Construction works have begun on Zaha Hadid Arhitects‘ Bora Residential Tower in Mexico City. Commissioned in 2015 by Nemesis Capital, a Mexican company committed to building new communities of the highest standards, the tower is within Santa Fe, an important business district in the west of Mexico City with a rapidly growing community that includes 3 universities and the regional offices of Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Roche and Amazon.
The Bora Residential Tower is a short walk from local schools, theatres, cafes and restaurants, as well as the new Santa Fe Transit Hub that will offer a 5-minute train journey into Observatorio Station, connecting with the city’s metro network when the Toluca commuter rail line opens next year.
Being adjacent to the 28 hectare parklands, lakes, sports fields, basketball and tennis courts of La Mexicana park, the largest new public space created in Mexico City for 50 years, the tower has been designed to provide excellent levels of natural light and ventilation, with the apartments optimising Santa Fe’s extremely comfortable environmental conditions of prevailing winds and mild annual temperatures.
With more than 50 floors, Bora will be the highest residential tower in Mexico City and incorporates over 220 apartments of one, two and three bedrooms. Each floor houses a variety of unit sizes to create an integrated and diverse community of families, first-time homeowners, professionals and retirees.
The arrangement and layout of the apartments maximises natural light, ensures privacy and offers panoramic, double-aspect views from all units that are also surrounded by balconies, providing residents with outdoor living areas to enjoy Santa Fe’s mild, elevated subtropical climate.
The distribution of varied apartments across each floor defines the formal composition of the tower. The six apartment layouts surround a central core and are extruded vertically, with the tower’s façade articulating the folds and pleats created from the juxtaposition of these six volumes. A sense of dynamism is introduced by the geometric configuration of the balconies which follow a harmonic variation that is optimised to ensure the best use of these outdoor living areas.
The tower tapers inwards at its base to increase the areas for leisure, recreation and entertainment located beneath ‘swirling’ canopies that transfer the surrounding streetscape vertically, echoing the dynamism expressed throughout the façade. Civic spaces with restaurants and shops at street level will enhance the growing Santa Fe community.
The tower’s structure has also been designed for optimum flexibility and ductility, as well as an overall reduction in its weight, to best respond in seismic conditions, with the ten-storey canopies at its base providing additional lateral stability.
Project Team
Client: Nemesis Capital
Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA)
Design: Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher (ZHA)
ZHA Project Director: Juan Ignacio Aranguren
ZHA Project Architects: Andrés Arias Madrid, Pierandrea Angius
ZHA Concept Design Team: Saman Saffarian (Design Lead), Johannes Elias, Julia Hyoun Hee Na, Lisa Kinnerud, Kate Revyakina
Structural Engineer (Concept): BAC – García Jarque Ingenieros
MEP Engineer (Concept): PGI Engineering
Façade Engineer (Concept): Front Inc.
Visualizations (Concept): LabTop
