Torre Banco de Panama
Programmatically, the tower section is organized as a piling up of four separate buildings. The lowest first part relates to the city with the bank offices and its counter hall on the ground and mezzanine floor above which a six-story parking is located. The remaining three building pars are accentuated as prisms of different sizes adapting to different positions, offsetting each with the one below and hereby creating a series of terraces, with different orientations and views over the sea and the historical city centre.
Each prism can be read as a small canonical office building with its sky lobby with shared uses by all tenants: a restaurant, a gym and a club for meeting and relaxing. On its up most part, a representative hall provides stunning views all over the city.
The building envelope is resolved with a glass curtain wall supplemented of different colour tones and transparencies that enhances a vibrant effect of randomness in the facade, caused not solely by apparent effects of opacity and reflection but also by the scalar ambiguity of the standardized elements that never coincide with any obvious horizontal line of the building. This prevents ‘reading’ the program distribution from the exterior while introducing a diversity of elevations of the horizontal façade elements as seen from the inside. The proposed system incorporates naturally all particular solutions such as the railing of the terraces, air intakes of the technical rooms or the integrated ventilation openings of the parking levels.
