LTR1’s roofline wasn’t sculpted from imagination — it was extracted directly from photographs of two real mountains visible from the site, then translated point for point into the building’s silhouette. Designed by Carazo Arquitectura for a 60,265-square-metre (648,686 sq ft) site in Nuevo Cuscatlán, El Salvador, the unbuilt LTR1 replaces the standard high-rise tower with what its architects call a vertical and horizontal neighborhood, wrapping more than 400 residential units, a commercial district, and a preserved forest into one continuous form.
Most residential towers stack their functions in isolated layers — commerce at the base, housing above, landscape reduced to rooftop amenity. Carazo Arquitectura‘s research framework, Tropical Vertical Urbanism, rejects that separation, distributing housing, retail, gastronomy, and shared infrastructure through a single interconnected system rather than dividing them by floor.
Rodrigo Carazo frames the shift directly: “The project evolves from the typical notion of a tower to a vertical and horizontal neighborhood, where there is no beginning or end — a continuous built environment that relates without obstacles to the nature within and outside the site,” said the founder of Carazo Arquitectura.
The site’s existing forest sits at the center of the plan, and rather than clearing it to fit a standard footprint, the design lets the trees dictate the architecture — the building bends into an oval configuration around them, preserving ecological continuity across the plot. NOA takes a related position with Berdenesh Hills in southern Albania, another project that rejects the tower typology outright in favor of a terraced neighborhood built to preserve its site’s forest canopy rather than remove it.
The massing itself was generated by geometrizing photographic profiles of El Picacho and the San Salvador volcano, taken directly from the site, translating the mountain contours into the roofline while guiding orientation, shading, and volumetric carve-outs.
Program and scale shaped the form further. Commercial volumes facing the city are kept to one or two stories — the height at which retail and gastronomy actually function — creating a pedestrian scale at street level before the building rises into the residential volumes above.
At the base, a commercial and gastronomic district named Quadra operates as an extension of the surrounding city, with restaurants, retail, and public plazas activating the ground level. Collective life continues upward through coworking spaces, gardens, terraces, and wellness facilities distributed vertically — a strategy that shares its logic with MVRDV’s Grand Ballroom in Tirana, which stacks an arena, hotel, and housing into one continuous volume rather than separating them into distinct buildings.
Environmental performance is embedded directly into the spatial organization. Carved voids form shaded courtyards and sky gardens that provide passive cooling suited to the tropical climate, while the amenity strategy is structured around El Salvador’s ecological biomes — drier zones informing the lobbies, humid biomes the central communal spaces, water-based ecosystems the pools and wellness areas.
The real test of LTR1 isn’t whether a roofline generated from volcano photographs reads as poetic — it’s whether Tropical Vertical Urbanism survives as a framework once applied to a site that doesn’t come with a ready-made forest at its center to justify the whole premise, since the entire logic depends on a landscape condition most urban infill sites simply won’t have.
LTR1 by Carazo Arquitectura | Location: Nuevo Cuscatlán, El Salvador — Status: Unbuilt, 2024 — Key materials: concrete, vegetated surfaces