's degree in Landscape Architecture from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and brings expertise in urban processes and management, while serving as a tenured professor directing the Landscape Design and Critical Theory postgraduate programmes at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. Cabal, a graduate of the same institution and currently a Master's candidate at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, leads the studio's project development and consultancy, and holds teaching appointments at both universities. The sustained academic engagement of both principals ensures that the studio's practice remains firmly anchored within a framework of critical design inquiry.

DARP has earned consistent recognition in national and international design competitions, including first place at the Bienal de Paisaje de México (BLAP) 2016 and the global award in the Social Habitat and Development category at the Bienal de Arquitectura de Quito (BAQ) 2020. The firm's competition record spans Colombia's most significant public commissions, encompassing the Tropicario of the Bogotá Botanical Garden José Celestino Mutis, the Civic Centre of Medellín (Components A and B), and the public spaces of the San Juan de Dios Hospital complex. Through a rigorous design methodology and sustained social commitment, DARP has established itself as one of Colombia's foremost practices of critical and engaged architecture.