PARALELA and LB2 Thread a Public Walkway Through the Base of a Las Condes Residential Tower

Most residential towers in Santiago's eastern districts arrive at the street the same way: a gate, a guard booth, a strip of controlled lawn, and a lobby you see only if you live there. The Hamlet Building, designed by PARALELA with associate office LB2 (Cristián Larraín and Pablo López), takes a different line. It is a 15-storey, 52-apartment block at Hamlet 4201 in Las Condes, completed in 2017 for Inmobiliaria Arauco. It has no perimeter fence. Instead, a tree-lined walkway more than 70 metres long cuts across the site between Hamlet and La Gioconda, and anyone can use it.

That walkway is the project. It doubles as the building's entrance, connects toward Mustafa Kemal Atatürk plaza and the Escuela Militar and Alcántara metro stations, and recasts a private development as a piece of neighbourhood infrastructure. The jury of the 2017 Premio Aporte Urbano recognised this when it named Hamlet the best high-rise building project. Above the ground plane, the tower splits into two volumes tuned to the sun, and we think that move is more thoughtful than its sober exterior first suggests.

A Shortcut That Doubles as a Front Door

The passage works because it is legible from end to end. The planting is arranged as a wooded strip that keeps a clear line of sight between both streets and the lobby, so you read the route as public before you set foot on it. Gravel beds, young trees and low groundcover replace the usual hedge-and-railing edge. Wherever the access areas need a boundary, landscape provides it.

Paving also runs from the street into the private ground, which blurs where the city stops and the building begins. Residents walking a dog and commuters cutting toward the metro share the same surface. At dusk, lamps set into the planting turn the path into a lit corridor. That matters in a district where long, blank block edges often go dark once the offices empty.

Canopies, Cobbles and a Planted Edge

Over part of the route, a black steel canopy with repeating A-frame struts sets a rhythm overhead. It is light enough to read as garden structure rather than architecture, and it frames views back to the ivy-covered party walls and neighbouring brick towers. Below it, cobblestones alternate with gravel strips planted with saplings, so the ground surface tells you which areas are for walking and which are for growing.

At the building's base, vertical timber fins screen the glazed ground floor, with agave and broadleaf planting pressed right up against them. The lattice does the job a wall usually does, giving residents' shared rooms privacy, while letting the building look out onto the passage. The landscape design treats the tower as an island inside the block, and the screen is that island's shoreline.

Two Volumes, Two Orientations

The tower is made of two volumes joined along their length, and each has its own temperament. The east volume is closed and solid. It holds the bedrooms, which get morning sun through narrow vertical openings in the dark cladding. The west volume is open and permeable, made of stacked balcony slabs that shelter living rooms and terraces from the afternoon sun behind movable shading.

The split is a straightforward climate response, but it also gives the building two faces. Seen from one side, Hamlet reads as a dark, almost monolithic slab. Seen from the other, it dissolves into horizontal bands of light and shadow. The balconies overlook the walkway, so the most lived-in parts of the apartments face the most public part of the site, which keeps eyes on the passage at most hours.

Holding Its Ground in the Skyline

From above, the tower stands among brick apartment blocks, green roofs and mature tree canopy, with the Andes behind. It is taller than most of its neighbours but does not try to compete with them through form. Its long bar and banded balconies are calm, and the grey palette lets the planted ground and the surrounding trees carry the colour.

That restraint suits a project whose ambitions are mostly at street level. Hamlet adds density to a pedestrian-scale area already served by offices, shops, medical services and transit. A quiet silhouette makes that density easier for the neighbourhood to accept.

A Ground Floor Without Shops or Flats

Local regulations ruled out commercial or residential use on the first floor. That could have produced a dead podium. Instead, PARALELA and LB2 filled it with shared amenities, bicycle parking and workshops: rooms that generate activity without needing a shopfront. The lounge sits directly behind the vertical louvers, so the garden light filtering through the screen becomes the room's main feature.

The lobby is furnished more like a living room than a reception, with wood-framed armchairs, a woven rug and stone-tiled walls. Elsewhere, a darker masonry elevation with a narrow recessed red door shows a tougher, more urban register. The ground floor balances openness and shelter, and the interiors take their cue from that balance.

Flexible Apartments and a Shared Roof

The apartments are organised as large open spaces divided by big sliding doors. You can close a room off or open the whole plan toward the terrace, depending on the hour or the household. The covered terraces on the west face act as outdoor rooms and extend the living areas, and floor-to-ceiling sliding glass is all that separates the two.

At the top, a roof terrace under a slatted pergola picks up the timber language of the ground floor and opens views toward neighbouring towers and the mountains. Using the same material at the base and the crown is a small decision, but it ties the building together.

Plans and Drawings

The site plans make the strategy plain. A long, narrow footprint sits inside a field of gardens, and the walkway stitches Hamlet and La Gioconda together across the block. The early perspective sketch shows how central that route was from the start: a bench, trees, people, and the slatted facade as backdrop.

The typical floors repeat a long bar served by two stair and elevator cores, with partitions that shift between levels to vary the apartment mix. The sections show the stacked slabs, the two basement parking levels and the deep structural walls, with trees and figures drawn at street level. Even in the drawings, the ground is where the project wants your attention.

Why This Project Matters

Hamlet shows that a private residential tower can give something back to its street without giving up security or marketability. Removing the fence, putting the entrance on a public path and protecting sightlines across the block are low-tech decisions. Together, though, they change how a building of this size relates to the people who will never live in it. The 70-metre walkway now does real work for the neighbourhood, shortening routes to the metro and the plaza.

It also shows how to turn a regulatory constraint into a design brief. A ground floor that could hold neither shops nor flats became a shared, porous base. That lesson applies well beyond Las Condes. In any city where upscale housing tends to wall itself off, Hamlet offers a working counterexample, and an award jury agreed it was worth rewarding.

Hamlet Building by PARALELA with LB2 (Cristián Larraín and Pablo López), Las Condes, Santiago, Chile. Area: 10,230 m². Completed: 2017. Photography: Nico Saieh and Rodrigo Opazo.

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