medellín, santo domingo and la ladera

(Perhaps not entirely successful but at least well intentioned self-portrait with reflected Medellín land- and skyscape in green opaque glass through punched openings in faux stone wall whilst using the internet. Photograph by the author.)

The city of Medellín has entered an important transitional phase. In the last few years it has rebounded from its narco-traffic legacy (this was the home of Pablo Escobar, after all) and it is now reaching out to educate and incorporate the broad, sloping margins of impoverished neighborhoods. Architecture is at the heart of the city’s recuperative campaign…not in an environmentally deterministic mindset, mind you, but in one that is playfully mindful of figure and ground's interplay. The city is employing Colombia’s architects to revamp its public spaces with formal ambition and spatial sensitivity. The crusade is ongoing at the local and regional scales. As the city proper (financial center, civic center, universities, etc) extends north-south along the Río Medellín, here “regional scale” means down-in-the-valley and “local scale” means up-in-the- flanking-hills.

So far Medellín boasts five local-scale interventions. The two I show here are designed by Mazzanti Arquitectos, the office I visited in Bogotá. Their full names are, respectively: “Parque Biblioteca España en Santo Domingo Savio” and “Parque Biblioteca León de Greiff en La Ladera.” The appellation “parque biblioteca” most comfortably translates as community center. Instead of serving as passive repositories of textual knowledge (although they do harbor small collections) the buildings' main focus is housing a myriad of programs, resources, and services dedicated to all ages...small children being the most vocal.

Informal developments are relentless in their cellularization of space into semi-private and private claims. As such, they can approach modular homogeneity with a density in plan that renders it difficult to discern the circulatory network allowing them to function. In such an environment, a carved and carefully cared for public space coaxes out the public with capillary action. Projects such as Mazzanti’s, positioned in the thick of the informal mash, are fed directly by the pressure of the surrounding urban density. The interventions do not structure the surrounding built fabric so much as redirect its flows and concentrations, rending discreet reconstructive scars that heal into continuities over time.

Parque Biblioteca España en Santo Domingo Savio insets three immense geometricized stones high on a hillside overlook. The top image places the buildings in their social context. Note their modest, tip-of-the-iceberg massing versus the glowering monumental masks visible from below (see image at left). Several security guards--a common sight in Colombian cities--and a few waist-high safety rails are all that protect the parque biblioteca’s property. Its wood-floored main entry rests adjacent to the existing road. Across the street is the church of Santo Domingo and, above it, a sheltered ball court.

The image to the left looks upslope to the chamfered boxes. On a hazy day, the mottled black stones fade into the mountain’s silhouette. As one approaches by the newly installed “metrocable” (also highlighted in red), corners crisp and details clarify. If the library seems more comfortable than usual with my graphics it is because the initial scheme was presented in model form as three glowing red resin blocks.

The metrocable ride is surreal. The cars’ forms mimic those of the library and confuse scale, distance, and function. The system is minimal in some senses and massive in others. Each car is intimate, seating only eight people, and there is no continuous track or trail that needs to be cleared on the ground for the line to pass through. Terrestrial impact is limited to enormous cylindrical footprints and a progression of mammoth station stops. Floating between these implants one drifts quietly, dangling past the (clearly visible) private daily lives of all the conglomerate below.

The center image’s downhill stance elucidates the project’s immediate contextual relationships, conveys the breadth of the landscape beyond, and relates the stones’ idiosyncratic creasing to their interior tectonics. The buildings climbing the slope to the right (a church and ball court), while no architectural gems, mark the neighborhood’s communal center. A clear departure from the local architectural vocabulary, the library blocks’ stolid opacity squeezes the panoramic spectacle to their interstices, where a strong prospect-and-refuge effect begs photographic exploitation (see link to New York Times article below).

The stones’ roof lines reveal them as folded, suspended sheaths. Inside, canted walls whitewash interior towers with reflected daylight. Windows are minimal and placed as much for graphic effect as to account for sight lines. The buildings’ surprising lack of transparency intensifies their figural quality and illusive solidity. Even as the walls’ thinness and luminous interiors belie their ostensible material sincerity, the resultant spaces’ emphatic interiority enhances their union to the landscape.

Finally, the image to the right depicts a stone gabion retaining wall upslope, the main platform above, and an entrance to the partially sunken socle ahead. A layered forest of steel tubes lets air and light into the sub-platform plenum that conjoins the boxes beyond without undermining its solidity.

In Parque Biblioteca León de Greiff en La Ladera, Mazzanti Arquitectos address a similar brief to Santo Domingo by likewise anchoring three discreet boxes in a common armature.

However, whereas Santo Domingo looms with iconic imagery at high visibility, La Ladera hunkers into the landscape. It combs the topography over its head with a formal discipline bordering on Modernist orthodoxy. The building is more intent on views from within than from without. The boxes are view-finders that don’t have to do much searching.

The top image—courtesy of Mazzanti Architects—catches the building at its most charismatic. Below that, the image to the left peers over the library’s right shoulder as it hunkers into the terrain’s broad slope, tracing a contour line while its constituents slide forward out of their holsters. The slope here is much more gradual than at Santo Domingo and its green space more generously inhabitable.

The composition’s concavity catalyzes voyeuristic interrelationships. The image at center looks from one box to its neighbors’ similarly split-level condition. As is also visible in the image to the left, the uppermost deck gently slopes down to enjoy the modules’ formal frontal gestalt’s framing and shading potential.

Finally, the image to the right faces the entrance from within the communal arm. To the left is the ground, to the right are two boxes are highlighted in red, and from above the sunlight filters through young palms rising toward the new ground.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/travel/12nextstop.html?8dpc
http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/hiperbarrio/