Martínez Arquitectura, MEC Arquitectura and Fiallo Atelier Raise a Bogotá School over a Public Ground Linking Two Parks

Most urban schools in dense Latin American neighborhoods are built as fortresses: a perimeter wall, a guarded gate, and a courtyard that belongs to nobody outside it. The Feliza Bursztyn School in Kennedy, Bogotá, starts from the opposite premise. Designed by AR-AR Martínez Arquitectura y Paisaje, led by Carlos Alberto Martínez Valencia, with MEC Arquitectura and Fiallo Atelier, the 8,835 m² building sits at a pedestrian crossing between two neighborhood parks and treats that crossing as part of its program.

The interesting move is a vertical sorting of publicness. The base is open, permeable and shared with the community for cultural and social events. The classrooms, laboratories and offices sit above it, where students get privacy and security. Between those two conditions, a sequence of curving brick stairs and terraces steps down toward the park. The result is a long bar that works as an edge for the park on one side and as a civic frontage for the neighborhood on the other.

A Brick Bar Between Street and Park

From the air, the building reads as a single linear block laid along the park boundary, with a green roof and a perforated brick skin. From the street, it is a different animal: a tall brick mass rising above low shops, utility poles and parked vans. That contrast is honest. Kennedy is one of Bogotá's most densely populated localities, and the school does not pretend to blend into the two-story fabric around it. It uses brick to stay in the same material family instead.

The facade detailing earns its keep. Vertical slots and stepped diagonal courses break up the length of the bar, and the whole mass lifts onto slender concrete columns at ground level. You read the building as heavy above and light below, which is exactly the hierarchy the program asks for.

The Ground Floor as a Public Room

The open gallery under the classrooms is where the project makes its case. Brick paving, concrete columns, a long planter bed and tube lights under the slab create a covered public room that can host music, art or simply a shortcut between the parks. Two kids popping wheelies past the columns tell you more about the success of this space than any render could: it is being used as a street.

A covered plaza at the corner serves as the school's entrance threshold and connects directly to the park, while two smaller plazas, one facing the neighborhood to the east and one facing the park to the west, tie the circulation together. Seen from above, the courtyard's curving brick path and playground extend the contemplative park routes right up to the building's edge. The architects frame this as a continuous curvilinear public space, and in the photographs the claim holds.

Stairs That Act as Grandstands

The curving brick stairs and terraced balconies are the project's signature, and they do more than move people. They step down to the courtyard like seating around a small plaza, give students places to linger outside class, and turn the building's park-facing side into a layered, inhabited facade. A spiral stair seen past a planter of red and yellow flowers is a reminder that this is a landscape office leading the design.

The terraces also face the Cerros Orientales, Bogotá's eastern hills. For a student in Kennedy, a district far from the mountain edge, that view is not trivial. It anchors the school in the city's larger geography. The architects cite 15th-century public buildings as an influence, and you can sense it here: the loggia, the open stair and the elevated gallery are old civic tools, rebuilt in local brick and concrete.

Shared Rooms Inside the Block

The interiors keep the same material discipline. The dining hall uses round concrete columns, yellow chairs and a glazed wall that throws sharp sunlight across the floor. The auditorium is wrapped in brick, with dark grey and orange seats facing a low stage. Neither room is overdesigned, and both read as spaces that could serve the neighborhood in the evening as easily as the school during the day.

That flexibility is the point. The architects describe the base as adaptable to changing educational needs, and rooms like these, robust, simple and well lit, are what make that adaptability plausible over decades of heavy use.

Plans and Drawings

The plans confirm how carefully the bar is layered. The ground floor holds a sports court, the dining hall and a classroom wing along the site boundary. Higher up, a curving ramp and an auditorium with fixed seating anchor one end of the third floor, while the sixth floor plan shows classrooms along a corridor and a basketball court with bleachers at the far end. Putting a sports court at the top of the building frees the ground for public use, which is a smart trade on a tight urban plot.

The east elevation shows the repeating vertical fin rhythm and the open ground level, while the sections reveal the stepped upper stair, the rooftop volume and the layered balcony facade. Read together, the drawings show a building that is closed and regular toward the neighborhood and stepped and porous toward the park.

Why This Project Matters

Bogotá has a strong tradition of public schools and libraries used as instruments of urban repair, and the Feliza Bursztyn School joins that lineage with a clear thesis: a school can protect its students without turning its back on the street. By stacking privacy above and opening the ground below, the building gives Kennedy a covered public room, a pedestrian link between two parks and a civic frontage, all inside the footprint of a single educational program.

For architects working on schools in dense cities, the lesson is about sectional thinking. The perimeter wall is not the only security strategy available. Height, hierarchy and carefully managed thresholds can do the same work while giving something back to the neighborhood. The brick is local and the terraces are generous, but the idea underneath them is what travels.

Feliza Bursztyn School by AR-AR Martínez Arquitectura y Paisaje (lead architect Carlos Alberto Martínez Valencia), MEC Arquitectura and Fiallo Atelier. Kennedy, Bogotá, D.C., Colombia. Area: 8,835 m². Completed: 2024. Photography: Teodoro Posada.

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