Live Journal 01: Designing Across Studios, Avenida Balboa Competition
This April, Sordo Madaleno launched its cross-studio Live Journal series — a bi-monthly series connecting the Mexico City and London studios that, through conversation, maps how thinking evolved across the life of a project, and what that reveals about how we practise across geographies.
The session explored the design process required for a recent design competition for residential towers in Avenida Balboa, along the site’s scenic 3.5-kilometre waterfront boulevard on the Pacific coastline in Panama City, Panama. Moderated by Ann Dingli, London based writer on the Storytelling team, the conversation ran between Mexico based Design Director Rodrigo Flores — who led the design competition — and Matthijs la Roi, Project Lead in the London studio. Rodrigo took the team through a summary of the brief and the overriding design approach. Matthijs discussed the everyday decisions, dialogue, and tools shared between the two teams. The ultimate aim of the discussion was to catalogue lessons learned for future collaborative work.
The design process was organised around the competition brief’s leading prompt: to build “from the city to the sea.” Towers in Panama typically appear as stacks of horizontal layers. The team’s solution explored how the city’s fabric could be translated vertically instead, with windows framing specific relationships to the sea, the historic city and the contemporary skyline. The central design idea was that the facade should emerge from the apartments’ organisation, rather than be applied to them retrospectively.
The speakers discussed technical challenges that arose as part of the cross-studio design process. The relationship between facade and plan required the most iterative work, negotiating the composition of a modular facade that could still ensure optimised efficiency of the apartments. This negotiation required a substantial model rebuild and re-rendering, working through daily communication to correct discrepancies before the final design could be passed on to the competition’s CGI team. Support from the studio’s Research team helped make the cross-studio structure more productive and grounded in context, keeping the work aligned to the studio’s core design priorities.
Notably, the team discussed how they navigated the unique challenge of maintaining the integrity of Sordo’s design sensibility while appealing to the distinct tastes of a client. Rather than adapting the proposal to conform to a client’s style, the team saw the competition as an opportunity to apply our design ethos to tangible brief points.
The discussion between the Mexico and London studios also included points made on the fallibility and blind spots involved with reading context through the lenses of different geographies, and on how to maximise time, talent and thinking within dramatically compressed timelines.
The session concluded on how design competitions can act as instruments for gestating studio ideas. Research into themes connected with a specific site and brief need not belong exclusively to the project that generated it. Competitions and cross-studio collaboration can become testing grounds for idea development, concept refinement, and building strength around design values.