Projects

Every house is, above all, a portrait of the people who live in it. Across Barranquilla's most exclusive enclaves — Villa Campestre, Caujaral, Puerto Colombia — José Pérez Orozco has built an extensive catalog of single-family homes and residential buildings designed around each family's everyday life rather than a repeatable formula.

This is where the studio's most irreverent side lives: decades spent designing restaurants, bars, nightclubs and shopping centers that never try to go unnoticed. From Barranquilla's dining circuit to franchises now open in Cartagena, Bogotá and Cali, this is the architect's largest and most prolific body of work — and the one that best captures his sense of Caribbean leisure as experience.

Before designing buildings, José Pérez Orozco served as Barranquilla's Secretary of Public Works and Secretary of Planning — an experience that pushed him to think about the whole city, not just the lot. His urban projects, from Caimán del Río to the Barlovento City proposal, share one ambition: giving the Magdalena River and public space back the prominence Barranquilla had lost.

Schools, clinics and medical centers demand a different kind of architecture: more restrained, designed to serve a community rather than a single client. This is the studio's institutional work, extending from Barranquilla to Cartagena, where function and care for the end user come before architectural gesture.

Working with built heritage is an exercise in translation: understanding what already exists before deciding what to add. In the El Prado neighborhood and Cartagena's Walled City — two of Colombia's most protected historic centers — the studio has restored Republican and colonial houses while staying as close as possible to their original language.