Markus Lagler

EpiBlock

EpiBlock explores how large-scale traffic infrastructure can be transformed from an urban barrier into a foundation for new public life. Situated at a major circular highway interchange in Bogotá, Colombia, the project addresses a condition common to contemporary cities: infrastructure optimized for vehicular flow that fragments the city, producing inaccessible and uninhabitable urban voids. Rather than removing or concealing this infrastructure, EpiBlock accepts it as a fundamental urban condition and investigates how architecture can work with it to create new spatial and social connections.

The project introduces a continuous pedestrian layer above the existing road network, establishing a new ground that reconnects previously separated neighborhoods at a key urban location near Bogotá’s financial and employment center. This elevated level functions as an urban field rather than a singular object. It enables architecture, landscape, and public programs to occupy space above infrastructure instead of being displaced by it, transforming residual infrastructural space into active, inhabitable territory. Pedestrian connectivity, green spaces, public amenities, and housing are integrated into a layered framework that allows density and infrastructure to coexist while maintaining a human-scale spatial experience.

EpiBlock builds on research into megablocks and megastructures, reinterpreting these historically ambitious but often problematic typologies. While megablocks promised efficiency and integrated urban life, many became monolithic, repetitive, and poorly connected to their surroundings. In contrast, EpiBlock reconceives the megablock as an open, relational system: a network of interconnected platforms, pathways, and buildings that mediates between infrastructure, public space, and habitation. Buildings emerge from a thickened, artificial ground that integrates structure, circulation, and landscape, reinforcing the idea of architecture as a continuous spatial system rather than an isolated object.

The architectural strategy draws on early twentieth-century ideas of urban layering, including the separation of pedestrian and vehicular movement and speculative sectional city models. These concepts are translated into a contemporary context shaped by Bogotá’s rapid growth, infrastructural pressure, and social inequality, making the city an ideal testing ground for this approach.

To develop and evaluate this complex spatial logic, the project was designed from an eye-level perspective using a custom tool developed in Unity. This workflow allowed spatial decisions to be made directly from the viewpoint of the pedestrian, linking large-scale urban structure to human perception. Through this method, EpiBlock positions architecture as a mediator between infrastructure, landscape, and everyday life, proposing a layered urban model that transforms infrastructural division into connectivity and public ground.