The Komplex Tower rises as a landmark in the city of Puebla
A city within the city, it provides spaces for offices and meetings, shops, restaurants, amenities and services
The Komplex Tower rises as a landmark and plays a key role in the urban strategy of the southwest area of the city. Puebla, the capital city of the same name state, is the forth in Mexico for largeness, and yet somehow feels like a hidden gem.
Just a two-hour drive from the capital, the Spanish built the city at the intersection of two rivers and valued it as their new Jerusalem, with a stunning church on every corner.
The center is a UNESCO World Heritage site, known for its Baroque architecture and colonial buildings, but it is the growing cluster of world-class museums, culinary joints, and top-tier hotels that are putting this Mexican city back on the map of global fashion and architecture.
Valdez Arquitectos knows better, with their offices in town dedicated both to design and buildings, with the objective to create an architecture attached to the human.
To give new life and fresh points of view to projects that respect the history and the legacy of Mexican architecture, designed to meet the needs of each client with spacious and profitable spaces, using technology, contemporary materials and innovative construction systems.
One of the most impressive built examples under the Valdez signature is the Komplex Tower, located in the most vigorous district of the city of Puebla.
A corporate and cultural zone that houses projects of great relevance and vanguard: a development that brings dynamism to its immediate surroundings.
The project breaks up with the establishment and with a tradition of rigid forms in architecture, generating an exchange between arts, through the incorporation of mural paintings and sculptures in the built space.
A city within the city, the Komplex Tower provides spaces for offices and meetings, shops, restaurants, amenities and services. A two-storey podium housing commercial spaces forms the base of the fifteen-storey high tower with concave facing, which seems to grow harmoniously from the second floor of the podium.
The ‘L’ shaped continuous volume frames the complex while reflecting with another shorter volume that embraces the pedestrian and car access. The structures merge as an all, despite the volume’s different scales and proportions, thanks to the crownings of their cornices, fractal patterns pierced in aluminum sheet which, at nightfall, lighten up as abstract constellations, playing contrast with the reflecting void of the glass facade.
At a street level, the access to the spaces is perceived as a permeable urban continuity that blurs the borders between the city and the Komplex.
The pedestrian and vehicular flows are clearly marked: on one side, an immediate pedestrian access leads to the commercial building, that acts independently from the complex, with its levels sharply outlined and its exterior circulations covered by glass railings.
On the opposite side, the building that conforms the podium marks the pedestrian flows to the tower by the means of a pergola that guards from direct sunlight and, when meeting the corner, acts as a motor lobby for the tower.
The perpendicular wing of the podium is conformed by a double-storey space that enables multiple commercial occupation. Elements of urban furniture such as benches and street lights, as well as greenery, invite the user to relax and encourage the use of public space.
The access to the tower is provided through an elegant and bright lobby consisting of a transparent three-storey space whose interior, completely made of marble tiles in contrasting colours, with few wooden details, results in a container of lights, shadows and reflections that invites the guest to a contemplation of the space and to an interaction with the art pieces it houses.
Going up from the basement level, the lobby is crowned by a mural painting by the British urban art collective ‘The London Police’, that summarizes the urban quality of the city of Puebla tracing a silhouette where the historic and the contemporary find harmony and where Komplex Tower has a presence and coexists with recognizable and important landmarks.
The space is complemented by sculptures realized by plastic artists Richard Orlinsky and Elena Bulatova, conceptual representations of animals and industrial products that, with their freshness and subversion, synchronize with the building’s architectural values.
The space for Art is not limited to the inside
In the north side of the parking lot, the mural ‘Love vs Money’ realized by Kai, an American urban artist, makes a sharp critique to the consumer economy and the inherent value of things, using a friendly and contemporary plastic language that results in a playful, pop creation.
Other Mexican artists shared their local cultural expressions through their artistic work in the basement level.
Komplex Tower – by Valdez Arquitectos – takes part in the city’s discourse remarking its presence in the skyline and making a lovely contrast with the volcanic geography of the Puebla valley.
The tower itself enables spectacular views of the landscape from its middle and high rise levels and particularly from the great hall in the penthouse from which the limits between city and nature seem to disappear.
