IQON

Quito, Ecuador

Aerial over Quito with IQON at the centre, La Carolina Park and its sports fields alongside.

Oblique view of the stacked terraces, zigzagging concrete balconies planted with small trees.

Looking up the corner of IQON as the rotated concrete floor plates step outward against the sky.

Facade detail: projecting concrete balconies with glass balustrades and planting at every level.

Apartment interior with a figure seated at a full-height window, planted terrace and the city beyond.

IQON rising above the Quito skyline under heavy cloud, surrounded by mid-rise blocks.

Rooftop pool and loungers between raw concrete columns, the city visible through full-height glazing.

Bedroom opening through a full-height window onto a planted terrace, mountains on the horizon.

The facade from below, balcony edges and planting layered against glass.

Axonometric of a single terrace unit: concrete floor and soffit with a large tree in the planted roof.

Axonometric of the terrace unit with a medium tree in the planted roof.

Axonometric of the terrace unit with low planting in the roof.

IQON

Quito, Ecuador

Year: 2022
Area: 55,000 m²
Type: Mixed-use tower
Client: Uribe Schwarzkopf
With: BIG
Status: Built

IQON stands 32 storeys above La Carolina Park, the tallest building in Quito and BIG’s first work in South America. Completed in 2022, it holds 55,000 m² of apartments and offices at the park’s edge.

The tower is built from a single stacked unit, rotated floor by floor. Each turn opens a terrace and angles the living spaces toward either the park below or Pichincha to the west. What reads from a distance as a pixelated mass is, up close, a set of individual rooms each given its own outlook and its own piece of open ground.

The structure is left as it was cast. Raw concrete carries the building inside and out, with planting held on every terrace so the facade thickens and greens as it matures. In a city built largely of painted render, leaving the material unfinished was the point.