Two of the first places ever listed as Unesco World Heritage sites were, perhaps surprisingly, both in Ecuador; the Galápagos Islands and Quito. The Galápagos we can understand: the giant tortoises, the iguanas, the penguins, Charles Darwin, an isolated tropical world. Quito — a city so high up it makes you nauseous, edged with apparently undistinguished office blocks and heavy traffic — is perhaps less scrutable.
But this city of around 3mn inhabitants also has a remarkable historic centre, far better preserved than many in Latin America. It has churches that appear to be lined with solid gold, sun-shaded colonial-era courtyards and Baroque towers that look like they’re dusted in icing sugar. And it has a wealth of modernist architecture, made by a generation of central European émigrés.
In the foothills of the Andes, at almost 3,000 metres above sea level (only La Paz is a higher capital), you might think Quito would not be seeking still more height. Yet for just over a decade, the development firm Uribe Schwarzkopf has been adding a succession of high-rise apartment buildings of remarkable ambition. Well-known names including BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), MAD, MVRDV, Tatiana Bilbao, Jean Nouvel and Moshe Safdie have been commissioned to inject Quito with a dose of architectural adrenaline. The developer has completed more than 200 projects in Quito and the fruits of its labours are now transforming the city skyline.
Founded by architect Tommy Schwarzkopf in 1973, the developer inherits a tradition of Ecuadorean modernism influenced by central Europe. The country saw a wave of immigration from what was then Czechoslovakia, after the Munich Agreement in 1938 and during the second world war, as Jewish citizens fled the Nazis. They found a small, quiet city defined by its colonial heritage and introduced a crisp new architectural style — one from a country that had been revelling in redefining its cityscapes post-Austro-Hungarian liberty, until they were crushed again by war.
Quito’s centre is still punctuated by remarkable buildings and monuments from this era.
Casa Kohn, built by architect Karl Kohn for his family in 1949, is an exquisite time capsule of Czech modernism, with hints of Adolf Loos and Josef Frank tempered with tropical influences from Brazilian architecture. The vivid blue and white 1952 Olga Fisch Folklore Flagship Store, named after the Hungarian designer and crafts collector and designed by Czech émigré Otto Glass Pick, is also still open.
Tommy Schwarzkopf himself is the grandson of Czech émigrés who arrived in Quito in 1939; the legacy is one both he and his son Joseph are well aware of, and have even self-published a book about Ecuador’s Czech modernists.
If that modernist influx was a significant moment in the globalisation of Quito’s architecture, Uribe Schwarzkopf’s portfolio suggests another. The starchitect-designed buildings introduce a flashier, more exhibitionist style amid Quito’s still subdued skyline.
“Over the past 12 years we’ve tried to bring great architects in to make Quito a modern city,” says Joseph Schwarzkopf. “We’re trying to create a skyline, an identity.”
Tommy says that Quito has long seen “the middle class abandoning the historic centre”; it has become less and less desirable as a residential hub as buildings fall into disrepair. In the early 2000s there were nearly half a million Ecuadoreans living in Spain and not many fewer in the US. “They and their children who were raised in Europe became used to a more European, Mediterranean lifestyle, living in the city, going to restaurants and cafés, walking rather than using cars all the time,” Joseph says. The developer’s urban apartment blocks are designed to cater for a returning cohort, but also, they suggest, to attract them back to invest in their homeland.
Architect and theorist Christian Parreno, a professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, questions the strategy. “There are people returning from Europe,” he says, “but not at a big scale and those that return tend to be young. Even if the prices look affordable, they are very expensive for younger people who have yet to establish themselves.” Rather than the developments forging their own identity, he adds, “They are very much influenced by a US lifestyle. Big, open kitchens and living spaces, pools, lots of amenities.”
One of the developer’s most impressive new structures is the 32-storey Iqon (completed in 2022), a tower composed of a stack of boxes twisted into a spiral. Designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his practice BIG, it overlooks the large, central La Carolina Park. It is undoubtedly striking, and the rotating arrangement of box units are generous and uncompromised (except for the occasional massive concrete column poking through). But it does have more than a hint of Miami to it.
Large balconies with trees “allow the park to cross the street and climb up the building” Ingels says. Concrete-lined, the interiors have high ceilings and dramatic floor-to-ceiling glazing. BIG is also responsible for (the equally questionably named) Epiq, an elliptical tower split into two stepped, interlocking parts, with similar astonishing views of the surrounding hills.
In the Cumbaya neighbourhood to the east, Aquarela looks like a city within a city. It’s an undulating mass of strata, wrapping a series of courtyards and gardens filled with tropical plants. Wandering around, a vivid hummingbird appeared in a bough right next to my head. Aquarela was designed by Jean Nouvel, the architect behind the striking Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Qatar National Museum. Clad in stone and engulfed by greenery, it appears almost like the part-excavated remains of another civilisation and evokes experiments in housing from the late 1960s.
There is such a wide spectrum of architecture here that some, perhaps inevitably, is less to my taste. Chinese architects MAD seem to be trying a little too hard with Qondesa, a kind of swaying, slightly queasy tower. Its fluid concrete frame creates a bent cage through which balconies squeeze. Moshe Safdie’s Qorner tower, with its eroded, pixelated profile, hovers somewhere between intriguing and overbearing. But the nearby Qanvas, a slim tower designed by local architects Diez and Muller looks very fine indeed — a throwback to the slick mid-century modernism of the city centre.
Despite this starchitect presence, Quito is not Manhattan and La Carolina is not Central Park. Prices for apartments range from $1,800-$3,200 per sq m. “You can buy one of our apartments on the park for $100,000,” says Joseph. The top flight offerings in Iqon and Aquarela are around half a million US dollars. “We can’t sell at prices like London or New York,” says Joseph. “A legacy for the city,” is driving the strategy, he claims.
I ask Parreno if locals see these projects as gentrification. “In a way, yes,” he says, “but the problem in Quito is that we have a very thin middle class; [those] that would be responsible for gentrification [are] not really here in numbers.”
Joseph, however, points to the opening of the new Metro line and the arrival of more European-style cafés as markers of how the city is becoming more cosmopolitan. “Building in the centre means we don’t have to build huge parking lots and can make denser, more walkable cityscapes,” he says. “It is becoming a 15-minute city again.” I wonder if this is perhaps a little hopeful. It is a hilly, traffic-clogged city; those with money seem to be driving.
There are continuing questions too about security. Ecuador had historically been a haven from the drug cartels that plague neighbouring Peru and Colombia, but over the past few years the port of Guayaquil, an eight-hour drive to the south, had become a hub for exporting cocaine, bringing with it a bout of crime and unrest. Uribe Schwarzkopf has been busy there too, with buildings by Dutch architects MVRDV and Philippe Starck, but Guayaquil remains a volatile city. Quito may have calmed since the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in 2023 but its peacefulness appears fragile.
Perhaps working with prestigious international architects provides a note of optimism. “On the one hand you have to credit them with building at scale and at height and to a real quality,” says New York-based Ecuadorean architect Felipe Correa. But, he says, “the typologies offer one particular lifestyle: urban, cosmopolitan, high-rise. These are essentially gated communities and it would be good to see them experiment a little more.”
These towers, much as they are striking, could be anywhere, Correa says, “but you have to also credit them with using design as marketing; it raises consciousness of the importance of architecture for the city.” Parreno adds that Uribe Schwarzkopf’s huge portfolio is also training a generation of high-end construction workers. It also has a scheme to train more women; 10 per cent of workers on its sites are women.
Though international names are the most prominent, Uribe Schwarzkopf is also tapping into local architectural talent. Much of the most interesting architecture in the world is currently happening in Latin America, including remarkable urban interventions in the informal hillside settlements of Colombia, Gloria Cabral’s delicately wrought work in Paraguay, Freddy Mamani’s exuberant postmodernism in Bolivia, and the enigmatic work of Smiljan Radic and Pezo von Ellrichshausen in Chile. For a small city, the architecture scene in Quito is in rude health: architects Felipe Escudero, Leppanen Anker, and Diez and Muller are all working with Uribe Schwarzkopf.
Few developers have been so committed to their home cities as to commission such a vast vista of landmark architecture. But with this impact come questions, not least if Uribe Schwarzkopf is building itself a virtual monopoly on high-end development.
However, in tracing a line back to the mid 20th century central European architects, Uribe Schwarzkopf has continued the city’s lineage of global exchange. Quito remains a fascinating city with layers of history: these huge projects add one more; boosting the skyline of this high-altitude city, whose name roughly translates to “the centre of the world”.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic
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