Rogelio Salmona’s El Parque Residences are not a housing project but rather an idea of the city. It is a way of bringing together spatio-temporal elements scattered throughout Bogotá to re-present them as a recognizable and therefore habitable unit, within which an idea of the city and society is formed. All of this is presented within a notion of space, which translates into a void surrendered to the city, through the project popularly known as Las Torres del Parque.
The thesis of this work takes on greater meaning if we recall Pessoa’s phrase, quoted by Salmona himself, which states, [1] “The landscape is not what we see, but what we are.” The depth of this thesis guides the thesis, given that the entire investigation seeks to demonstrate how the landscape is life itself in Salmona’s work.
As a hypothesis, it is assumed that the landscape is not something distant, but rather something that invites an experience, where the individual visual event is complemented by a shared tactile experience. The landscape in Salmona is always a collective experience framed by nature. It never perceives a space for the subject, but rather a prevalent concern for the space that houses the community, the family, the neighborhood, and the city; all of these interconnected through spaces organized to surround and be surrounded by the enjoyment of urban life naturalized by trees, plants, hills, and modified topography.
The research begins with a survey of Bogotá’s urban environment, recognizing how the roads and large buildings of a misinterpreted modernity generate a city of autonomous, dispersed, and segregated parts, where pedestrians find it difficult to move freely. It also recognizes a Bogotá in which geography is no longer visible and where public space is a remnant of spontaneous development that has benefited private property. In this first part, the great influence of Le Corbusier on Salmona’s idea of the city is understood, especially through the Pilot Plan proposed for Bogotá, in which Salmona works and in which a good part of the notions of the city are proposed that he would later take up in a different form. This approach and distancing with his teacher is present in many moments of the study, given that in the project a certain modernity is always perceived that cannot be disassociated from tradition. While for Le Corbusier Bogotá had to be remade by knocking down what is on the flat part on which the historic center of the city is supported, for Salmona the city must maintain its memory and must be united by means of the eastern hills that border the urban area, which, having never been touched, are presented as an opportunity to integrate the city by means of green spaces and paths that follow the course of the rivers that have forgotten and deteriorated the future of the city. Salmona’s proposal to restore the riverbeds with undulating promenades then emerges, of which only the so-called “Environmental Axis” is successfully executed. The idea of the city found in Salmona’s drawings reflects an urban life integrated into the mountains, in which public space is organized to enclose a totality that attempts to unite a series of cultural and representative points of the city that are still disconnected and therefore hidden from the public. In this sense, the El Parque Residences begin to emerge as an urban gateway inviting one to ascend and approach the mountain, a fact that transforms the scale of the project, turning it into a recognizable point in the city, transcending it to a more monumental reality than that which characterizes a residential complex.
In the second part, it is demonstrated how the idea of Salmona’s project, beyond being a housing proposal, is an idea of a city in which the void is generated to bring the exterior into the homes by means of terraces and interconnected squares, while outside, in the city, the enclosed Bogotá life is brought out, by means of cafes and communal activity spaces arranged on the first floors of a city that, in addition to ceding 75% of private space as public, manages to eliminate a road to turn it into a large ascending promenade that integrates nearby parks and monuments. The aim is to make a house open to the landscape and a city open to pedestrians.
In this project’s intention, the idea of a home brought to the exterior generates a succession of flat floors (terraces) interconnected by a system of open spaces that organize the urban complex on top of parking spaces buried beneath a platform. The project then appears as a pause in the city, like a void surrendered to the life of the city. It presents itself at the intersection of two major avenues, like a large corner where the mountain is invited into the city, representing a moment in which the car, a constant protagonist of the city, disappears and gives way to the pedestrian in a silence where the Bogotá landscape is experienced.
Finally, in the last part of the research, a series of influences from modern masters and pre-Hispanic architecture are recognized in Salmona’s project; all fused behind an architecture where the main strategy is to achieve a spatial suture with the environment. This point demonstrates how Bogotá’s spatial discontinuity is re-presented as a continuity made of space. In this project, the void appears as a notion that echoes aspects of Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, but above all, of Mesoamerica and Inca architecture. All of these influences prior to the project appear as part of the architect’s past, which becomes an urban presence through the intertwined space with nature.
Inhabited courtyards as outdoor homes similar to those in Aalto’s Muuratsalo, a diagonal that breaks the interior space by bringing the outside in, as in Wright’s Cascade House, spaces understood as time through walkways reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Lean Lake House, and the use of human soils as terraces, as in Oyantaitambo or Machu Picchu, constitute a series of strategies that demonstrate how the project attempts to interweave domestic and urban life with each other and with their surroundings. It is then understood that the concavity of the void proposed by Salmona is a way of uniting the past and the future through an idea of landscape and landscaping. The aim is to present space as a shared form of identity for Bogotá and its citizens, both shaped by the mountains and the savannah that surround them.
This idea of the horizon, of being above the ground and below the sky, appears with the sun, which, as part of a dance where the body of the passerby walks alongside the movement of the star in short and long cycles, generates a changing and vivid geography in which the sun rises with the mountains and dies with the river that lies in the savannah. Both moments are revealed and highlighted by the concave space formed by the project.
In the Residencias el Parque complex, the fragments of sky and ground, veiled by the history of Bogotá’s urban development, unite in a totality where the citizen becomes geography and the mountains become leisure rituals devoted to the city. In this urban piece, assembled from a simple housing project (essentially for private use), the greatest importance is given to public space, understood as a system of the project at all scales. The void, understood as a form of order, generates a formal structure from which the implantation, form, volumetry and supporting structure of the project emerge. The parts and the whole of the complex are formed by a force that tends towards the concave, like a form of space that becomes empty to be filled by activity and nature. Thus, the void is recognized not as a single totality, but as a transition of thresholds that articulate the public and the private through approaches and distances produced by different nuances of the communal as an intermediate. In this way, an open and close dwelling and city are allowed in common union, both willing to highlight the near and far geographical fact. Something unique in Bogotá to date.
Salmona’s project is, then, an idea of city and society reflected in a threshold made to receive the landscape. The project is understood as a clearing in the forest, as a point where everything converges.
Thus, Salmona’s work is recognized not as a beautiful, nostalgic form of the past, but as a living way of understanding and creating the city of the future. In the project, one recognizes a desire to open the closed space of Bogotá to the landscape. One understands an idea of emptiness where elevated concavities become dwellings that are reached by the landscape and the sun, while outside, in the city, concavities appear in the ground, creating an aviary space that opens up the dense and congested Bogotá center, presenting it as a system of terraces where body, mind, and spirit are cultivated.
Thus, a recognizable form of unified geography and life emerges. In this spatial structure shaped by Salmona, order is given to the lives of those who inhabit it, and meaning is given to the landscape by seeing it, touching it, walking through it, and experiencing it. The enclosed, centripetal way of life of the Bogotá native is proposed as a centrifugal way of inhabiting the territory that encompasses the project and is seen through its sinuous concavities.
The research captures moments in Salmona’s life and some of his projects located in areas surrounding the contemporary El Parque Residences. In each of them, the same political will to democratize and open up urban space, interconnecting it through views and walks, is perceived.
The quest is to construct an inhabited void with a collective idea of the horizon, an idea of landscape that allows the community and Bogotá’s nature to be recognized and brought together through a concavity that becomes the horizon. The project is a geography made alive and, at the same time, an inhabited horizon.
[1]Fernando Pessoa quoted by Rogelio Salmona In: CONVERSATIONS WITH ROGELIO SALMONA. National University of Colombia. Master’s Degree in Architecture. December 1, 2004. 08/15 Landscape. Transcription Salmona Seminar December 1, 2004. Original Cassette Recording. Transcriber: Diego Origua. Review and Correction as of 12/17/08: Sasha Londoño. Page 7.
