area 115 | concrete

architect: Giancarlo Mazzanti

location: La Ladera, Colombia

year: 2007

The aim is to establish a project that enables the biggest amount of urban connections and the development of public spaces. To achieve this, there are several proposals such as enabling the roofing of the building as public space, empowering meeting places and developing viewing-points which overlook the city. Zonal Equipment – Management Strategy. The model allows the usage of communal facilities as small open spaced theatres, viewing-points, small plazas and sport fields when placing them on the rooftop, leaving plain borders as vacuums inside the lot and thus enabling their external use. We propose a management program between the EDU and the Culture Secretariat called “Film, Music and Theatre in my quarter”. This will allow the usage of the above mentioned roofing as auditoriums so that every two weeks a cultural show can be taken to each quarter.
The place presents itself as a green viewing-point and a territory of connections between the lower and upper zones of the quarter, which are actually used as areas for sport activities. The project we propose will redefine the existing paths and empower the creation of shaded plazas on the library’s rooftop. As a result, it will not only multiply the connections because the building will be an obliged path, but it will create more and more events as people intertwine in the public spaces provided around the library. More than a transformation, we want to re-interpret the space so that it can be recreated into a symbolic place for the city. The project will consist of a system conformed by three contained, rotated, squared modules that turn, adapting themselves to the landscape and the view and one curved module that unites and relates the other modules and that, in addition, allows other uses. The project is a landscape that gives the urban geography continuity through the paths and the building of public space on the rooftop, a landscape constituted by paths, theatres or inclined plazas, a spatial network with connection multiplicity and meeting places.

Medellín the “educated” city
by Mario Tancredi

Medellín, ciudad segregada. This is the lucid and tremendous description which has accompanied the action of an extraordinary political season led by Fajardo, mayor in the years from 2003 to 2007, which has profound social roots, also in the uneven terrain of the Aburrà valley, on which the city has been founded and consolidated over three hundred and fifty years. It is today the second metropolis of the country, with more than 3 million inhabitants. Medellin has reached our days with multiple fractures: the deep gullies which cut the steep slopes trace thin frontiers between poor and decrepit neighbourhoods, thus creating true enclaves. Rivalries, pandilllas, carteles. Other kinds of fractures, certainly physical, but with the subtle bitter taste of exclusion can be perceived, also in this case thanks to the terrain, among these very poor neighbourhoods and the city centre below: that handful of skyscrapers evoke power, riches, possibilities. Inaccessible socially, especially from the high altitudes, from the districts where it seems that “formal” spaces and architectures cannot germinate, which the networks and services of the city fail to reach. Where makeshift buildings, resentment, decrepit urban tissue and violence begins.
“Medellin, la mas educada” is the slogan of the Fajardo administration. The city which aspires to the title of most educated is the one that has resolved to invest in the fractures, the incisions, the wounds. Deciding to work on the borders, reconnecting physical and social tissues, launching a true urban revolution. The equipment? An attentive study of the most important town planning transformations and good practices, their regulatory implications and design solutions; an ability to reinterpret and update the positive experience launched in Bogotà, with a clear awareness that the successes achieved in that city could be carried even further. And finally, the existence of a group of professionals who have been able to immediately translate the political agenda into a rich and articulated urban operation: agile, immediate, fertile in its implications and modes of expression, at the same time capable of solving demanding social issues.
In a few years Medellin has become a building site and at the same time a workshop: infrastructural networks, public spaces, new architectural types. Architects from all over the country have gathered here: from Rogelio Salmona to the youngest generations, including the outstanding intermediate generation to which we must recognize the merit of having succeeded in exporting the “model” to the international stage. Work has been done on several fronts; one of them consisting of five big libraries which, through public architecture competition, are relied upon to confirm the new “educational” political vocation defined by the mayor. The operation has been anything but banal or suggesting easy populistic messages. The education it refers to is not only the scholastic. The segregada city had to be re-educated, above all to a pacific coexistence. A challenge for the traditional typological box of the library building, which has thus been entrusted with new functions, re-elaborated as a space for cohabitation and community centre, confirmed by the new function attributed to them on an urban scale, as hinge and guarantor of new a new arrangement in a difficult social coexistence.
It has been a matter of substantial investments, also due to the decision to in any case build high quality architectures – beyond possible and legitimate reservations as to specific solutions – in weak, difficult and poor contexts affected by a subtle inaccessibility of dignified, formal public areas. Spaces that invite people to spend time together, to socialize. Today they have even become tourist attractions, and citizens who would never have climbed the steep ridges of the threatening slopes visit them. Moreover, micro-projects are constantly developed around the libraries, something which confirms their role of urban detonators. Each of the five chosen sectors feature different types of fractures: between income brackets, urban tissue and terrain, between the different buildings and urban morphologies, strategically placed in the nodes of the public transport networks and thus becoming true poles on a metropolitan, and not only local, scale. Two of the five libraries have been designed by Giancarlo Mazzanti.
The España library, in the sector of Santo Domingo, has enjoyed exceptional media exposure, almost becoming an icon – also thanks to its primordial features, the imposing character and expressive force in an equally intense environmental and urban context – , of the transformations of Medellin. The León Greiff in the Ladera district presented in this article imposes itself with more subtle materials and forms. Standing halfway down the slope, it seems intent on setting the urban fractures right, rising to become a new belvedere and site of reconcilement, placed as it is in the middle of a Medellin that can never avoid strong views and scenarios, whether from above down or vice versa. Perhaps it also succeeds in reconciling the role of architecture itself, always hovering between the self-referential temptation of communicating itself, and the ability to merge with, capture and interpret the demanding metropolitan spaces.