Antonio Cortés Portfolio

Architecture_ Territory_ Art_

_Jhoan Antonio Cortés_ Portfolio

Within this portfolio there is a selection of projects developed both in the academic field and in the labor and personal field. These are a sample of my vision regarding architecture, landscape, territory and art. With them I also seek to show my personal explorations and interests in the aforementioned fields. Between different scales materialities

tectonics photos and drawings

I find myself

This portfolio is finally a sample of who I am.

Work index

CV

Education

Jhoan Antonio

Cortés González

Phone: +573142526826

E-mail: acortesg0209@gmail.com

Bogotá, Colombia

Work experience

Mentions and distinctions

Bachelor of architecture - BArch

Universidad de los Andes

2017-2022

Minor in fine Arts

Universidad de los Andes

2017-2022

Minor in Art studies

Universidad de los Andes

2017-2022

Academic experience

Student representative of the faculty of Architecture and Design

Universidad de los Andes

2020-2021

Teaching assistant (TA)

Course: Computational Thinking

Professor Daniela Atencio

First semester 2021

Teaching assistant (TA)

Course: Tectonic fables

Professors Luisa Brando and Inés Benítez

Year 2021

Languages

Mo.Bo. Architects Intern

Project: Public contest for the design of urban acupuncture actions - Colombian society of architecs.

_Winners second place_

May, June 2021

Luisa Brando Studio Intern

Project: Private open architecture competition for the design of emblematic projects of public space and interior gardens of the San Juan de Dios hospital complex

June, Juy 2021

Lorenzo Castro Arquitectos Architect

Project: Contest for the architectural design of the District of Science, Technology and Innovation of BogotáRegion in partnership with AYESA

_Winners second place_

June, July, August 2022

Luisa Brando Studio

Architect and illustrator

Cartographic and illustration projec on Magdalena river “El río territorios posibles” at the museum of EL BANCO DE LA REPUBLICA DE COLOMBIA

October - Currently

Fifth Colombian biennial of architecture students. (Colombian society of architects, Colombia) Project selected as finalist in the category Urban design, rural and land planning. (currently under judgment)

XXII architecture students annual. (Colombian society of architects, Bogotá) Project selected by the faculty of architecture and design for representing the university in the category of Final Degree

Project

BRONZE MEDAL WINNER, THIRD PLACE

Mention of a project on an article of Archi voice “PC__print(“HelloWorld”)____Computational Design-Thinking (Pensamiento Computacional)”

2021

Exposition of a project at the exhibition Escalando at Los Andes University

2022

Spanish

Native English

C1

French B1 Software

Autocad

Illustrator

Potoshop

Rhinoceros

Vray

After effects

Indesign Grasshopper (basic)

Qgis

Other skills

Hand-drawing

Model making

Photography

Between different photos scales and drawings materialities I find myself tectonics

“A Possible Territory: The Magdalena River Basin,” an exhibition by the Cultural Submanagement and the Library Network of the Banco de la República, seeks to prompt reflection on questions regarding how we have lived, how we currently live, and how we aspire to live in the future in the Magdalena River and its basin. These questions are of utmost relevance to eight out of every ten Colombians, as this is the proportion of those who inhabit the basin. They are the ones who make it a possible territory, as it has been, as it is, and as we wish it to be, through their present or future contributions to the economy, their customs and habits, particularly related to water, and even their political thought”

Illustration, conceptualization, exhibit, art, children

Museum exhibition

Location:

Bogotá, Colombia

Luisa Brando Studio

Luisa Brando Laserna

Lisa Anzallini

Jhoan Antonio Cortés

Museo del Banco de la República

Colombia ranks among the top ten countries in the world with the highest number of rivers, and the Magdalena River is the most significant one. With a length of 1540 kilometers, it receives over 500 major tributaries, including the massive Cauca River, stretching 1350 kilometers, and a multitude of streams and brooks estimated to exceed 5000. The Magdalena River basin covers an area of 257,000 square kilometers, encompassing 19 out of the country’s 32 departments and including 724 out of 1103 municipalities. The Magdalena basin is home to Colombia’s four largest cities: Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, and Barranquilla. Additionally, it encompasses the three mountain ranges that divide the Andes in the country, the snow-covered volcanoes of the central range, and the largest páramos (high-altitude ecosystems) in the country.

Throughout history, the Magdalena River has been described as Colombia’s communications backbone, and today it serves as the muscle, heart, and skeleton of its economy. Within its basin, 80% of the national GDP is generated, 70% of agricultural harvests are produced, including 90% of the coffee crop, and 70% of hydroelectric energy and 95% of thermoelectric energy are generated.

In this page:

Chart of fish species in the river

Relief and Climate of the Magdalena River Basin

In this page: Transport, Communications, and Infrastructure

In this page:

Ecosystem of the Magdalena River Basin

In this page: Sedimentation

In this page: Pulses of Water

The luck of the flowers

Our history has been marked by water, in the same way that we have affected it. The life of Bogotá and of ourselves is in the rivers, wetlands and paramos. We are people of these places, of the landscape. The city uses this resource, its subsistence is allowed thanks to it. Our vision of water is linked to thinking of it as a barrier to be overcome, and not as a privilege. It is time to coexist, to build a new landscape.

Landscape, urban design, masterplan, architecture, art

Graduation Project

Location: Bogotá, Colombia

Mentors: Lorenzo Castro Carolina Concha

Use: Water reservoir,park, urban trigger

The luck of the flowers

(currently

Project

(currently

Privileged are those flowers that are born next to the water and that thanks to this are aware of their beauty. The territory is surrounded, traversed and shaped by this element. We settle next to it, we need it, it is essential for our survival. We have trapped it, dried it, contaminated it, we have changed its course and we have also buried it and with it ourselves. The starting point of the project is the search to make it visible. The concern to give it the value it deserves, is the moment, the time of the water.

A block is intervened and just as it happened with this one, the model gradually begins to be replicated throughout the city, water is rediscovered, it then becomes part of our identity. New centers, foci of life. The cycles are regulated again, this resource once again has a leading role.

The city of Bogotá is restructured with Gardens, reservoirs. With places of coexistence. The project as an urban trigger, as a place of transformation of the environment. The new water infrastructure. A new way of thinking about the city. It is time to live the luck of the flowers that are born next to the water.

Video

Water

Fifth Colombian biennial of architecture students. Project selected as finalist in the category Urban design, rural and land planning.

under judgment)

XXII architecture students annual. (Colombian society of architects, Bogotá)

selected by the faculty of architecture and design for representing the university in the category of Final Degree Project

under judgment)

systems of Bogotá city

Context maps

Conceptual representations of the dioramas

In this page: Garden floor plan, first development.

In the next page:

1. The architectural pieces that compose the garden.

Left to right:

-The funnel

-The gargoyles

-The water yard

-Meander

-The center

-The strokes

-Shakei

2. Garden floor plan, expansion.

In this page:

Section and view of the water yard

In this page: -Section of the change of meterials. -Axonometric view of thw project.

In this page: View of “the center”, the main piece of the garden.

In the next page: View of “the gargoyles”

In this page: Sections of one of the points of meeting

In this page:

Axonometric views of the urban vision speculation. Gardens appear all around the city, regulating the natural cycles.

In the next page: Urban section of the proposed garden.

The border can move, fade or change. Despite this, the garden marks the place where today the limit between the paramo and cultivation is found. This project will give an account of how the management of the land will be given. This garden would be able to show history and the change in the landscape if this border continues to advance towards the paramo ecosystem, and will allow us to question our relationship with the natural environment, how it is manipulated for purposes of self-interest, leaving aside the free development of life. It will then become a monument to the encounter between these two worlds, seen at a specific moment.

Landscape, architecture, art, rural

Academic project

Project topyc: Contemporary gardens

Location:

Paramo de Sumapaz, Colombia

Mentors:

Luisa Brando Laserna

Pedro Aparicio Llorente

Diego rivero Borrell

Diego Bermudez

Use:

Water reservoir, park, monument, sculpture

Group of two

The garden project arises from the union of two plants, the potato plant and the frailejón. The first is one of the bases of food, it is in great demand and constitutes a large part of the country’s agricultural production. It grows in very diverse places and easily adapts to its environment, which has led it to massively cultivate itself and radically transform the environment it reaches, largely playing with the concept of limit. The second is endemic to the moors, and even to each specific moorland. It only grows in very special conditions of humidity and height. It is a key agent in the water cycle, as it can capture and accumulate it. They are small ecosystems concentrated in a plant that, over time, create tiny rivers that come down from the top of the mountain and allow the cycle to continue.

The relationship between these two plants took us to the paramo of Sumapaz, the largest in the world and which provides water to approximately 15 million people. There is a peasant tradition that has cultivated land near the paramo, increasingly expanding the agricultural frontier towards places that are thought to be untouchable, putting at risk the production of a vital resource for our subsistence. Friction is generated between these two landscapes and a limit is created between what is considered “natural” and what is cultivated. A limit that is crossed by water, which is responsible for sewing and uniting the territory. This element produced at the top of the mountain, comes down, feeds the fields and allows their development.

The garden project is implanted right on the border between the paramo, the cultivation and the high Andean forest. This has one hectare, which is distributed in an elongated way, joining two points where the cultivation area is advancing towards the paramo. The garden is designed as a route which comes into contact with the three existing ecosystems. Its shape widens in three moments, this happens when the paramo and the crop come together and there is no barrier that separates them. The purpose of this is not to allow the increase of the agricultural frontier, to increase the visibility of the importance of the paramo, to be a point of reference for the beginning of this ecosystem and to serve as an element of denunciation.

Between balloons that announce the arrival to the paramo, a path, stones, mirrors, moss and a reservoir tower, the garden finds its consolidation.

In this page:

Section and floor plan of the tower, mediums chrcoal and color pencils

In the previous page:

1. Video art, first concepts, installations and materil experimentation.

2. Video, model experimentation, terrarium

In this page:

Atmospheric drawings inside of the tower, charcoal over white paper

In the next page:

1. General floor plan

2. General sections

In this page:

Photos of the tower 1:10 concrete model, and material experimentation

In this page: Final presentation video

This proposal builds the idea of urban acupuncture as the relationship between the contemporary landscape and the human being with the development of lightweight architectures, which act as catalysts for new interactions between existing elements in the territory. Its reconfiguration of public space is a quest to rescue those elemental landscapes that have dominated the different places historically, but which have receded into the background in the Bogota imaginary due to the transformations of the city. This strategy articulates the physical and urban diagnosis of the different places through a social strategy that evidences the link emotional and rational of the communities for and with their territory.

Urban design, Architecture, Landscape Diagnosis of Bogota

Public contest

Location: Bogotá, Colombia

Office:

Mo.Bo. Architects

Date: 2021

Use: Urban parks, urban trigger

Elemental landscapes

Strategies for resilient infrastructure

_ Winners second place_

Three historical rings were determined in the urban fabric that order the type of public space in the different places of intervention: traditional, modern and republican (San Felipe), of industrial origin (Venice, Bosques de Mariana), and of origin informal (Altos del Poblado, Bella flor).

Landscape scales

The concepts of the different places revolve around building a direct relationship with the chosen approach and the landscape with the most identity within the community. For this reason, different scopes of the landscape were determined that allow us to understand what link with the natural and socioeconomic territory is promoting each proposal.

Social strategy

The workshops seek to make the community question its relationship with the landscape and society. It also seeks to build an interactive infographic in a digital medium, so the same questions are used, but they materialize in different formats according to the community. This materialization builds the atmosphere that could foster the project from the activities of the workshops and the ephemeral configuration of the space.

In this page:

Axonometric drawings of the different proposals

Public contest for the design of urban acupuncture actions Colombian society of architecs.

Neighborhood: San Felipe

cultural intervention

Level 1

With such a marked cultural character, the permeability of the place is sought to generate new appropriations of the place. The intervention proposes to change the limits of the court in order to attract new activities by the community while preserving the consolidated activities. This proposal raises the limits of the place to configure a more walkable plaza with minimal intervention that transforms the perception of space with few structural supports.

The surface of the place is transformed to generate a more transversal connection with the existing flows in the neighborhood, which articulates the metropolitan sphere with the most intimate sphere of the neighborhood. The Pompeian connects the amphitheater, which opens onto the pitch to allow for a more accessible public space. The canopy acts as infrastructure for lighting and irrigation of vegetation, but also as a framework for artistic and social installations. In this way, the local landscape is formed from the sporadic social relationships in the place, which foster new exchanges in the community.

In this page:

Project view

In the next page: Floor plan, section and axonometric view

Neighborhood: Bella flor

Social approach

Level 3

In this page:

Project view

In the next page: Floor plan, section and axonometric view

The project promotes a direct relationship with the physical and local landscape simultaneously, by generating a viewpoint that works as a water collector to supply the community, giving the inhabitants a social instrument to promote empowerment and care over public space. Therefore, the social approach is evident when understanding that the appropriation of space strengthens the mix between cultural and economic activities, where meeting spaces foster this flexibility.

From the urban strategy, a system of terraces is proposed that connects the different levels of the intervention, but which formalizes the routes already traced by the inhabitants, so that the circulation allows the terraced squares to be a space for circulation and constant permanence, to improve the perception of security in the place.

Neighborhood: Bosques de Mariana Environmental approach

Level 2

The environmental approach, together with the proximity to the wetland, were the triggering opportunity to generate an educational theme within the park. The architecture acts in the place as an articulator between the artificial and natural landscape, which builds a perception of continuity of the Jaboque wetland within the city. The park is transformed into an outdoor learning laboratory, a public space at the service of teaching.

The walkways that run through the educational wetland have a stilt structure that protects the ecosystem by slightly raising the paths. Some small squares are added to this system as open classrooms within the park, and the route closest to the wetland rises higher to act as a contemplative viewpoint. In this way, the intervention seeks to link the natural and human dimensions of the territory and thus interact in a symbiotic manner.

In this page:

Project view

In the next page:

Floor plan, section and axonometric view

Neighborhood: Venecia

Cultural approach

Level 1

The cultural focus within Venice translates into the proposal as the reappropriation of the mall for community activities, and not only for the strong commercial and industrial flow. This intervention superimposes different layers of intervention that translate into a continuous strip that encourages the gradual activation of the for permanence in public space, which influences the perception of security.

One of the main uses contained in the strip is to serve as lighting infrastructure for the trees and the ground, and also to collect water to redirect it to areas with more permeable soil. On the other hand, the rise and fall of the strip configures a series of frames alternated with the modulation of the trees, which further consolidates the perspective of the alameda.

In this page:

Project view

In the next page: Floor plan, section and axonometric view

Neighborhood: Altos del poblado

Cultural approach

Level 2

In this page: Project view

In the next page: Floor plan, section and axonometric view

The terrace system reinforces the idea of the park as a viewpoint towards the city, where the different levels have different activities for the use of different communities at different times. In this way, the cultural approach is enriched by the existence of a multiplicity of appropriations of the place that share the same view towards the landscape, where sports are mixed with the theatricality of the space to encourage social encounters.

The strong topography is the element that defines the main distribution axis of the activities on the terraces. By improving the circulation system, it is even proposed to articulate the open metal structure that surrounds the field to appropriate it as an urban viewpoint and also as a stage for this new hybrid scenario.

The Garden Paths that fork

In the literary work

The Garden of Paths that fork, Borges enters the tour of a garden to give a turn to the notion of a uniform or absolute time. The author, poses, a growing network of trails divergent and parallel, that at times, They approach, they meet, they cut and they diluted, encompassing all the possibilities of what we understand as time. Making a parallel between time and space; this landscaping project contemplate, as in the tale of Borges, the different and infinite possibilties that arise from inhabiting and connecting gardens that start inside the set, to spread to different landscapes already existing in the city, such as are the Eastern Hills and the different bodies of water such as the Rio Fucha. For achieve recovery and healing gardens of the San Juan Hospital proposes a look at three scales that complement each other: the territory, the neighborhood and the body.

Landscape, architecture, master plan

Public contest

Location: Bogota, Colombia

San Juan de Dios hospital complex

Office: Luisa Brando Studio

Use: Water reservoir, park, monument, sculpture

Through the need to activate the edges of the whole, a series of gardens and paths are designed that intertwine and fork, including and connecting people with nature and the multiple ways of healing with and in it. Different uses are characterized to invite different ages of the population and thus guarantee the vitality of the whole at different times of the day. Thus, starting from the current hospital, dotational and communal uses, activity points are created approximately every 40m where they are: multiple courts, playgrounds, skate parks, water gardens, restaurant areas, cafes, collection centers, of creation, planting areas, places for shows and markets, among others

A way of working and designing the interior gardens and the public space of the San Juan de Dios Hospital contemplated in the following 5 points:

The Garden Paths that fork

1. Permeate: horizontal and vertical borders

2. Shakkei: bringing outside scenery inside

3. Continuity: Roads and articulation with neighboring neighborhoods

4. Active Edge: Healing from Vitality

5. Elements: Plants and the body

In this page:

-Ecological urban vision

-Border of the complex activation

In the previous page:

General urban plan

In the next page:

Floor plan of 2 of the gardens

Sections of the project

In this page: Selection of the vegetation

In this page: Diagram of the relations between plants, body and healing

Speculation processes of computational design as well as a criticalconceptual framework through information processed and determined parameters. The project investigates the ways in which meaning, intentions and knowledge are built by solving and materializing complexities. Multiple prototypes and distinctive non-conventional objects are generated, creating a new aesthetic and methods of understanding, exploring and creating procedures to generate the development of computational techniques, tools and theories, combined with methods of visualization, representation, parametric and algorithmic design. In other words, the construction of a graphic discourse as a computational argument.

Art, computacional thinking, landscape

THE IDEA OF THE FLAT IMAGE AS A SOURCE OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL DATA

University Project PC__print(“HelloWorld”)__ Computational Design-Thinking

Mentors: Daniela Atencio

Use: Speculative processes, image production

PC__print (“HelloWorld”)

The aesthetic and readable notions of an image are challenged in representation, design and visualization, developing an abstraction to speculate on the generation of retracted, distinct and attractive images [through both algorithmic programming processes and post computational techniques]. The possibilities of migrating information from image to geometry will provoke mechanisms to activate a speculative realism in the products to be obtained: instead of simply replicating or re-sampling what is known, the project will impose a more profound and strange result and new relationships between ideas or exploration of the new limits of design challenging the traditional notions of form finding and representation.

Mention of a project on an article of Archi voice “PC__ print(“HelloWorld”)____Computational Design-Thinking (Pensamiento Computacional)”

Exposition of a project at the exhibition Escalando at Los Andes University

Based on the use of nature pattern images, a spherical surface was made more complex using centroids to generate 300,000 spheres, thus developing an organic geometry. Speaking about the object’s material we found iridescent black chrome and, for the generation of a subtle contrast, gold was used on randomly chosen spheres. The object ends up being a figure with a high degree of spatial plasticity where the geometry’s complexity and the material’s contrast are the main characters. The work then becomes a sculpture with a high aesthetic value. The setting in which it is located is a forest that has been burned in such a way that the smoky and foggy atmosphere makes the object blend into space and become part of the landscape.

Virtual sculpture Implementation in a scenario

Departing from the modeling of volumes using Python and Grasshopper, a complex texturing and effect was applied to a geometry that was then duplicated to generate symmetry. A pearlized material is added to give it an organic feel, more specifically alluding to marine life. The object is implanted in the stage in such a way that it appears as if it was part of the mountainous landscape. The atmospheric features show the sun rising in the morning, so that both the object and the stage are illuminated by a subtle yellow light. The object’s material allows it to be part of the landscape and its scale is defined from what would be an habitable space.

Photography is a thin slice of space as well as time. We turn the experience into an image into a memory. To take photographs is to participate in the mutability, vulnerability and mortality of things and beings.

Each of the images produced in the worls is intrinsically linked to the person who produces it. In the photograph we can find the vision of the person who takes it, the value that he gives to what he is seeing, to what deserves to be seen. The photo itself becomes an act of possession, in a certain way it takes possession of what is captured, be it the subject or the space. In this way, photography is not only “the mere result of the encounter between an event and a photographer” but is itself the event itself. The photographer with the camera has the ability to change or not the perception of the event.

The photographer with his gaze and his photo manages to change the perception of things, allows us to see what we did not see before or did not want to see, he has the ability to show something that I would call the sublime moment, with which he leads us to feel affected by the photograph we are seeing.

Images surround us, they are everywhere, they even saturate us. But there are times when some of them move us, take us to emotional states of great value. Photographs allow us to see what we did not see before, they lead us to give value to what did not have value before. They allow us to build different imaginaries around what we live and see. The photographer has that role, to capture the moment, to change our gaze, to lead us to find the sublime. Photography to a certain extent helps us transform experience into a way of seeing. I also keep this sentence of Susan Sontag “Today everything exists to culminate in a photograph”

The forest Analog photography Photographic paper 25.4x20.4 cm 2022

In a certain way, movement in photography captures an instant, a feeling, the poetics of the inhabited space. Analog photography is used as a means of capture to give strength to the image. Shutter time is increased to capture movement.

Paris II (The moving image, the poetics of space) Analog photography 2021

Berlin (The moving image, the poetics of space)

Analog photography

2021

Barcelona (The moving image, the poetics of space)

Analog photography

2021

Paris (The moving image, the poetics of space) Analog photography

Latin american exuberance

Analog photography, serie of 38 photos.

Latin american exuberance

Analog photography, serie of 38 photos.

Between lines and backpacks

Mix media, charcoal, indian ink, metal. Multiple papers and formats

2.20x1.50 m

Innocence Cotton paper Charcoal and indian ink Large format 1.50x1.25 m

Under the moonlight Cotton paper

Charcoal and pencil

Series of two drawings 21x30 cm