Colombia

The name Rogelio Salmona is as familiar to Bogotá as Antonio Gaudi is to Barcelona. Even though he was born in Paris in 1929, Salmona was the native son of the Colombian capital and whose architectural identity then could be summed-up as a patchwork of ornate homes with inlaid Tudor-style woodwork. Greatly influenced by his early years in France, Salmona returned to Paris to train as a draftsman for the pioneer of modern architecture, Le Corbusier. He then set off to explore the world, incorporating many styles that would go on to define his future identity as an award-winning architect. According to the Rogelio Salmona Foundation, the buildings he designed “are not just an amazing union of projects, but more importantly, works of art.”

Medellín is Colombia’s second biggest urban center. The Medellín River bisects the city, which rises up along a sloping valley. Many of Medellín’s impoverished neighborhoods are informal settlements located along the periphery. After a period of intense violence and urban decay, the community voted for an independent civic movement, led by former mayor Sergio Fajardo, committed to urban renewal and social inclusion.
‘Cultural Connective Spaces’ are the facilities that connect people to educational resources; in Medellín, they take form primarily as Library Parks, or hybrid cultural and educational centers. ‘Local Connective Spaces’ are the plazas, parks, bridges, and promenades that informally bring inhabitants together with one another and with other neighborhoods. There are currently five local master plans in Medellín, which are designed and administered by the EDU, the municipal Urban Development Wing. Alejandro Echeverri, former Director of Urban Projects under Fajardo, told me in an interview that, in a geographical sense, these strings of public spaces could be thought of as “the central nervous system” of the once-neglected and divided neighborhoods. To improve mobility, the projects link pedestrian space with bridges, ramps, and stairways. Environmental hazards like unstable waterways are remediated and converted into public promenades. For safe and active community gathering, they include plazas, terraces, and amphitheaters. And where critical infrastructural spaces are lacking, the EDU builds recreational facilities and police stations along the master plan trajectory.

Simón Vélez is well known for having developed a variety of projects using bamboo. What is less known how many paths he has had to travel to be able to carry out such developments. Vélez calls bamboo the vegetable steel. It is an economical, renewable, extremely resilient, easily available material, capable of being used by people with very different building skills. And despite all these advantages, he has had to undergo indescribable struggles every single time he has tried to use it. He has worked for rich clients in order to subsidize himself and create new knowledge that can be applied when working poor clients. He himself has tested innovations, such as the introduction of concrete into the nodes to improve the structural capacity of the weakest point in the system.