le corbusier, project for the plan director (1950): first...

Part two

BOGOTA

Le Corbusier, project for the Plan Director (1950): First and second stages of execution at metropolitan scale. © FLC Archivo Pizano.

60 Le Corbusier in Bogotá: Precisions around the Master Plan

Bogota, 1940-1950: Towards modernizationAlberto Saldarriaga Roa

The city of Bogota transformed itself radically throughout the 20th century. At the beginning of the century, it still conserved its colonial appearance and was just initiating the route to-wards the improvement of the conditions of its public ser-vices, of the collective transportation, the communications, and in general the quality of life of at least one sector of his population. An embryonic idea of modernization was present in those attempts. It advanced gradually and acquired a spe-cial strength towards 1930, when the national government, then in the hands of the Liberal Party, adopted it as an official purpose. In the following fifteen years the modernizing spirit attempted to take root in diverse sectors of the national life:

public administration, education, health, and culture, among others. The small intellectual and artistic groups of the time inclined towards the leftist ideas and watched with somewhat delayed interest the proposals of the European and North American vanguards. The private sector, impelled by the ad-vances of the capitalism, found in the bank, industry, com-merce, and entertainment, horizons of modernization, and approached them. Therefore, a bicephalous conception of modernization and progress became established, one liber-alizing, the other conservative. The country’s turn towards the conservatism after 1945 discarded the socializing content of the previous governments and wanted to strengthen the

modernizing approach of the private world, visible, among other things, in the works of engineering and architecture. Between 1940 and 1950, Bogota had a considerable increase of population. The 1938 census gave an approxi-mated number of 330,000 inhabitants; in 1951 it registered 715,000. The urban plans of that period show a city of an elon-gated shape, from south to north, on the side of the eastern mountains and still distant from the Río Bogotá. The growth of the city during this decade is manifested in its accentuated prolongation towards the north end, a minor stretch to the south end, and some urbanized concentrations on the west-ern edge. The streetcars’ routes and some of the important roads, like the 7th Carrera, Caracas Avenue, and the Avenue of the Americas, connected the urban fabric and propitiated their development.1

Bogota’s urban landscape was, according to photographs of the period, one of a medium size city of low height, sur-rounded by the untamed nature of eastern mountains and the broad extension of the high plateau. The tallest constructions were located in the banking area of the Jiménez de Quesada Avenue and the green spaces of Centenary Park, Indepen-dence Park and—greatest of all—the National Park, stood out in this landscape. In the residential neighborhoods built after 1930 there was the development of a domestic architecture, the “English style”, that has characterized the north sector of the city since then. In publications of the time it is possible to appreciate different images of this landscape.2 Le Corbusier visited Bogota before and after the disturbances of the 9th of April of 1948. The city that he visited in 1951 was not the same than the one he got to know in his first stay; the country was not the same either. The political atmosphere, rarefied

Office of the Regulator Plan (OPR), Fi-ve-Year Plan, street-widening, Avenida Norte Quito Sur, and the placement of Paloquemao market plaza, 1951. © A-D Archivo de Bogotá 201-001-23

61Bogota, 1940-1950: Towards modernization | Alberto Saldarriaga Roa

after the murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, should have mani-fested itself, one way or another, in the reception of its work. The signs of destruction in Bogota’s center were too visible to be ignored. Did Le Corbusier perceive those changes? Did they influence the final version of the plan?

The visualized modernization

The evident signs of the modernization of the city between 1940 and 1950 were not abundant, but some of them were quite significant. The celebration, in 1938, of the fourth cente-nary of the foundation of the city had already motivated some important advances, one of them putting into operation the aqueduct of Vitelma, the first really modern aqueduct in the history of the city. The works inaugurated in that year included schools, parks, sport facilities, some housing neighborhoods for workers and employees, and a quite complete treatment plan of the eastern edge of the center, planned by Karl Brun-ner, who led practically all the realized works. With the University City, outlined by Leopoldo Rother and Fritz Karsen, an integral plan of urban and architectural de-velopment of a large area of land located in the western pe-riphery of the city, the first step was taken toward the modern planning of Bogota. In the plan are evident certain echoes of the preceding academicism, especially the symmetrical dis-position of the roadways and the buildings. Actually, these were released as independent units and in each of the first ones, without giving up the principles of symmetry, an analo-gous but not identical formal treatment was applied; Rother explored some of Le Corbusier’s architectural principles in the entrance buildings and in the houses for professors and projected later, in 1945, the printing press building, an origi-nal and interesting work with a formal language completely dissimilar to his first works. The University City was a special urban planning exercise completely different from the devel-opment model applied to the rest of Bogota, based on build-ing “urbanizations” or “neighborhoods” by private business-men, consisting of the bounding of streets, blocks and lots, with the required intervals for parks and some communitar-

Photograph by Daniel Rodríguez of English-style houses in the Merced neighborhood, from Mendoza de Riaño, Consuelo, Bogotá the City, Ediciones Gamma – Consuelo Mendoza Ediciones, Bogotá, 2006.


ian services. Two municipal public institutions, the Instituto de Acción Social (Institute of Social Action) and the Caja de la Vivienda Popular (Bank of Popular Housing) and another institution of national order, the Banco Central Hipotecario (Central Hypothecary Bank) carried out several small hous-ing developments for workers and employees. Among these neighborhoods, the Model of the North, designed by Karl Brunner, excels. In the Model of the North are applied some norms derived from the Decree 380 of 1942, which formulat-ed and regulated the proposal of Barrios Populares Modelo (Popular Neighborhoods Model), a Colombian interpretation of the “neighborhood unit” followers of the ideas of the city planners Clarence Perry and Clarence Stein and already ap-plied in several American cities. The Instituto de Crédito Territorial (Institute of Territorial Credit) advanced the development and updating of that proposal and, in the neighborhood unit of Muzú, in 1948, applied a new city-planning model, the one of superblocks, interconnected externally by two unique vehicular roadways and in their interior by a network of pedestrian footpaths integrated to the open green areas. A few years later, in the neighborhood unit Quiroga, after the visits of Le Corbusier and Josep Lluís Sert, the model was perfected in some aspects, before being abandoned almost completely. In both works, the institute tried prefabrication systems using reinforced concrete pieces, in a first attempt of industrialization of the construction process. In another field of work, some incipient architecture and engineering companies quickly adopted the functional and technical principles of the international architecture and were in charge of realizing some commissions of some importance. Standouts among them are the company Cuéllar Serrano Gómez, established in 1939, which projected and constructed two significant buildings towards 1948: the Hospital of San Juan de Dios and the headquarters for the Caja Colombiana de Ahorros. A novel system of construction for concrete slab floors, the “reticular celulado”, (waffle slab) designed by Italian engineer Doménico Parma Marré, was applied in the first building. A steel structure imported from the United States was used in the second, the highest building of the city at that time, which accelerated its execution remarkably.

Le Corbusier and the modernizing spirit

Le Corbusier’s first visit was not fortuitous: he was invited ex-pressly in response to his offer to elaborate the urban plan of the city. Le Corbusier was recognized as a great master in the university and professional field, but he was little known in political and economic circles. His visit, aside from exciting the architecture students of the Universidad Nacional, was oriented to the motivation of the governmental and private sectors towards a radical modernization of the city modeled in agreement with his ideas. Three urban plans preceded the first visit of Le Corbusier. One of them was the roadway and zoning plan, elaborated in 1944 by engineer Alfredo Bateman during the mayoralty of Jorge Soto del Corral and known by the name Soto-Bateman. The Colombian Society of Architects formulated, the following year, a counter proposal that was not adopted, just like the roadway proposal published by Carlos Martinez Jiménez in Proa magazine in 1946. The three plans were modern in their own ways, but they did not respond strictly to a citywide proj-ect. It is not very clear whether some of the ideas contained in these plans influenced Le Corbusier’s proposal to any extent. The modern notion of the “plan” had spread as much from the academy as from the professional architects’ guild. The study of urbanism had been established in the School of Architecture of the Universidad Nacional since 1938. Its main impellers were Karl Brunner, Carlos Martinez Jiménez, and Herbert Ritter. The latter two of these adhered quickly to the ideas of modern urbanism and eventually distanced themselves from Brunner’s proposals, which were described as “academic”. It is significant that the magazine Proa—founded in 1946 by Martinez Jiménez, along with Jorge Arango Sanín and Manuel de Vengoechea, and dedicated to the subjects of “Urbanism, Architecture and Industry”— included in its first issue an article signed by the architects’ promotion of 1945, titled “For Bogota to be a modern city”, and that in the second issue, from September of that year, Jose de Recasens would write a article titled “The other Cor-busier”, in which he dealt with the painting and sculpture of the Swiss architect. Even more interesting is the third issue

of Proa, dedicated to the subject “Bogota can be a mod-ern city”, concentrated on the “re-urbanization of the central market place and of the 16 neighboring blocks”, an ambi-tious project of urban renovation that covered from 7th Street, in the south, to 11th Street, in the north, and from the 9th Carrera, to the east, until the 12th Carrera, in the west. The project was a set of repetitive high buildings, an extension block, resting on low platforms, with interior green spaces and a large park.3

From the proposal published by Proa it can be deduced that for its authors an appreciable portion of the historical center of Bogota was susceptible to being demolished, be-coming a fragment of a modern city. There was no mention of an interest in its patrimonial value. That attitude was charac-teristic of the modern approach regarding the transformation of old sectors that the same Le Corbusier had exemplified with his famous Plan Voisin for Paris. The encounter between the Swiss architect and his young Colombian colleagues had, then, affinities that facilitated the much more radical proposal of the Swiss architect for the future civic center of Bogota.

Bogota post-Corbusier

The set of factors previously described allows us to under-stand that at the time of Le Corbusier’s first visit to Bogota there already existed, in different political, academic, cultural, and business spheres, a favorable attitude towards modern-ization. It is significant to accentuate the importance of the facts that happened between 1947 and 1950, which affected not only the city but also the country. In the following decade, Bogota’s population increased explosively and in 1964 it reached 1,700,000 inhabitants, more than double the popu-lation in 1951. A good part of the population growth was due to the massive arrival of immigrants expelled from the rural areas by the political violence that reached levels of cruelty never before known in Colombia. During the dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957), two works of great urban-planning impact were com-pleted in the east-west axis: the Official Administrative Center

63Bogota, 1940-1950: Towards modernization | Alberto Saldarriaga Roa

and the El Dorado airport. The north freeway was built as an extension of Caracas Avenue. These works were not anticipat-ed in the definitive version of Le Corbusier’s plan, translated to practical terms by Wiener and Sert. The change of place of the civic center, from the center to the periphery of the city, was one of the signs of the abandonment of Le Corbusier’s proposal. The plan was retaken and modified some years later by the architects of the Planning Office of the city. After the dic-tatorship, the planning of the city acquired another course and a cascade of plans began that has concluded partially with the actual Plan of Territorial Ordering. The ghost of Le Corbusier has been present in all of them.

Alberto Saldarriaga Roa. Architect from the Faculty of Arts and the Univer-sidad Nacional de Colombia (1965). Specialized in Housing and Plan-ning from the Centro Iberoamericano de Vivienda in Bogota. Completed courses of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan (USA). He is the author of several publications, among them: Habitabilidad (1976), Arqui-tectura y Cultura en Colombia y Arquitectura para todos los días, (1986) Arquitectura Popular en Colombia: Herencias y Tradiciones, with Lorenzo Fonseca (1988); Arquitectura fin de siglo, Aprender Arquitectura and the CD-Rom Bogotá CD (1992); Bogotá siglo XX. Urbanismo, arquitectura y vida urbana (2000). In 2005, he was recognized with the America prize in the category of Theory in the Ninth Seminary of Latin American Architec-ture gathered in Mexico. He has won several Biennials in Colombia and Ecuador. He has been professor at Universidad de los Andes and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and he was the academic coordinator of the program of Maestría en Historia y Teoría del Arte y la Arquitectura de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia (1989-2005). At the moment he is the dean of the Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Arte y Diseños of Jorge Tadeo Lozano University

1 Marcela Cuéllar y Germán Mejía Pavony, Atlas histórico de Bogotá. Carto-grafía, 1791-2007 (Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá: Planeta, 2007).

2 Guillermo Hernández de Alba, Álbum de Bogotá, 1938, Sociedad de Me-joras y Ornato de Bogotá (Bogotá: Litografía Colombia, 1948).

3 The authors of the proposal were Luz Amorocho, Enrique García, José J. Angulo and Carlos Martínez.

Luz Amorocho, Enrique García, José J. Angulo and Carlos Martínez, proposal for the reurbanization of the central market plazas and the surrounding 16 blocks, published in Proa No. 3: “Bogotá can be a Modern City.” © Proa


Notes for a context on the Pilot Plan and the Regulatory Plan of BogotaHernando Vargas Caicedo

But mainly, what is needed is a change of mental attitude. Once we have been convinced truly that the time of the cities is a reality and that they are going to grow, that the majority of us are going to pass the majority of our lives in the cities, that a high density is convenient economically and that is possible without congestion, that the character and the dis-tinction of a city affects our well-being and that, as in many European cities, when we built it must be in a lasting way and that it adjusts to a harmonic pattern and not something improvised that it has to be taken down in a few years. If we are able to carry out this mental revolution, then it will follow, on its own, the revolution of our physical environment, we will be able to guide our destinies in a concientious and rational way, or will have to remain in the hands of blind forces. This is, in essence, the question.1

This text sets out to suggest and order elements of refer-ence infrequently noticed in the increasing literature that has come out in the recent years on the genesis of the Pilot Plan and the Regulatory Plan of Bogota and the moment in which they unfolded. It is presumed that these processes were the result of extensive incubations and confrontations of different natures. Among different natures, it will argue that the aware-ness of the needs of and options for urban modernization drove the exploration of different options and models with diverse efforts of adaptation. It will finish with some lessons possibly learned.

Urban evolution until World War II

In the slow 19th century, the only plan of extension for Bogota that is remembered is the one by the general Mosquera, in the days of the speculative euphoria sparked by the disentail-ment of dead hands’ property.2 The major Colombian cities had begun to show signs of overcrowding and deterioration at the end of the 19th century, when the first series of industri-alization and improvement announced new molds and prob-lems.3 Already, the street cars had indicated the impact that they could have on urban size and forms, as in the case of Chicago or Buenos Aires.4 Bogota did not have, as São Paulo did, the push of great promoters like those of the Companhia City, that advanced the enormous urbanizations of Jardim America from 1912.5 The first zones for working districts; the promotion of urbanization in extensions; the appearance and extension of new energy, aqueduct, telephone, and pub-lic transportation networks, expressed how the population growth and the specialization of the urban centers during the republican period demanded more space and better stan-dards. On the other hand, there appeared normative indica-tions on building control, efforts to make technical surveys, hygiene campaigns promoting green spaces and cleanings. With the arrival of the railroads in Colombian cities (Ba-rranquilla, 1871; Bogota, 1889; Medellin, 1914; Cali, 1915), the problem intensified. In the middle of a generation of real estate promoters like Nemesio Camacho or José María Sie-rra, who had multiple businesses and were of rural origin, a figure like Ricardo Olano typified the preoccupation of the impresario with undertaking urban extensions within a con-sciously organized framework of future city, drawing from

international experience. Olano, after attending the interna-tional conference of dwelling and urbanism in Paris in 1928, donated his books on the subject to the School of Mines, on the condition that a course be offered on the subject.6

After Medellin, Bogota and Cali joined the movement of adhesion to extension plans, when the resources of the eco-nomic expansion of the twenties— with public money received from the indemnification of Panama and local and internation-al banking recourses—allowed for diverse improvements in aqueducts, market places, and the creation of schools and roads. It was also the time in which foreign standards for land-scapes and paving in concrete were noticed, like those of El Prado or urbanizations like the Mutual benefit society.7

Before the city planners came, it was the time of architect-engineers like Enrique Uribe Ramírez, who led improvement proposals on the continent. We should not forget that the en-gineer of Ponts et Chaussées, Maurice Rotival, was hired for the plan for Caracas since the end of the gomecismo.8 The presence of international founds, grew to support urban infra-structure works, as weak local financial resources could not keep up with the rate of industrial growth and urbanization that took place in the 1930s... On rare occasions, as in Bar-ranquilla, this resulted in advanced models for the manage-ment of municipal services. For its part, the problem of hous-ing for workers, which had been seen by early legislators as a problem of public budgets and lobby groups, now drew attention from new public, local and national institutions. In the shield of the respice polum of Marco Fidel Suárez, it is significant that the president Olaya Herrera (1930-1934), former ambassador to the United States, would determine that Bogota should have an urban plan which would follow the

65Notes for a context on the Pilot Plan and the Regulatory Plan of Bogota | Hernando Vargas Caicedo

code of urbanism from the prestigious Bartholomew, pioneer of the new profession in North America. And that, in circum-stances that are still murky, with his important responsibilities in commissions in Chile, Karl Brunner arrived at Bogota to direct the significant Planning Office in 1933. In a very short time, Brunner, who educated the Council with his exhibition in the Teatro Colón in 1937, created unprecedented criteria, extensions, districts, and public spaces, made possible with national, municipal and private initiatives. The urbanism of Brunner, under the epigraph of Mumford, was a form of high culture, a sense of civic, political, aesthetic, and technical organization. The Austrian professor combined European, North American, and even South American ideas on the best possible city, in an expert effort that aspired to synthesize them all in the Regulatory Plan.

The Bogota that Brunner advised in the thirties clearly knew weaknesses. It was the immense village without municipal services. Aside from the sectors of piedemonte that demand-ed cleanings, there was flood congestion by the center-north extension, very old public buildings in inconvenient places, a lack of parks, blocked roadways, no deliberate direction of growth, and disorderly industry scattered throughout. What one hoped that the capital had in 1950, after the blessing of works like those that the IV Centenary of 1938, was a series of interconnected parks; new locations for three main markets; bus and train stations; defined working districts; organized factories, workshops, and deposits. Brunner noticed that the hills were occupied illegally, and saw that businesses had to be kept out of the hills and that pathways and linear parks were necessary for their conservation. To sum up, Brunner’s was an inward-looking operation on the existing city, with new extensions, arduous surgeries, relocated connections that encountered the impact that, in its own words, had the same urban valuation.9 It is necessary to remember that Brunner and Humeres already had developed a plan in Santiago that was considered a segregator of popular districts, aestheticiz-ing the public buildings and ingenuous in its demographic projections, although their insistence in the maintenance of parks is recognized.10

Brunner had expanded his actions to Cali, where he was in charge of urbanizations like Versailles, Miraflores, and Santa Isabel; the Regulatory Plan of the Future City was com-missioned in 1944 and it faced the pressures of developers who were resisting the halt of new licenses while they were finalizing the plan that would be finally adopted by the city, in August of 1947.11

The capital was also on the minds of politicians, doctors, and engineers. Despite the high turnover of mayors, a few, like Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Germán Zea and Carlos Sanz de Santamaría, enthusiastic about sewage systems, contributed sufficient mandates to propose and realize improvements before developers like Mazuera Villegas, Trujillo Gómez, and Salazar Gómez took office.12 Behind Medellin, that had a leftover hydroelectric network from 1932, Bogota dreamed about a modern aqueduct, which came to fruition in Vitelma. In spite of this, it suffered, put under the yoke of the quick urbanization of the 1930s and 40s, with chronic rationing until the end of the following decade, when it was able to fill with Bogota river’s supply. We must remember that the Pearson house made the first survey for the modern project of an aqueduct in 1907. De-spite this, even in 1954 there were complaints that the capital did not know the networks that it had and that its sewage system was hardly of a third of the indicated urban area in the Pilot Plan, with serious deficiencies in the central areas and impure trenches. From 1940, with the support of the interna-tional guru in geotechnics, professor Arthur Casagrande of Harvard, there appeared in Vitelma’s periphery—in the Muña, Neusa and Sisga—projects that provided water and energy to a city that resisted paying for them.13

The industrialization had sped up in the 1930s with the stimulus from the state and it continued in the 40s with the opportunities that the war offered manufacturers. The com-merce had barely been modernized and without new space had dispersed linearly. The markets remained in the center of the city, with impact unanimously indicated in all the pro-posals of improvement. In those days, the new campus of the Universidad Nacional and the stadium were islands of modernity.

From the war to the Pilot Plan

With the convulsions that the international conflict caused in the economy, business had begun to organize in the ANDI and Fenalco, and the labor and social legislation gradually recognized the new features in the middle of the political con-troversy. The rural country announced its conversion to the Colombia of cities of the second half of the century and the state assumed tasks in industry, housing, health, tourism, transportation, and education, that compromised important economic and human resources in a successive series of initiatives. The state desired to demonstrate its strength by presenting the results of its modernization, particularly in the showcase of the capital. Hernando Vargas Rubiano was elected president of the SCA at the beginning of 1947. He was a member of the first group of students to graduate from the Faculty of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional in 1941, a group of professionals who wanted to be increasingly visible and influential, espe-cially after their criticism of the Soto-Bateman plan in 1943.14 When he saw in the newspaper El Tiempo the news of Le Corbusier’s visit with Rockefeller and Eduardo Zuleta Angel to the site of the United Nations project in New York, Rubiano had the idea that the SCA convince the national government and the mayor of the city to have the architect and city plan-ner visit Bogota, dictate conferences, and be put in charge of advising on urban development. (Brunner’s star, by then, had begun to exhaust itself.) Given the friendship of Zuleta and Le Corbusier, it was easy to get the interest the Euro-pean architect, although it was very unusual that then-mayor Mazuera, who would go on to great accomplishments in gov-ernment and real estate development, failed to recognize him at all. With the company of Gabriel Serrano and Gabriel Largacha, Vargas Rubiano started up this contact, which cul-minated in the mythological first visit of Le Corbusier. Vargas Rubiano was absent because a familiar duel, in the tribute to Corbu in the Granada Hotel, Largacha read the speech of the president of the SCA in which he praised the architecture and the urbanism of the visitor and declared him a honorary member of it. “Master of his generation”, he was called; his


Karl Brunner, plan designed by the research team led by Fernando Cortés Larreamendy based on the plan from 1941 that includes the housing development and other projects for Bogota, published in the exposition catalogue, “Karl Brunner – Arquitecto Urbanista, 1887-1960”, at the Bogota Museum of Modern Art, May of 1989.

Housing developments:1. Palermo, 19342. Prelimary plan for El Campin, 19343. El Retiro, 19394. Medina, 19355. Workers’ Neighborhood, Social and Sports Center, 19356. Project for El Campin7. San Luis, 19368. El Bosque Izquierdo, 19369. El Centenario neighborhood, 193810. Ciudad Del Empleado (The Employees’ City), 194211. Satellite City, 1942

Street expansions and road plans12. Study of the Ensanche Sur, 193413. Study of the Ensanche Occidental, 1934-3514. Study of the Ensanche de la Calle Real, 193515. Study of construction of the Avenida Central, 193516. Road plan for Bogota, 1936-3717. Road opening, 193418. Regulator plan and street-widening in Bogota19. Regulation of the Avenida Caracas20. Regulation of the Avenida Jiménez

Other constructions:21. Media Torta cultural center22. Gardens at the Escuela Bellavista23. El Campin stadium24. Humboldt Monument25. Emergency Clinic26. “Daytime” Hotel project (subterranean) 27. Lookout Terrace at the Paseo Bolívar28. Extension of 26th St.29. Tranvia stops30. Kiosks for the Paseo Bolívar

Parks31. Paseo Bolivar Park 32. Park on 13th St. and 26th Ave.33. Plaza de Nariño34. Santander Park 35. Santa Sofia Park 36. San Martin Park 37. San Diego Park 38. El Salitre Forestal Park 39. Panamerican Forest40. San Fernando Park 41. Park in the La Estrella neighborhood42. Calderón Tejada Forest Park43. 20 de Julio Park 44. Los Rosales Park 45. Sebastián de Belalcázar Ave.


works in his words a lasting accomplishment and an orien-tating doctrine. Vargas Rubiano remembered the comments of Le Corbusier on top of Monserrate on projections of the population of the city, saying that it would not reach one mil-lion inhabitants, and his admiration of the transformation work of the Panóptico in the National Museum that was prepared for the 9th Pan-American Conference of 1948. In the euphoria of his first visit, Le Corbusier was enticed by the ICT to participate in the neighborhood Los Alcázares and to develop the prefabricated industry in Colombia with the support of ATBAT, the multidisciplinary cooperative that had formed around Le Corbusier’s atelier with great pres-tige in the Unité of Marseilles.15 A significant amount of time passed before Le Corbusier was indeed in charge of the Pilot Plan of the city. Many things had interfered with the project, including interest, but mainly the 9th of April of 1948, which saw a series of fires and destruction in the heart of the city. This situation demanded the accelration of several courses of action. On the professional border, the Colegio de Ingenieros y Arquitectos was formed in June of that year, predecessor of the future Cámara Colombiana de la Construcción, that brought together city professionals dedicated to the construc-tion. Several main assignments were considered: managing and using the ten million dollars that the International Bank of Reconstruction and Promotion had approved for the recon-struction of the city, adapting and adopting a law of horizontal property inspired by the Chilean experience and necessary to regulate new types of developments, cataloging and mak-ing visible the materials of the local industry of construction, demanding technical and city-planning definitions raised by the quick urban development from authorities.16 The imme-diate consequence was the commission that Serrano, Ritter and Arango formed to handle the reconstruction and that test-ed the possible integration predial on the 7th Carrera as form of renovation of the destroyed commercial sectors. The fury against Brunner in Proa shone then, with the endorsement of Rotival, that credited that Bogota’s architects only required the tutoring, at a distance, of international advisors.17

The presidency of Mariano Ospina Pérez was propitious for urban improvement. The president founded a success-

ful urbanizing and construction company in 1933, which had leaned on Brunner for many of its new neighborhoods and supported, through his public works ministers, substantial pro-grams of infrastructure modernization.18 At that time in Mede-llin, an original process for the urban development occurred. From a 1920 law, Antioqueños’ businessmen headed by Jorge Restrepo Uribe had managed a national law that allowed them to carry out urban improvements by valuation.19 Although at the outset these were made first and the contributions of the taxed properties were collected later, the instrument became serious through a municipal office that made outstanding prof-its in works like breaking canals and forming new routes. Re-strepo invited Le Corbusier to Medellin to interest him in formu-lating a pilot plan for that city, thinking that the cost of the study could be taken later from the same works that the valuation managed. The valuation of the Antioqueños would extend to Bogota, Cali, and Barranquilla in the following years, with un-equal success, perhaps due to cultures and local policies that contrasted with the associative tradition of the region. In any case, although Le Corbusier and Sert mentioned several times in the correspondence the plans that were commissioned from them, this original instrument of financing and urban project management—without a doubt inherited from the colonial sys-tems of special taxes for public works—was not quantified, analyzed, or formally incorporated to those proposals. In a confidential memorandum on valuation in 1950, possible cri-teria for their application were mentioned.20

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the foreigners were learning in Colombia. In the notebooks there appear refer-ences to Pizano and the Catalan vault and in the correspon-dences of Le Corbusier, Wiener, and Sert there is praise for Solano’s vaults, and for the enthusiasm and quality of the teams of young people. Within these teams there were dif-ferent temperaments, like those of Gaitán Cortés or Arbeláez Camacho. The first one, a technocrat, a politician, was inter-ested with Sert, from Tumaco, in the urban plans. His mul-tiple roles as a professional, public functionary, industrial and academic official seemed to exemplify the ambitious task of bringing to the Colombian context the international state-of-the-art. Germán Téllez speaks to us of their dean at the time21

(note six) and on the obvious difference between the Corbu-sian faith that Germán Samper showed against the criticisms that Francisco Pizano put forth with respect to the effort of the plan.22 After an intense race in 1966, Gaitán Cortés cul-minated his recognized mayorship with a plan of the city for following the 25 years.

As a first director of the Office of the Regulatory Plan for Bogota (OPRB), until November of 1949, Herbert Ritter had taken care of the meeting in Cap Martin in August of that year and maintained correspondence with the teams in Paris and New York. In 1949, in the correspondence on the Pilot Plan, there was announced the study on public services of the OPRB where it was explained that the Bogota River was es-sential for the rear area public networks to produce almost all the electricity of Bogota and to form the base of the irrigation in the savannah. It was central within the recommendations to begin the studies on the river and to create a commission on the river constituted by the people in charge of services and hygiene in Bogota.23

In November of 1949 Ritter was succeed by Arbeláez, who came from the National Buildings Directory and was a mem-ber of the CIAM—and therefore a guarantee for the consul-tants.24 He was diligent in taking care of the local pressures in routes and, mainly, validating the developments that the OPRB advanced. A conservative, he maintained a key prox-imity with the mayor and the president (note 8). With Fran-cisco Pizano and an increasing team of architects and engi-neers, the OPRB transformed from a group of pupils to critics or competitors in the development of ideas and prototypes, like those of the neighborhood units. The OPRB did their first tests trying schemes of neighborhoods with unité type build-ings which TPA was inclined to view positively because of their principles, reason why would be necessary to let them do the proposals until review them with Le Corbusier.25 The technical assembly that supposed the OPRB allowed to have previously dispersed information, like the schemes of com-mercial growth, distribution of population and activity of con-struction of house per years.26


It is very clear that the mayoralty of Santiago Trujillo Gómez (from April 1949 to July 1952) imposed pressure in time, de-tail, and clear expression of products of the contracted plan. This mayor, a constructor in the Trujillo Gómez Company and the Cardinal y Martínez Cárdenas, carried out tasks as work minister until being promoted to manager of the new-born Petroleum’s Public Company. Like Arbeláez, Trujillo conclud-ed his tasks in the mayoralty and the OPRB and fulfilled the technical and political objective of developing and of making public the Pilot Plan that, finally, after its secret development and failed exhibition in September of 1950, appeared in May of 1951—sustained in dispositions that assured against the enmity from the Municipal Council and the anxiety of the pri-vate developers.27

Examining the their correspondences in the period of elab-oration of the plan, the silence of the consultants on what the ICT was doing in the matter of processes, neighborhoods and constructive systems is noticeable, particularly in the case of Muzú, which is reverted when Sert demands the authorship of the prototypes of Quiroga. Minister Leyva had undertaken the superblocks of CUAN (Centro Urbano Antonio Nariño), from the data obtained in the tour in charge of the architects to Mexico,28 and a total hermetism occurred on the appearance in Bogota of the CINVA since 1951, becoming a species of anti-model for the CIAM approach, like a school of technicians that bet on the disciplinary mixture, to the mixed zoning, to the communitarian participation, to the technological develop-ment with local means.29

The proximity and distance of the group of Proa with re-spect to the Pilot Plan has been examined before. It is a his-tory of confusions and few gratitudes, which began with the murder of the father when Brunner was relegated, the master who was losing control successively on his proposals in Bo-gota, Medellin, and Cali. It is possible that the cooling and later criticism of Martinez for the Pilot Plan would also have had to do with political partisan issues. Clearly, the intermedi-ate plan and its reports were put under code of silence, so that the correspondence registers an unusual situation when Sert recommends what and how to say it, the OPRB and the mayor control the publicity on the verge of justifying increas-

ing nonconformity by the product absence or results until ir-remediably spending the credit of the project and its authors. A key opponent, Brown Manuel Umaña, represented the in-terest of the traditional builders against the radicalism of the Corbusian typologies.30

The city underwent great changes in form, nature, and scale from the turn of the century. The first detailed plan, cre-ated by the Pearson house in 1907, showed a very small city, with the ear of Chapinero. This contrasted with the one of Bucle, of 1933, that showed a proliferation of districts in all directions, which was formed for the first time in the photo-mosaic of aerial images of 1935. In successive illusion, the agreements on urban perimeter, in 1940, and zoning, in 1944, face the crude reality of the plane of clandestine parceling of 1950, in the scene of the elaboration of the plans by the inter-national consultants and the OPRB.31 Finally, the proposal of order of the plan director in 1950, the Pilot Plan in 1951, and the Regulatory Plan in 1953, are considered the culmination of the hypothetical series of states of the city in history, from 1538 to 1938. The city had been projected and its possible history had been constructed.

After the city planners, the economists

In defense of the Pilot Plan, the OPRB declared their gospel: On the arrival of the industry and the automobile, the streets became narrowed, the perimeter and the urban operational range were extended suddenly and the fields and the villages were left by the promises of the new city. The consequences were the destruction of the existing harmony, the city began their development without order nor reason, until acquiring an abnormal extension. The private interests speculated more and more with remote urbanizations, and at the present time the city is led the problem of an exaggerated extension. We write down the disturbed growth of the city moved away from all human activity, at the same time that its tendency to trans-form itself into a linear city of a precise Biology. They are mul-titude of empty areas in the zones destined to housing, empti-ness coveted by the earth speculation.32

This affirmation contrasted with that of Currie, years later: Two of the truly amazing developments that distinguish the past century and a half from the previous ones were the de-mographic explosion and the urbanism. As its time, in the countries economically more advanced, in the last 30 years, urbanism is becoming metropolitanism that is almost endless extensions of suburbs between and around the urban cen-ters. The automation of agriculture and the means of urban transportation, followed by means of individual transporta-tion, made possible this tremendous growth in the radical numbers and changes in the conditions of life and environ-ment. They are illustrations of how the technology and the economy model our world and our lives.The dynamics of these processes have not stopped working. By the way, in Colombia, as in other underdeveloped coun-tries, we were in the departure point of enormous processes that will make the country almost unrecognizable within a few years, relatively. The administrative mechanism to execute this policy could be a Ministry of Urban Issues to formulate plans and to provide incentives and ties or impediments to obtain a balanced urban development; offices of planning and agencies of urban renovation in all the big cities to carry out the policy to unite the room with the work, that character-ized the urban life during 3,000 years until the 19th century; a system of subsidies, if necessary, to resist the costs of the renovation and the high values of earth near the centers.Other fundamental elements in an urban policy must be to provide suitably that the transit goes around the cities, the location of the markets wholesale and the slaughter houses on the periphery of the city, and facilities for diversions of the urban inhabitants in the field.33

The Bogota of the beginning of the 1950s moved quickly. The Colombian economy was accelerated to the tune of the inter-national growth of the postwar period and the urban scene registered new hotels, like the Tequendama Hotel, in 1951; warehouses of of North American chains like Sears, in 1953; services of domiciliary gas, in 1954; the project of the Of-ficial Administrative Center, in 1955; the reorganization of the OPRB, in 1956, with the Office of District Planning. After


the height of the city planners, the new star from 1949 was Lauchlin Currie, outstanding propeller of railroads, regional institutions of planning, authorities and, finally, studies and urban policies: economic rationality, institutions, and mech-anisms were their platform.34 His study for the World Bank continues to be an example of synthetic documentation of a country that was looking into the development from its rural-ity and that bet on that which Lleras Camargo called “our industrial revolution”.35 In there, numbers on the increasing needs of housing, forms of financing, systems of planning for infrastructures are considered. Against the economic rationalism, the Pilot Plan had its provoking rhetoric: “Urbanism is a social task that tries to lead the modern society towards the harmony. The world has a necessity for harmony and to let itself be guided by the harmonizing ones”.36 He briefly talked about the human prob-lems of the city (Human Geography), summarizing in some dimensions the poor material, cultural, and social conditions: sanitary overcrowding, services, the absence of kitchens, wage cost in drink, lack of formation of trades, time of mo-bilization of the workers, and basic education. And he sum-marized characteristics of a city to surpass that, instead of a culvert, had the “old Spanish sewer”, with space for au-tomobiles, since the railroad was considered “perfectly un-economical”, equipped with a “world-wide airport” plus the extension of the present airport, where “each neighborhood is a perfect organism”, with a “rational subdivision of the city” and, as a bone of contention, a “civic center that reunites in a spiritual and material harmony the set of collective functions”, where to reunite the “history of the city without rupture and abandonment”. It was conceded that “this plan has studied everything, it has anticipated it for a total accomplishment”. It was made to notice that the new perimeter included 3,000 additional hectares and works for the following five years were taken into account. As well, Arbeláez answered the critics of the plan,37 mak-ing commitments to the new class of the team of technicians that, besides necessary technical knowledge, must have:

[...] a very high work spirit and the goal of improving one-self … conditions for observing conscientiously, to deduce

the logic conclusions and knowledge to adapt to the positive resolutions … to own a special temperament that allows him to accept the suggestions of the conglomerate to whom he is working, as long as they have reasonable bases of good faith or intention and that they persecute in the long run the same goal.

Gracefully, and possibly more important than majesty of the consultants or the prince, he thought that “the public opinion must be considered, since the planning that goes ahead has a essentially democratic character, because it wants to ben-efit many without stopping hearing everything that it should be said on the matter. But also the office can have an opinion about the criticism”. He was hurt by the accusation about the “contrast between the creative imagination (is worth to say the fantasy) and the existing reality” since “the exhibition cor-responds in its scale to a doll’s game and that here everything appears clean, healthy, and without problems”.

He added that the Pilot Plan: is just a First draft [sic] that in general lines solves a prob-lem as complex as the urban zoning. Each case in particular must be studied and be solved by a living organism that con-stitutes the Office of the Regulating Plan, which will have to remain investigating the general conditions of the city.

Against the dogma of the team of the plan, it was clear that this was the signal of mass exodus because of the news that the press gave on the CIAM in Hoddesdon. On Le Corbusier, it reported:

[...] because of his poetic exaltation forgot to perhaps treat points less beautiful, but more important: did the project contemplate the conditions, possibilities and social needs of the country. Was it in agreement with the principles of the Athens Charter? … Vieco indicated the existing simi-larity between the social conditions of India and Colombia with respect to undernourishment, illiteracy and lack of as-sistance. If the Regulatory Plan of Bogota was studied with the same criterion, will be more detrimental that beneficial, he said. The civic center with a presidential palace of 2,000

squared meters of reception left out much more important problems to be solved or without even beginning to study them, at least. It was spoken of knowing how to extract tra-ditional values and to appreciate the climactic conditions of our countries and to take into account the conditions of life and the difference of classes, education and hygiene defi-ciency. The explanations that the masters gave left without answering these questions.38

In the afternoon, Germán Samper maintained that: technically, the problems are well resolved but the limitation of the urban area (by effects of the plan) would valorize the lands included inside the limits of it, favoring in this way a minority that owns them and increasing in price the housing for the poor classes.

From the Pilot Plan to the Regulatory Plan: from the dreams to the practices

After the visionary and enunciative condition of the Pilot Plan, victim of the pre-statistical age in which it was developed, the consultant’s contract of the Regulatory Plan meant a com-mitment to details and advice much more concrete. The city moved much faster than the studies and it was necessary to propose criteria and referents of clear and immediate use. It auto-defined a plan that “indicates your rules, it indicates a way and forms a program that must govern the ordered and harmonic development of the city, correcting errors com-mitted in the past and trying to avoid their repetition in the future”. And it was pointed out that its “suggestions and stan-dard percepts… [sic] do not represent a rigid criteria and its variety allows very diverse solutions”. It was necessary to surpass the vices and to open “great avenues that begin anywhere, do not go nowhere and frequently they finish in the funnel of the old city”, possibly alluding to recent large roadways, like the Avenue of the Americas or the 10th Car-rera. In this context, in which the services of aqueduct, sew-age system, and electricity did not bear on the urban growth, with buildings ventilated by small patios, norms as the Act


Urbanization plans drawn by Ospinas & Cia, Fernando Mazuera & Cia and Olcasa between 1940 and 2000.


21 of 1944 had regulations on incomplete and contradictory heights, backward movements, patios, and ties.39

The problem of the evolution, control, and taxation of the values of the urban ground was just outlined, making mention of the initiatives of Ernesto González Concha on unique tax, and did not appear anywhere in references to the valuation system that already was an effective fact in Medellin and or-ganized in Cali, Barranquilla, and Bogota. It was assumed to be possible to fix the top value of the land and the planes of economic contours of the municipality were mentioned. The plan was designed to be a flexible general frame in its details and rigid in its basic principles, given the impossibility of ex-actly predicting the growth of Bogota during next fifty years, which would require knowing all the changes that can affect the national and international economy. The report of Wiener and Sert included plans 1 to 5,000 and 1 to 2,000, graphical standards, three volumes of informative material and bibliog-raphy. Part of it talked about how continuing the organization of the OPRB, daughter of its advice since September 1948, to press for measures to avoid the growth of clandestine urban-izations, to conceive systems of road intersections with sev-eral successive phases of development with bridged rotaries after round points. The difficulty of advance without an embryonic regula-tory frame was seen. At that time Luis Cordova Mariño, ad-visory legal of the OPRB, dominated the process. A regional authority would have to be created as rapidly as possible and the municipalities incorporated before the development of the population of the initial phase happened. The margin-al subdivisions that had multiplied quickly in the last years had to be limited, reorganized, and included in a regional plan. One imagined that it could be effective to control of deeds of extra-peripheral urbanizations and that the same perimeter (inheritance of the “feudal urbanism” of Brunner) could be used. At the same time, it was maintained that it was necessary to use special norms for spontaneous par-cellings and that it was convenient to use low-cost material in the form of premolded elements for workers’ housing and that it was necessary to facilitate the purchase of lots with elementary services.

After the change that 9 April unleashed on the commerce of the center to take it to Chapinero,40 new typologies of space for this activity were considered: American type markets, like those Carulla had just finished opening, and they were con-sidered in the CUAN: shopping centers, according to the models of the latest criteria on local neighboring commerce advocated by committees of housing of the United States. Before the absence of other promoters, it was proposed that the blocks were impelled by the insurance agencies, the banks and the state. The city would need two decades to es-tablish financing mechanisms sufficient to support a volume of construction like the one that was implicit in the plan and its densities.

In order to achieve the image of a great nation’s capital, many actions were necessary: prohibiting dispersed chircales, to continue the reforestation, developing monumental buildings according to North American models and standards, lighting, ventilation, accessibility, services, emergency exits, batteries of elevators and parking, besides lodging for the employees of ministries in appropriate zones. Already from the Geologic Ser-vice Report of 1949, questions regarding construction and op-erations in hills were considered, although the OPRB would not demonstrate specifically how to handle slope urbanizations, secular subject of the Colombian Andean city41 and data from the collectors that, in the OPRB, were handled by the team that Jorge Forero directed in sewage system networks.42

The urban traffic was quantified for the first time with the studies by the consultants Seeyle, Stevenson, Vaue, and Knecht, on capacities, movement of vehicles in critical hours, peripheral parking. They mentioned parking meters; parking inside the blocks; in streets, cellars, and buildings of several floors; when in Bogota the cellars were still a peculiarity. With a population of 700,000 inhabitants, Bogota had only 20,000 cars that, nevertheless, were a problem in the congested center. It was necessary to offer for the CBD 9520 mainte-nances plus a peripheral maintenance of 4,000 positions. The imagined city must have an area of 6,577 hectares in order to lodge the projected population of 1,653,242 inhabit-ants after 50 years, handling densities of 200, 300, 350 and

400 inhabitants by hectare in different zones. It was an im-perative for the urbanism of three dimensions, the elimination of mixed zones, indices FAR to control constructed densities, front yards, adapted standards for urbanizations of mountain, superblocks surrounded by green areas in apartments of more than ten floors, construction in series or in masses, a series of linear parks. The problem of the evolution, control, and taxation on the values of the urban ground was just outlined, making men-tion to the initiatives of Ernesto González Concha on unique tax, and did not appear any where references to the valuation system that already was an effective fact in Medellin and was organized in Cali, Barranquilla and Bogota. Planes of eco-nomic contours of the municipality were mentioned. All this intention required that the OPRB, organized in the way of the Planning Department, would guarantee a stable technical nucleus and would assure their visibility: “For being able to execute the plan, it is necessary to make the citizen-ship in general understand the convenience and public utility. One is due to explain to them that the plan is for the general good of the city, that it affects the life of all. The plan must become popular”. Nostalgic, it praised “the small towns with colonial places of great enchantment” and it was hoped in the new city to re-store the concept of vicinity, giving each sector its own char-acter or personality. The creation of the Special District was a necessity.43 Already in Medellin, TPA had raised the issue of a municipal association of future and lasting consequences. Behind the contractual sequence of analysis of the city was a preliminary basic scheme. Pilot Plan, Regulatory Plan, development and application of the plan, the provocations of the new illegal parcellings, congestion, overcrowding, inad-equate speculation on the ground, and construction had gen-erated a series of answers on perimeter, roadways, super-blocks, intervention of the ground, governmental systems of parks, and buildings that proposed radical innovations. This ambitious set demanded an unconscious distribution of roles around the idea. On the one hand, Le Corbusier represented emotion, the poetics and the dreams. The SCA personified the initial impulse raising the positive factors of the initiative.


Like devil’s advocate, the set of the developers behaved as snipers throughout the evolution of the plans. Wanting to be neutral and objective, the OPRB team talked about data and realities. Finally, like coordinator and main tutor, the TPA team was the true facilitator with seriousness, seniority solutions and organizational capacity. Simplifying the organizational scheme that nobody designed, the SCA had suggested what to do; Mazuera had found why to support it; Trujillo had determined when to obtain it; the OPRB had proposed where to fulfill it; TPA had prescribed with whom to develop it; and Le Corbusier, with Wiener and Sert had considered how it would be. The reality of the new urbanization in the following de-cades would be dominated by the private promoters and the informal establishments, with minimum state presence, as a expression of an incomplete vision on the nature of the transformations in course44 (See image of plan of Bogota that presents urbanizations of Ospinas and company, Olcasa and Fernando Mazuera and company). The plans, that had been privileged field of training, were transmuted and abandoned under the pressure, compromised against results of short term that could not demonstrate.

Hernando Vargas Caicedo: Civil Engineer, SMArchS and MCP MIT. Associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes in the programs of Architecture, Civil and environmental engineering. Director of the research group History of the constructive technique in Colombia. Coordinator of the master in Mana-gement and Engineering of construction. Member of the Academia Colom-biana de Historia de la Ingeniería y las Obras Públicas. He has published numerous books and articles about architecture, urbanism, construction, structures, history of technology and urban history.

1 Lauchlin Currie, “El Urbanismo”, Colombia en cifras: Síntesis de la activi-dad económica, social y cultural de la Nación, ed. Plinio Mendoza Neira (Bogotá: Librería Colombiana Camacho Roldán, 1963).

2 Sergio Uribe, La desamortización en Bogotá, 1861-1870”, dissertation, Universidad de los Andes, 1976, Bogotá.

3 Germán Mejía, Los años del cambio: historia urbana de Bogotá, 1820-1910 (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2000).

4 Harold Mayer, Richard Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967). The capital had a slow takeoff of its urban improvements at the beginning of century: macadam (it is the system of pavement invented towards 1820 by Macadam in England to form affirmed in material compacted the clay-sand on carreteables routes) in streets of the center in 1910, first districts like Union Obrera or the Per-severancia in 1912, creation of the Society of Urban Embellishment and beginning of the reforestation of hills, in 1917. The transport demonstrated the modernization rate: in strike of aurigas of cars, 1921; first buses of stairs, in 1923; first company of taxis, in 1929; import of first trolleybuses, in 1947. With the events of the 9 of April, 1948, the final disappearance of the street car in 1952 was provoked, the same year in which the construction of the northern freeway began and, in fulfillment the tone of traffic control of the Regulating Plan, appeared in 1954 the first traffic lights and parquí-metros. Fabio Zambrano, Exposición Bogotá Siglo XX (Bogotá: Museo de Desarrollo Urbano, 2000).

5 Richard Morse, Formação histórica de São Paulo: de comunidade á me-trópole (São Paulo: Difusão Euopéia do Livro, 1970).

6 Luis Fernando González, Medellin, los orígenes y la transición a la moder-nidad: crecimiento y modelos urbanos 1775-1932 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional)181.

7 Néstor José Rueda, Bucaramanga: paradojas de un ordenamiento urbano (Universidad Santo Tomás, 2003) 45.

8 Henrique Vera (Dir.) “El Plan Rotival: La Caracas que no fue, 1939-1989. Un plan urbano para Caracas Universidad Central de Venezuela” (1989)13.

9 Karl Brunner, ”Bogotá en 1950”, Registro Municipal (Bogotá 1938). Luis Carlos Colón, “El saneamiento del Paseo Bolívar y la vivienda obrera en Bogotá”, Urbanismos 2: Áreas residenciales en Bogotá (Bogotá: Unibi-blos, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2007) 119-128. Antonio Améz-quita, “Barrios obreros bogotanos”, Urbanismos 2: Áreas residenciales en Bogotá (Bogotá: Unibiblos, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2007) 93-103.

10 Armando de Ramón, Santiago de Chile: historia de una sociedad urbana (Madrid: Mapfre, 1992).

11 Édgar Vásquez, Historia de Cali en el siglo 20: Sociedad, economía, cultura y espacio (Cali: Artes Gráficas, Universidad del Valle, 2001). Brunner acted in the design of the campus of the UPB and the district Laureles in Medellin in 1941, in the plan and urbanizations in Cali in 1944, and as a consultant for Popayán, Pasto, Manizales, Santa Marta, Girardot, and Buenaventura. Tania

Maya, “Karl Brunner (1887-1960) o el urbanismo como ciencia del detalle”, Bitácora (Septiember 2004) Bogota: Universidad Nacional.

12 Julio Dávila, Planificación y política en Bogotá: la vida de Jorge Gaitán Cortés (Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, IDCT, 2000). The mayors of Bogota had (Davila, 2000) very short periods of mandate and only some of the considered period stood out, like Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in charge of the preparation of the Cuarto Centenario (1936-1937), Germán Zea (1938-1941), Carlos Sanz de Santamaría (1942-1944), Fernando Mazuera (April to October 1948 and January to October 1958) and above all, Santiago Trujillo (April 1949 to July 1952).

13 Hernando Vargas Caicedo, Cincuenta años en la construcción de Colom-bia, Camacol, 1957-2007, (Bogotá: Panamericana, 2007).

14 Hernando Vargas Rubiano (1917-2008) belonged to the first group of ar-chitects graduated from the Universidad Nacional, in 1941, which inclu-ded Carlos Arbeláez and students of Brunner’s. In charge of the Project for the Museo Nacional in 1947. President of SCA in 1947, 1955, and 1956. Hernando Vargas, Le Corbusier en Colombia (Bogotá: Cementos Boya-cá,1987).

15 About ATBAT and Bodiansky, ver Bruno Reichlin (Dir.), “Le Corbusier”, En-ciclopedia Electa (1988) 97-98.

16 Hernando Vargas Caicedo, Cincuenta años en la construcción de Colom-bia, op. cit.

17 Jorge Arango, Herbert Ritter, Gabriel Serrano, “La reconstrucción de Bo-gotá”, Proa 13, June (1948) Bogota.

18 Enrique Santos, Crónica de una empresa 1932-1995: Ospinas (Bogotá: Antropos, 1995).

19 Jorge Restrepo, Jorge Restrepo Uribe y su influencia en el desarrollo de Medellin ( Medellin: IDEA, 1996).

20 “1) The works will become by instigation of the community: “Pilot Plan”. 2) Valuation by 3D. 3-4) Distribution of the valuation according to services “to the French”: a) room, b) office, c) manufactures, d) industry, e) commerce, f) diversion. 5) The beneficiaries of the plan will be: a) the community. b) the 1/2 of the community and 1/2 of people affected. c) the direct group of affected people. 6) The cost recovers between these 3 categories. 7) The reviewer will be a meeting already constituted. 8) The valuation is on sur-face but it hits on construction index. 9) The valuation coefficient changes according to classes. 10) All proprietors will benefit by the valuation of the plan. If he does not pay, he will have to sell or to enter a union that will be proprietor of its part. 11) The “PP” distributes the population in valuation classes. 12) Each class is made up of whole urban elements that produce accomplishment unions. 13) The urban elements contain the organs that compose them: affectations, constructed volume, access… will be consi-dered and assured by the total valuation. 14) A restored tax that will go to a rotatory bottom that renews every year (for each 8 million pesos finance 150 million pesos of work). The Cadastre constitutes 2000 million pesos in Bogota.” (FLC H3-4-470, note card extract, toward September of 1950).

21 “The author of this text arrived there in 1951 and remembers that in the interminable wall that divided the building longitudinally had placed two


contributions brought by Jorge Gaitán Cortés, the first dean of the Facul-ty: one was the famous “Grille CIAM” (Grid of the International Congres-ses of Modern Architecture), a plot of rectangular modules used in the congresses of the group CIAM to standardize the presentation of projects of urbanism and sector planning. Gaitán Cortés was then the Colombian delegate to those meetings, which explained the presence of “Grille CIAM” in the site of the Faculty. In an occasion, Gaitán Cortés mounted on those rectangles of soft cardboard and cork a study and proposals for a sector of Bogota, consequently the “Grille” acquired sense for us, but never more it had the use for which it was designed. For the students, the “Grille” was a ceremonial species of tótem that presumably announced or allowed established an order of which we ignored practically everything. The rest of the wall at issue had mounted a beautiful exhibition of scholas-tic architecture in the United States, also brought to Colombia by Jorge Gaitán Cortés, including the pavilions designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the University of Florida and those of Eliel Saarinen for the Cranbrook Ins-titute. It is not necessarily to say that, after years to serve like support for “hanging” projects and more projects of uniandinos students, the Grille CIAM and the North American scholastic architecture went to stop, very damaged, to one of the so many deposits of academic remainders that were appearing here and there in the University”. Germa’n Téllez, “Histo-ria de la facultad de Arquitectura”, Universidad de los Andes 1948-1998, unpublished investigation, 1998.

22 Jorge Gaitán Cortés, Francisco Pizano, and Germán Samper followed one another as the first three deans of the Faculty of Architecture of Universi-dad de los Andes, starting in 1949.

23 FLC H3-4-496, Setter by Herbert Ritter to Wiener and Sert, Bogota, 17 March, 1949.

24 The Section of National Buildings was an essential school in the training of the experts who evolved there in projects in the decades of the moderniza-tion: several ministers were outstanding constructors, like Mariano Ospina Pérez, 1926-1927; César García Álvarez, 1934-1938; José Gómez Pinzón, 1941-1942; Carlos Sanz de Santamaría, 1944; Víctor Archila Briceño, 1949-1950; Santiago Trujillo, 1953-1954; Roberto Salazar Gómez, 1957-1958. Protagonists in their professions were directors like Jorge Arango Sanín, Carlos Arbeláez, architects like Álvaro Ortega, el grupo para la re-construcción de Bogotá, con Manuel de Vengoechea y Gabriel Serrano, el Grupo Tumaco con Édgar Burbano, Luz Amorocho, Fernando Martínez S., Hernán Vieco, Jorge Gaitán C., Gonzalo Samper y Eduardo Mejía, ar-quitectos como Gabriel Solano, Francisco Pizano, Germán Samper G., Guillermo Bermúdez y Fernando Martínez S. Véase Carlos Niño, Arquitec-tura y Estado. Contexto y significado de las construcciones del Ministerio de Obras Públicas, MOP, de Colombia, 1905-1960 (Bogotá Universidad Nacional e Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1991).

25 FLC H3-4-11, Setter by Town Planning Associates to Le Corbusier, Bogota, 12 July, 1950

26 OPRB, Exposición del Plan Piloto de Bogotá, 1951, Multigraph ICSS.27 Rafael Uribe ed., El arquitecto Carlos Arbeláez Camacho. Compilación de

sus más importantes escritos cortos 1947-1969 (Bogotá: Canal Ramírez, 1980).

28 The formation of institutional experience capable of the required scale of housing production happened initially through the tests focused in single-family projects, like the Palaces (1949), with 324 units; Muzú (1949), with 1,216 units; Quiroga (1951), with 4,014 units; models clearly exhibited the urbanism of three dimensions, the formula CIAM undertaken directly by the National Government in 1952 in CUAN for 768 units, Colombian echo of the superblocks of Brazil, Mexico or Venezuela in those times. Alberto Saldarriaga, ICT, medio siglo de vivienda social en Colombia, 1939-1989 (Bogotá: Inurbe, 1995). Beatriz Mesa, “Superbloques y masificación: vi-vienda Banco Obrero en Venezuela (1955-1957)”, Tecnología y Construc-ción, vol. 24, no. 2, May 2008.

29 Luis Fernando Acebedo, “El CINVA y su entorno espacial y político”, po-nencia en el seminario Hábitat y Ciudad a 50 años del CINVA, Bogota: Universidad Nacional (18 Septiember, 2001).

30 Manuel Pardo Umaña, civil engineer, partner of Brown, Restrepo and San-tamaría, was one of the factotums of the CIA, construction union of the engineers and architects, founded in 1948.

31 Germán Mejía, Marcela Cuéllar, Atlas histórico de Bogotá: Cartografía 1791-2007 (Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, Planeta, 2007).

32 OPRB, Exposición del Plan Piloto de Bogotá, 1951, op. cit.33 Lauchlin Currie, “El urbanismo”, op. cit. 34 OPRB, Exposición del Plan Piloto de Bogotá, 1951, op. cit. Economist of

Canadian origin, advisor to President Roosevelt, director of the Foreign Economic Administration, advisor to the National Committee of Planning of Colombia, director of the Mission of Study of the Valley of the Magdalena, coordinator of the Mission of the Transport, adviser to the Foundation for the Progress of Colombia, and technical adviser of several associations.

35 Lauchlin Currie, Bases de un programa de fomento para Colombia: Infor-me de una misión (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1951). Alberto Lleras Camargo, Nuestra revolución industrial (Bogotá: Aedita, 1957).

36 (Le Corbusier), OPRB, Exposición del Plan Piloto de Bogotá, 1951, op. cit.37 Idem.38 Arturo Laguado, “Desde Londres: Lo que dijeron del Plan Piloto”, El Tiem-

po, (Wednesday, 8 August,1951).39 Town Planning Associates, Paul Lester Wiener y Josep Lluís Sert, Plan

Regulador de Bogotá: Memoria descriptiva, mecanografiado, 1953.40 Hernando Vargas Caicedo, “Arquitectura de centros comerciales y de

oficinas en Bogotá en el siglo XX”, Ospinas 75 años, ed. Luis Fernando Molina,( Bogotá: Panamericana, 2008).

41 José Royo y Gómez, Mapas geológicos de Bogotá, del centro y sur de su Sabana y su explicación, Ministerio de Minas y Petróleos, Servicio Geoló-gico Nacional, informe, August 1949.

42 EAAB ESP, El agua en la historia de una ciudad. Vol. 2, EAAB ESP (Bogo-tá: Plazas, 1997).

43 Julio Carvajal, “La incorporación a Bogotá de los municipios vecinos es indispensable complemento al triunfo de los derechos de la capital”, i

Anales de Ingeniería, vol. 58, no. 654 (November 1954). 44 Fernando Correa, Organización Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, 20

años(Bogotá: Litografía Arco, 1979). Indalecio Rodríguez, Pedro Gómez y Cía., S. A.: Un mejor modo de vivir (Bogotá: Litografía Arco, 1998). Enrique Santos, Crónica de una empresa, op. cit.


“Architecture in everything, urbanism in everything” Le Corbusier: from the civic center to the center of Bogota María Pía Fontana and Miguel Y. Mayorga

Bogota: the seen city and the city imagined by Le Corbusier

One of the ten conferences that Le Corbusier dictated in 1929 in Buenos Aires had the title “Architecture in everything, urbanism in everything”,1 a phrase that clearly summarizes the importance of unity between architecture and urbanism, and of the definition of the inter-scalar relationship between territory, city, and architecture. Le Corbusier returned to the notion of “architecture in ev-erything, urbanism in everything”, to apply it directly to the case of Bogota, in a series of reflections expressed in his conferences presented in Bogota in June of 1947, and that, for him,

[...] prove “the evolution of the science of urbanism had hap-pened of the practice of a realism in two dimensions, that was based on the operation of extension of the streets, towards one in three dimensions, that allow to incorporate as a new factor the height and to think in volumetric terms. In short, urban-ism must make volumes, transforming itself into the putting on stage of these in space. Thus the architecture will follow the conditions of Nature and it will become ordered, arranging itself with formal and compositional criteria of order, under the laws of the communications, the relations of the channels of circulation and mobility, that is to say, the streets.”2

What city was Le Corbusier imagining for Bogota? Le Cor-busier was imagining a city that followed the laws of nature and that was related to its history: he understood that the ge-ography defined from the beginning the territorial and urban structure of the city, and that simultaneously, the city’s history

would define the urban landscape. And, in fact, is he himself who states very clearly from the beginning what the depar-ture points of his proposals for Bogota are:

The revolutionary work manifests itself by means of a highly traditionalistic character. Because it reencounters the root of things, because it designates its true axis again. Here in Bo-gota, history and geography, the topography, the regime of the sun, and that one of the waters, of the winds, etc. (…)

have lead the Director Plan to respect the same laws that were discovered, respected and used by the founders of the city.3

The city that Le Corbusier imagined would also be an open city, viable and moving away from the golden promise of the era of the machine, leaving a utopian and ideal model and accepting the inexorable character of the topos.4 In Bogota, the bet was for a structuring roadway network rooted in the

Le Corbusier emphasized that volumes, buildings and architecture represented new possible relationships within urbanism (A propósito del urbanismo). They should order to the city and define its silhuette, the “symphony of the city,” (Precisions). a) Le Corbusier, A propósito del urbanismo, plate 1, p.144 © FLC, b) Le Corbusier, A propósito del urbanismo, plate 40, p.142 © FLC, c) Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, sheets 72-79, p.104. © FLC

a) b) c)

75“Architecture in everything, urbanism in everything” | M. P. Fontana and M. Y. Mayorga

Bogota’s geography and cityscape at the time and their relationship to the new urban landscape proposed by Le Corbusier in his travel notes.a) Le Corbusier, Carnet 1–B5–332 © FLC, b) Le Corbusier, Carnet 2–E20–433 © FLC

a) b)

geography of the territory, where the new unit of aggrega-tion would be the unit of the neighborhood, of the sector, that within the general order would allow for flexibility and leave room for the use of diverse forms of arrangement, types of buildings, and constructive techniques. 5

A city in which its main civic and representative space was defined from the renovation of its own center; a place where, in a more explicit way, the urbanism in three dimen-sions is put on stage, where volumes, streets, and spaces overlap and confront directly with geography and history, re-sponding to new guidelines that are added to the established urban order, superimposing a series of formal rules that arise from the reinterpretation of the preexisting conditions.

It is, in fact, in the city’s central area—that is to say, the civic center—where the urban-architectural proposal inte-grates and becomes more visible. A “new” center where the unit is ruled by the composition and mixture from elements coming from the geographic base and the forms of the urban evolution of the existing historical center, very present from the beginning of the development of the commission. In order to verify these proposals that depart from a con-viction of “the new” possibilities of city-making through ar-chitecture, in the case of Bogota’s center, we will initially ap-proach the design process of the arrangement proposal of the civic center of Le Corbusier and observe later, within the urban structure of downtown, the materialization and concre-

tion of two projects of teams of Colombian architects, which we consider archetypes that approach this making of urban architecture by using a series of common rules for architec-ture and urbanism, formal and compositional pattern proce-dures put in practice by Le Corbusier himself, as well as by modern architects in general. Le Corbusier says: “Architecture is an act of conscious will ‘To do architecture is to put in order’. To put what in or-der? Functions and objects. To occupy space with buildings and pathways”.6 Nevertheless, when he speaks of the form in which these objects must relate or be ordered, he talks about

[…] spaces, distances and forms, interior spaces and inte-rior forms, interior channeling and exterior forms and exterior


Series of three sketches, Le Corbusier, 1947.a) Le Corbusier, Bogota June 24th, 1947. © FLC H3-5-36-001b) Le Corbusier, Bogota June 26th, 1947. © FLC H3-5-37-001c) Le Corbusier, (Bogota, date unkown). © FLC H3-5-38-001

a)

b)

c)

spaces, amounts, weights, distances, atmosphere, we act with all of these. Such are the facts that we have to consider. From that moment, I confuse with solidarity, in a single notion, architecture and urbanism. Architecture in everything, urban-ism in everything.7

Let us observe this sequence of three sketches: here are, captured, the determining characteristics of what will be Le Corbusier’s proposal for the civic center:

- In the first one, the necessity to give urban continuity to the center in longitudinal sense stands out; there appear the main road axes the 7th, 10th, and 14th Carreras, inter-sected by Jiménez Avenue and in addition some areas of reference like the Plaza de Bolivar, the Santander Park and the Bullring, with the hint of the triangular lot that will occupy part of the future International Center of Bogota,

and that was property of the Military School at the time. The note says: “The City Hall is going to open streets through the park and the military land to widen two large streets. What first?”8

- In the second, the importance of the cross-sectional rela-tion of the center is noticeable, supported by the deci-sion to promote the Jiménez Avenue axis, showing part of its urban history and the need of redistributing its public space and to put a limit to the vehicular traffic of the city center. The note says:

The City Hall is going to open streets and to widen streets. Bogota is within the atrocity of the horns, Ministry of Na-tional Education, Ministry of Petroleum, hotel, when widen the large roadways in them will precipitate the flow of cars, exactly what took place when the river was covered and the buildings of offices were built.9

- In the third, he tries a new urban order that is superim-posed ove the existing one, based on an architecture of blocks over the Damero plot (grid plot) of the colonial city, emphasizing its relationship with the landscape; the blocks appear in two-way directions, thus showing their compositional possibilities and perspectives where they frame eastern hills of Bogota and imply a solution for ground floors.

STAGE 1. 607 plane FLC A

The civic center is drawn within the plot of sectors proposed for the city, structured by means of a linear system of three focal points of tension: the Plaza de Bolívar, a space to the south of the Plaza, and another one to the north. The main road axes are Jiménez and 10th Street, one cross-sectional and one longitudinal. Two main buildings around the Plaza de Bolivar are proposed, their volumetric composition is similar to that proposed for the United Nations building. A plot of cross-sectional streets is already defined. Some relevant pre-existing structures are marked; among them are the urban plots around the Plaza de Bolívar and the 7th Carrera.

Le Corbusier’s proposal for the United Nations headquaters in New York, 1947 © FLC


Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 607a

The Civic Center: urbanism in three dimensions

We consider that the best way to explain the formal genesis of Le Corbusier’s Civic Center is through his own drawings, showing its evolution and the project’s different versions. We emphasize four main themes that will serve as references be-tween all the schemes:

1. The linear structure of the main urban spaces of the center. 2. The longitudinal road axes and the relations of formal con-

tinuity with the city that these generate. 3. The cross-sectional road axes as relationships with the

geographic and territorial surroundings. 4. The role of the volumes as “urban architectures” that de-

fine and introduce new forms of urban relation in height and at the level of the ground, by means of the disposition of new volumes and the configuration of an urban fabric.

We have identified five stages previous to the final project, that mark the evolutionary process of the proposal and that we present here grouping the drawings in thematic series by means of interpretative schemes. The schemes are indicative and their intention is to show those that are, in our opinion, the most remarkable aspects in each case, through a synthetic reading of the original drawing.


STAGE 2. Plane FLC 31560.

An approach to the sector of the civic center in its central strip is shown. A certain balance in the relation of tension is still proposed, either towards the north or to the south, al-though the latter limits itself. It is possible to see some his-torical buildings as references. The 7th Carrera along with the 8th Carrera configure a longitudinal system of pedestrian axes related to the system of public spaces around Plaza de Bolivar. The blocks and the platforms of the buildings ap-pear drawn with a similar degree of definition. What is config-ured is, in fact, an urban carpet around the Plaza de Bolivar that continues to Jiménez Avenue, where the superimposed blocks are ordered according to the first proposal of serial order (which will change throughout the project). However, in the section between the Jiménez Avenue and the 26th Street, the 9th Carrera is emphasized by means of a series of ele-ments that are still not defined. A plot of streets in the east-west direction is still present, but the longitudinal tension still predominates, in north-south sense.

Plane FLC 31561 of the 10 January 1950 The area around the Plaza de Bolivar is shown in more de-tail; there are no important changes with respect to the pre-vious plan.

Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 31560



Plane FLC 31564 of the 2 February 1950 In this version of the project, three defined parts appear, which configure a linear system of focal spaces: one towards the south, a second that corresponds to the area around the Plaza de Bolivar, and a third of linear development that be-gins in the Santander Park and that includes the arrange-ment of the 9th Carrera (“Broadway”, for Le Corbusier). In this sketch the ensemble is shown as an urban carpet, where the high buildings do not stand out and get to be confused with the plot of the urban weave. One still notices the preponder-ance of the longitudinal relations, in north-south sense, while the cross-sectional relations are still secondary. The most important change with respect to the previous versions is the direction of both main blocks around the Pla-za. These will not change until the end of the project, while we will see in the later versions, changes in its position and reciprocal relation.


STAGE 3. Carnet number 2 Bogota. 16 February 1950.

Again, Le Corbusier concentrates in a more specific way on the area around the Plaza de Bolivar. In this configuration of the Plaza, there are now three main blocks that configure the Plaza towards the south, the west, and the north, that show the necessity of formally ordering their limits and ac-cesses. The main building of the grand immeuble is moved away from the Capitol, and one begins to see more specific variations in the low buildings and the platforms of the high buildings.

Carnet number 2 Bogota. 2 March 1950. In the first sketch, Le Corbusier turns his gaze to the geo-graphic conditions of the city and the structuring role of the rivers. In the second, he continues reflecting on the arrange-ment of the area of the Plaza de Bolivar. Of the main blocks: the one that defines the south side moves with respect to its platform; the one situated towards the west, that goes ahead towards the Plaza, varies in its lower body; and the one that configures the north side becomes the first in a series of three that serve to configure the first section of the 7th Carrera. The role played by “Broadway” as a structuring axis in the north-south direction is reaffirmed with clarity.

Carnet number 2 Bogota. 5 March 1950 Using as its base the two schemes of the roadway plot of the center of Bogota, the proposal, until this moment mark-edly linear, incorporates formally the bond with the historical preexistence and the existing nature, through the definition of powerful cross-sectional relations, mainly in the area around the Plaza de Bolivar and at the end of Jiménez Avenue. Both blocks towards the south and the west acquire finally their structuring roll within the set, one emphasizing an urban ten-sion towards the hills and the other towards the north.

Le Corbusier, Carnet 2–D16’–169-170 © FLC Le Corbusier, Carnet 2–D16’–187-188 © FLC


STAGE 4. Plans: 33698 of the 20 of 1950 FLC and FLC March 33689 Fig 5l-m-n. Plans: FLC 31565 and FLC 31568 of the 22 of March of 1950, and FLC 31566 of the 25 March 1950

From this moment on, the system of relations in longitudinal and cross-sectional directions becomes concrete and spe-cific. This system was established by means of the final dis-position of both blocks that configure in the Plaza de Bolivar a unified urban set with the existing capitol building and that, by means of an arranged relational system in the form of a swastika, mark the general guidelines of all the set of the civic center. In this sequence of plans it is possible to verify how the transversal relations with the mountains is created, reaf-firming the purpose of the area of the Plaza de Bolivar as epicenter of the urban system. The main urban elements are five blocks and two bars (in black); two preexisting buildings (in gray); the system of streets, and the green system. At this moment of the process, the elements that configure the urban fabric step into the background and other buildings that define the main urban tensions become the protagonists. Practically, the blocks will no longer change their position until the final version, the bar in the north-south direction, that acquires a very important role here reaffirming the relation with the hills, and will end up transforming itself in the final version of the project, once its function during the evolution of the proposal is accomplished. At the road level, the hierarchy and the continuity of the streets in the south-north direction are being defined and also their role of connecting with the natural surroundings and of definition of the central area of the Plaza. In these schemes, we have chosen not to mark in red the main elements but the elements that vary or that move with respect to the previous version, so that the evolutionary pro-cess of the proposal is more legible.

Le Corbusier, Carnet 2–D14–27-28 © FLC




STAGE 5. Series flat: FLC 31572 and FLC 31563

The work of insertion and of superposition of a new order on the existing center is already made evident and the level of concretion reached shows a correspondence that puts in value the geographic base, the historical preexistences and the layout of the grid plot (Damero), by means of a composi-tion that defines the streets and the public spaces as well as the buildings. The result is an urban area configured by means of an urban-base as a carpet—low constructions and over a plat-form—to which, it is superposed, in a serial way, a set of blocks, all this governed by the main emblematic space, new Plaza-esplanade where in addition rises the grand immeuble, main referent and synthesis of the new urbanism understood in three dimensions. In this almost final stage of the process a unitary ensem-ble can already be seen, where in addition each urban area,

each space, and each building acquires its measurement and specific function. In both sketches of the series appear detailed two urban areas: one around the Plaza de Bolivar (FLC 31563), in which are configured the territorial relations with the hills and the next natural surroundings; the urban relations with the build-ings and preexisting streets and guidelines of relation with the city, marking the direction of the dynamics of the develop-ment and the continuity towards its longitudinal sense— to-wards the north—over the cross-sectional direction—mainly toward the eastern hills. And one more toward the north (FLC 31572), where one double series of buildings is set: one defined by the sequence of blocks in height that mark an urban tension throughout the 7th Carrera, reaffirming their structuring role, and other defined by low buildings, platforms, and green public spaces, which contribute complexity to the urban fab-ric and that would animate the “Broadway” of Bogota.

In the scheme we have marked in red the archetypal build-ings that configure the Plaza-esplanade, the road system that reinforces the main relations with the hills, in the east-west direction, and the road system that reinforces the relations in the south-north direction, with a clear tension towards the north, reinforced by means of a serial sequence of buildings that define the initial profile of the 7th Carrera (black blocks).

FLC 31587 of 30 May The roadway system of the civic center is defined from a main strip with two areas in both sides and delimits the central area of the civic center from the peripheral axes, with a vehicular access controlled. Thus, two main areas are configured, that are articulated in its interior by a network of pedestrian streets where the “forum” of the Calle Real stands out. On the other hand, Jiménez Avenue becomes the main vehicular access, disposing also of a connection to the parking areas.

Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 31572 Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 31563


Series flat: FLC 621 and FLC 605 BOG 4220 Already, in these final documents of the plan, one can see that the intentions of Le Corbusier have evolved and have been synthesized in a proposal that reunites the aspects pre-viously studied.

City and architecture at the Civic Center

The approach to the solution of the civic center has been developed through a strategy of continuous verification, by means of the interpretation of the existing determinants and the superposition of its proposal. We summarize next the five stages that we have identified: 1. Definition of the main roadway system structured by

means of two main streets, the 10th Carrera (north-south) and Jiménez Avenue (east-west). A plot of secondary streets exists (east-west). Three focal spaces related to the preexistences are identified. Proposal of two main buildings that configure the area of the Plaza de Bolivar.

2. Proposal for a longitudinal development of the civic cen-ter. Linear system of three focal spaces. First variation of the buildings that surround the Plaza.

3. New territorial scale reflection. Relationship with nature and geography. Putting in value of the cross-sectional re-lations (east-west). Structuring role of the urban buildings.

4. Definition of a double system of relations in the area of the Plaza de Bolivar, transversal (east-west) towards hills, longitudinal (south-north), reaffirming the structuring role of the 7th Carrera. Variations on the buildings around the Plaza and the road system to arrive at the definition of the


Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 621 Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 605


ensemble. Definition of the high blocks like urban tension-makers. The urban carpet, the low platforms and build-ings appear drawn schematically, but not detailed.

5. Integration of all the elements and systems that com-pose the project: the ground floors, the urban carpet, the blocks, the streets configure a unit.

Finally, in the project for the civic center of Bogota, Le Cor-busier puts in practice an “urbanism in three dimensions”; that is to say, a way to take part in the constructed city as-suming the determinants of the place, superposing a new order, to finally transform it and to grant a new scale to it. An urbanism that initially recognizes and interprets the urban reality in its geographic, historical, formal, spatial, and func-tional aspects. An urbanism that proposes a new image of the city with the establishment of a formal order based on guidelines of relation with the surroundings and rules of com-

position of the urban space (streets and buildings): the serial-ity and sequence, by means of the disposition of the blocks; the continuity and space integration, by means of the defini-tion of an urban carpet (low platforms and buildings), and by counterpoints or focal point, by means of the use of landmark buildings. An urbanism that solves in architectural terms the relations of the building, understood as element or as an ad-dition of elements (tower, block, bar, low body, platform, etc.). The Pilot Plan for Bogota was approved by means of De-cree 185 of 1951, with different results: a roadway network that would organize the sectors is one of the most evident as-pects in its execution; nevertheless, the linear urban structure proposed has been strongly transformed into a semicircular radial scheme, that contravened the extended natural form imagined by Le Corbusier. The project for the civic center, instead, as we know already, was not realized nor was it ap-proved, but its repercussions, in our opinion, are and can be

important. His guidelines and bets agree with basic postu-lates of the architectural modernity, ideas that mainly found their application in the definition of the central area of the city thus forming their present modern character.

The center of Bogota: a linear poly-center system

The center of Bogota is an urban system based on a colonial layout with a grid plot, with two main axes of composition that mark their center, where the major Plaza and with a linear development south-north, parallel to the eastern hills and that intersects a cross-sectional system with east-west direction conformed by water streams, rivers, and brooks. An area of the city that has acquired its character and that has been configured during the 1950s and 60s by means of a series of interventions that have been able to consolidate the center of

Consistency in the relationship between Bogota’s geography, its urban form and in Le Corbusier’s proposal. a) Hypothetical plan of Bogota at the time of its founding in 1538, created by Carlos Martínez for his book: Santafé Capital del Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1987, p. 65. © Proa, b) Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 606

a) b)


Bogota, retaking the modern spirit that had fed the plan for the civic center of Le Corbusier. The longitudinal linear system tied cross-sectionally to the natural elements that had existed from the foundation of the city persisted like urban strategy and structure of the civic center proposed by Le Corbusier: the focal points, one around the Plaza de Bolivar, one related to the Santander Park and one in proximity of the Bullring (where will be lo-cated the urban ensemble Tequendama-Bavaria within the present International Center of Bogota) are reaffirmed like nodal areas of the center. That is to say, the superposition and intersection between the geographic base and the urban layout promote focal points of territorial importance, in such a way that their hierarchy is reaffirming itself in time: the same points of geographic and urban intensity that Le Corbusier retakes, that Sert confirms and that constitutes, at present, what we can define as a linear poly-center system. The Plaza de Bolivar, with the project of Fernando Mar-tínez Sanabria of 1960, acquired a new appearance that adapted to the colonial weave valuing the historical preexis-tences of the Plaza, redefining the powerful “urban void” like an opening to the natural scene, releasing totally the horizon-tal plane in a unitary way and solving with subtlety the slopes: “The ambitious propositions of Le Corbusier in relation to the civility of the Plaza did not take real body with demolitions, cement and bricks, but they lasted affirming the convenience of giving to this enclosure the sober appearance imposed by its centennial tradition”,10 affirmed Carlos Martinez. Santander Park, by its side, is a wooded plaza totally re-shaped along its edges and consolidated by the insertion of remarkable modern buildings that coexist with others of historical important value. Among these the Avianca tower, the Banco Central Hipotecario, the Museo del Oro and the Nacional de Seguros building stand out; buildings that confer new characteristics to the place, without putting in doubt their historical referring value like in the evolution and character-ization of the city. Finally, the International Center (and specifically the Te-quendama-Bavaria urban ensemble) is the test of a new way to make a city; a new center with a strategic location, an area

Downtown Bogota in J. Aparicio Morata’s panorama from 1772. The city’s most important elements appear along the intersection between its geographic base and its longitudinal development. © Carlos Martínez – Proa

Downtown Bogota: lineal, policentric system in the Pilot Plan and the Regulator Plan. Persistence of the transversal and longitutidinal relationships. a) Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota, civic center – BOG 4212 © FLC 604, b) Wiener y Sert, Regulator Plan for Bogota: carrera 6. From: 1928-1979 obra completa: medio siglo de arquitectura Josep Lluís Sert; Rovira i Gimeno, Josep M. Barcelona Fundació Joan Miró, 2005.

a) b)


contrasted by the coexistence of historical preexistences and obsolete constructions and where it is configured a parcel, which is the result of important infrastructural operations. The two historical places, without losing their symbolic vocation, are transformed by new and different forms from intervention and a new center is consolidated in an area that offers new opportunities for the city

Urban architectures: the Avianca building and the Tequendama-Bavaria urban ensemble

Urban beauty is originated through a visual balance between the components of a fragment of city, a change in one of these brings about the misalignment of that general balance.11

Cornelis van Eesteren.

We will concentrate now in two of the three urban areas previ-ously mentioned: Santander Park, that consolidated itself as focal space for the city, mainly thanks to the construction of the Avianca building (1962-1968; Esguerra-Saénz-Urdaneta-Samper; Ricaurte-Carrizosa-Prieto, and Doménico Parma, engineers) and the urban ensemble Tequendama-Bavaria (1952-1982; Holabird-Root-Burgee, Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez, and Obregon-Valenzuela). In both cases we speak of projects that by their spread and strategic insertion in the city have become in representa-tive urban operations of a modus operandi that bets clearly to the configuration of the building and the set of buildings as urban architectures, as new elements that assume the new scale of the city and become the measure of the transfor-mation and the bet towards modernity. These are exactly the types of buildings capable of bringing about changes of such spread that it is necessary to look for a new balance in the city and thus to arrive at the “urban beauty” mentioned by Van Eesteren or to the “true architectural and landscaping symphony”, as commented by Le Corbusier in the report of the Pilot Plan. The tower constructed for the Avianca airline is located on the 7th Carrera, in a context that stands out for its historical

Urban role of Le Corbusier’s Gran Immeuble in the Plaza de Bolívar and the Avianca building in the Parque San-tander.a) Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota: model of the Centro cívico © Archivo Pizano. b) Photograph of the group of buildings that make up the Parque Santander in Bogota, circa 1970. © Photograph by Rudoph in: Bogota: Metró-poli moderna, Servicios Técnicos Editoriales, 1970. a) b)

and urban value, and in addition is part of a set of buildings varied by its use, time and architecture, that define and de-limit Santander Park. Within a block of irregular rectangular figure, on a corner lot of almost squared dimensions—50 by 45 meters—stands the forty-story building, the first and high-est skyscraper of the city. In one recent conversation with Germán Samper,10 we had the occasion to speak of some subjects regarding the conception of the Avianca tower, among them the reasons why the bet of the designers of a much higher building than initially was predicted (that made it totally different with re-spect to the other proposals) and of which was the urban role they wanted to give to the building within the city. To the formulated questions, the architect responded that the first objective of the team was simply “to win the com-petition” and because of this they had to bet for something that will convince the jury. Their reasons demonstrated that, without altering the maximum constructed surface predicted, a much higher building could be obtained that it allowed the

double objective of the best use of the lot and that surely would stand out within the city. When asking him for his referents, the answer was im-mediate: the Pirelli building, of Gió Ponti, and the Seagram Building by Mies; he also arrived at the relation with the grand immeuble of Le Corbusier, because of the similar urban role that it was going to have in the city of Bogota. In an extract of the report published in the magazine Proa, the same designers defined the building: “A new construc-tion, balanced, that by its simplicity lasts through the years”; “Plastic Contribution that becomes symbol for the promotion-al company and the city”; “Synthesis at the present time of urbanism, architecture and technique”.13

Evidently the Avianca building conceived as a new ur-ban landmark, a reference within the city that responds to the idea of building like “urban tension-maker”, like visual counterpoint in the development of the city throughout the 7th Carrera, as vertical element of “resistance” necessary to compensate the horizontality of the urban space in which it is


located. The main subject of the project is “consideration”, the balance between the old and the new and, simultaneously, the “counterpoint” and contrasts with respect to the existing. The element tower assumed the role of urban reference at the scale of the city or an area of it, betting on an evident contrast with the surroundings, while the ground floor and the platform solved the relations on the scale of the street and of the place. The platform, the fitting element in the parcel, is conceived in a unitary way with the tower; both bodies are perceived as fused and the lower part of the tower is an extension of the same platform. The ground floor of the building is solved in a system of three spaces of different characteristics and cate-gories, arranged on different levels: Santander Park, outstand-ing urban space of the surroundings, serves as “anteroom” to the main access of the tower, above which it dominates the high building as urban-architectural referent; the lobby-plaza of entrance from the 7th Carrera, to a higher level with respect to the street, it configures itself as an outer-inner space of ac-cess and connection between the tower and the platform, that serves as space or observing place on the street; the other space is the inner lobby, located underneath the tower at a level inferior with respect to the street, related visually with the urban surroundings thanks to the transparency of the facade.

Van Eesteren, Propuesta para el área de Rokin, Amsterdam, 1924. Tension, counterpoint and balance between urban elements. © Julián Galindo, Corne-lis van Eesteren, La experiencia de Ámsterdam 1929-1958, Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, Barcelona, 2003, pp. 38.

Images of the relationships between the lower foundations of buildings facing 7th Ave from the Parque Santander as seen in a proposal for the contest and from an areal photograph from the 1960’s. a) Esguerra, Saenz, Urdaneta y Samper, Avianca Building. © Archivo distrital.

b) Photograph of downtown Bogota around 1970. © Foto Rudolf, Bogotá: Metrópoli moderna, Servicios Técnicos Editoriales, 1970.


Masters of modernity as Van Eesteren, in projects like the arrangement of the area of Rokin in Amsterdam, 1924, or like Le Corbusier himself in the project for the civic center, had bet exactly by this type of urban dynamics, proposing for their plans new urban elements capable of establishing vi-sual, functional, and formal connections with the space, and structured by means of rules of the game that could not be agreed a priori but interpreted from the specific conditions of the place. “You see that, little by little, as I enunciate the prin-ciples, rules appear, elements appear, since they are those that will help to constitute the key of urbanism”, commented Le Corbusier in his first conference in Bogota. Since we have already seen in the project of the civic cen-ter, Le Corbusier puts in value a series of urban reflections basic to the construction of modern Bogota: the interpretation of the landscape as a structuring basic system and part of the urban composition, without relegating itself to being a simple background; the incorporation of the historical preexistences as elements that enrich the system of urban relations; the configuration of the urban voids, plazas and esplanades by means of the existing tension between the buildings, more than by the continuity of its edges; the configuration of the street from a sequence of public spaces conformed by plat-

forms that compose an urban carpet instead of the alignment of facades, and the use of high buildings as elements ca-pable of establishing new mechanisms of relation of differ-ent nature: by counterpoint, in contrast by repetition, serial or continuity; tests that are exemplified in the urban ensembles for the different centers (administrative, of businesses, com-mercial, and cultural) that conforms the civic center. In a sketch from February, 1950, Le Corbusier drew a pro-posal of a composition of a set of urban buildings situated ahead of the Bullring. They are, evidently, high and far-reach-ing buildings that grant to this area of the city an important strategic role as a new urban and territorial centrality, a cul-tural and leisure hub that will promote the uses of the existing buildings (the Bullring, the National Museum, etc.) by means of new hotel uses. The proposal for this new center, very gen-eral and surely incipient, incorporates in an instinctive way many of the intuitions that Le Corbusier matured and defined for the project of the civic center. The mountains, the park, the existing buildings, the new buildings, the urban spaces, as a whole appear deeply related to each other; once again an ur-banism in three dimensions is put on stage, that incorporates all the previous reflections on the area of intervention referring to the complexity of the place, of the surroundings, and ma-

terialize them by means of the disposition of representative urban buildings. Le Corbusier’s proposal for this area of the city did not go beyond this drawing, but after a few years several Colombian and foreign architectural firms carried out the process of re-alization of a very emblematic urban setting for the city of Bo-gota: the lot selected for the project will be other, practically adjacent with that which Le Corbusier had imagined and with characteristics of even better strategic relations; the Interna-tional Center of Bogota, that in spite of a little well-known pro-cess of management and the complexity of its construction, owns as a formal result a unified image, a new urban center with a high symbolic and functional value for the city, a proj-ect of a business center, complemented with room for hotels, and leisure and residential areas. At a metropolitan level, the set is part of a system of centers that give shape to an emblematic urban area, the expanded center of the city, an urban structure organized through two main vectors: one in direction south-north con-formed by the 7th Carrera and the 10th Avenue, and another one towards the west, the Eldorado Avenue, that opens to a new front of relations towards the airport El Dorado. At an urban level, on the one hand, it contributes to the continuity of the sequence of a series of referential spaces: plazas, parks, axes, and representative crossings, through-out the 7th Carrera, solving the transition between the city of a colonial layout and the new formation one. At an architectural level, the diverse buildings with pro-grams and uses (residential, of commercial offices and of leisure) are urban elements that establish diverse types of re-lations resorting to variations of buildings made up of tower and platform, with a remarkable repertoire of mechanisms of relation between their own parts, with the other buildings, with the public spaces and with the city. If we observe the different stages of the process of com-position and construction of the setting, we can evaluate the process, the guidelines of order it assumed and its results at urban and architectural level:- The origin of the block in 1949 in the sector of San Diego

arises from the extension and widening of the 10th Carrera

Le Corbusier, Carnet 2–D16’–187-188, sketch from February 28th, 1950. Proposal for a new centrality in the area near the bull ring (San Diego): the propo-sed buildings form a unitary whole connected to nature, public spaces and present builidngs. © FLC


and the partition of the Parque del Centenario. In 1952, the city will conform the San Diego Glorieta which disappears in 1958 when the viaducts of the 26th Street are built.

- The process of the construction and consolidation of the setting was transformed in the following stages:

A. Tequendama Hotel 1950-1951/1952-1953 Project: Holabird-Root-Burgee Construction: Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez B. Bochica Building 1952/1955-1956 Project and construction: Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez. C. First extension of the Tequendama Hotel 1959 -1960/1961-1962 Project and construction: Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez Structural design: Doménico Parma D. Joint Bavaria 1963-1965 Project: Obregón-Valenzuela Construction: Pizano-Pradilla-Caro Structural design: Doménico Parma E. Bachué Building and Tisquesusa Theater (today, Aladín Casino) 1963-1964/1966 Project and construction: Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez F. Second extension Tequendama Hotel 1966-1967 Project and construction: Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez G. Residences Bachué (today Tequendama) 1978-1982 Project and construction: Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez

Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota: sketch of the civic center: counterpoint, seriality, and continuity in the urban composition of the civic center’s area. © L14 – 24-001

a) Plans of the urban composition © Mayorga-Fontana, 2009b) The perspective from the Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez proposal for the Tequendama complex, 1952. © L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui num. 80, 1958.a)

b)

a) Plans of the different stages of construction for the Tequendama-Bavaria complex between 1952 and 1982. © Mayorga-Fontana, 2009.b-c) Photographs of the points in construction that correspond to the second and third sketches respectively, taken by Saúl Orduz © Saúl Orduz, IDPC.

a) b) c)

AB

FE G

CD


The ensemble: the relation with nature and the city

The Tequendama Hotel was the first constructed building of the set, that since its construction it was considered as a proj-ect of great importance for the city; “Concluded already the Tequendama Hotel” the newspaper El Espectador published on 25 April 1953, and 20 October 1973; 20 years later, the same newspaper dedicated a special supplement to the con-solidation of the new “International Center of Bogota”, a great bet towards the future. It is evident that from their beginnings, each building of this urban set generated great expectations of change and repre-sented a bet apparently original, given their spread and size with respect to what was being built in the city. In fact, the innovating character of the proposal had to do mainly with a logic of equilibrium and of a search of new rela-tions with the existing: in the same line of Le Corbusier’s pro-posals for the project for the civic center or that Van Eesteren in his proposals for the area of business for a contemporary city in The Hague in 1926,14 to only mention a few examples, what is proposed with this project for Bogota is a series of new rules of the game for a city that wants to be modern with-out negating its past. The project of the urban setting Tequendama-Bavaria was built, as we have seen, in several stages, but there are two distinct large areas of the project, which we have termed “Te-quendama set” and “Bavaria set”; each responds to rules of specific grouping and urban composition as well as to main territorial and urban bets: to be related to nature and the pre-existences and to clearly adhere to a tension directive reaf-firming the importance of the 7th Carrera as the structuring axis of the city. Both parts fulfill these objectives by means of different ur-ban compositions: to the area of the Tequendama set, for ex-ample, if we pay attention to the first proposal of Cuéllar-Serra-no-Gómez, instead than in the set that was built, we identified an urban grouping composed by four buildings in bar (includ-ing the already built Tequendama Hotel), each of them related by diverse types of low bodies or platforms. Three bodies are placed in a transversal direction with respect to the street and

Plans made by the creators of the connecting mechanisms between the blocks and platforms that make up the complex. © Mayorga-Fontana, 2009.

Perspective of a three-dimensional model of the Tequendama-Bavaria urban complex.© Mayorga-Fontana, 2009.


one, longitudinal on the 13th Carrera, in such a way that the set is open towards the mountains and in addition defined a sequence of headwalls on the 7th Carrera, as well as a more compact facade on the 13th Carrera. In the final realization, the second extension of the Te-quendama Hotel and the large tower of the Tequendama Residences (last scheme, figure 15a) alter, in our opinion, the spirit and the intentions of the initial proposal, taking away the strength of the serial repetition of the fronts on the street, though they do maintain the opening towards hills. For the area of the Bavaria set, the architects opted in-stead for a composition of three bodies (two towers of square plans and a higher tower of a rectangular plan), shifted to each other and resting on a common platform. The disposi-tion of these elements allows for different visual relations with the mountains (framing or trimming silhouettes) or with the ex-isting building from the National Museum, which forms in its overall composition a strong relation towards the north of the city with the disposition of the highest building in the corner of the lot.

The parts: variations of the building tower-platform

If it is important to recognize a common logic in the set of buildings, it is also necessary to pay attention to the specific architectural solutions proposed in each case: the diverse ways the tower and the platform relate to each other, or the way the low bodies show an urban and architectural variety of possibilities, repercussions, and solutions. In the buildings of Josep Lluís Sert, it is possible to rec-ognize three main parts in a volumetric level in each building. Each has a different degree of urban relation: the ground floor is the relation with the ground, the area of denser and direct urban relations; the platform, an intermediate element that can lodge public and private uses; the tower or superposed block has only minor direct urban relations, but has a high value as an urban landmark. In the case of the Tequendama Hotel and his first exten-sion, for example, the two blocks located cross-sectionally in

View of downtown Bogota on Google Earth, 2008.

Urban composition and relationships in the Tequendama-Bavaria complex. © Mayorga-Fontana, 2009.

relation to the street are imposed upon a low body. In the Bo-chica building, the block prepared longitudinally with respect to the street is atop, but almost fused, with the low body, which acquires the function of a commercial base and aid to solve the change of level between the street and the “interior plaza”. In the Bachué building, the block and the building platform are separated and the relationship between both buildings is solved by means of a joint that lodges a com-mercial street-passage. In the Bavaria set, the two residential

towers rest on a large urban platform that lodges commer-cial uses, of offices and leisure, while the highest building is displaced with respect to it. In each case, in addition to the variations of relation between the main volumes, diverse ur-ban spaces like inner streets, commercial galleries, covered streets and covered plazas, colonnade spaces, etc., a series of mediation spaces define a network of urban relations be-tween the buildings and their surroundings.

Location and section of the Tequendama-Bavaria Complex. © Mayorga-Fontana, 2009.


Urbanism and urbanist architecture in three dimensions:a) Paul Beer, perspective of the Hotel Tequendama and first extension. © Mayorga-Fontana. 2009. b) Perspective of the Bochica building. © Mayorga-Fontana. 2009. c) Mayorga-Fontana, photograph of the Bachué buiilding, 2004 © Mayorga-Fontana, Bogota. d) Saúl Orduz, photograph of the Bavaria Museum in Bogota. © Saúl Orduz, IDPC.

a) b)

c) d)

“Architecture in everything, urbanism in everything”: Bogota, the architecture of the modern city

For Le Corbusier, Bogota represented one page à to tourner, as he affirmed in his last text, written a month before his death:

In Bogota, in 1950, I had the sensation to pass page: the end of a world, immanent, imminent. There is only to know the duration, in human hours, of the seconds or minutes of this… catastrophe? No, friends of this liberation. A circumstance without emphasis and in anything solemn: a trip of business in Bogota filled my hands, in five days only, of a harvest of facts and proofs of general order and personal order capable to affirm without anguish, but, from of the joy of tomorrow, that the page will pass, a great page of human history, the history of the life of the men before the machine and that this broke, crushed, made breadcrumbs.15

And Le Corbusier represented the same for Bogota: a new page of its history, an encounter that did no more than to ac-celerate the evolution of the city towards transformations that already were in process. Both parties in this encounter will follow separate paths to their destinies, but with the traces marked by an interrelation that will reverberate in both their evolutions, without being able to question their identities. We can now confidently consider the city of Bogota as a laboratory of urban and architectonic modernity, for which a set of ideas, projects and/or accom-plishments on a territorial scale were produced, that conform an important chapter of the architecture and urbanism. We have talked about only a few accomplishments in the most specific way, but there are many that have been car-ried out and which are emblematic of this modus operandi, of this new way of conceiving the city. It is the truth that Le Corbusier got to propose a plan for the city of Bogota, but in fact his ideas were widely known or implicitly assumed by the Colombian architects; one of the most remarkable aspects of his presence in Bogota was that he had the occasion to propose, once again, a “urbanism in three dimensions”, that actually could be materialized by diverse routes. A legacy of modernity: Architecture and urbanism understood as a formal


and functional unit, fruit of the relationships between the new urban elements on three scales: the scale of the well-known city and the monuments, the scale of the skyscrapers and the new activities, and the scale of communication with the territory.16

Let us then return to the first image of this writing: Le Cor-busier explains:

I have expressed a silhouette of city. Why lacking of modera-tion and why ignorance of the consequences (as the fashion makes damage) would we have to make the silhouette of the house like the silhouette of the city? If I begin to multiply, by the street or in the city, the mistreated houses in this form, the effect will be miserable: the tumult, the breakdown, the ca-cophony. [...] Lets reserve this diversity indispensable to our intellect for the hour in which the symphony of the city will be prepared. The immense contemporary problems of urbanism and the architecture, will contribute to the city, in extension and height, elements of a new scale. The unit will reside in the detail; the gibberish will be in the whole. I have made in-tervene the space around the house: I have counted with the extension and with what rises above: distance, time, duration, volumes, cadence, amounts: urbanism and architecture.17

María Pía Fontana: Architect by the Universitá degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”. She is a professor of Projects at the Universidad de Girona (Spain), DEA by the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (2004) and attends the doctoral program in Architectonic Projects by the UPC, Barcelona.

Miguel Y. Mayorga: architect by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia of Bo-gota, teaches at the undergraduate level and at the Master program in Urbanism of the UPC and of the UOC (Barcelona), DEA by the UPC (2003) and attends the doctorate program in Management of the Territory by the UPC.

They have been invited editors of DPA 20 Cosenza (2004) y DPA 24 Bogo-tá Moderna (2008). They have been curators of several exhibitions, among them Colombia. Arquitectura Moderna. 50-60, UPC - La Salle, Barcelo-na (2004); Colombia. Contribución a la modernidad, Museo de Bogotá. Bogotá (2005); Ciudad y arquitectura moderna en Colombia. 50-70, Mi-nisterio de Cultura, Bogotá (2008); Luigi Cosenza. El territori habitable, UdG – COAC, Girona (2008); Museo de Arquitectura Leopoldo Rother UN, Bogotá (2009). They have published several articles on architecture and urbanism, and are the authors of the catalogue Colombia Arquitectura Moderna (Colombian Modern Architecture), ETSAB Barcelona, 2004 and 2007; of the book Luigi Cosenza. Il territory abitabile, Università Roma La Sapienza, Aligns, Florence 2007 and of the Catalogue Luigi Cosenza, el territorio habitable 10 projects Museum of Architecture Leopoldo Rother, Bogotá (2009).

1 It is the third conference dictated in Buenos Aires, Tuesday 8 October, 1928, in soothes of the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Le Corbusier, Preci-siones respecto al estado actual de la arquitectura y el urbanismo (Barce-lona: Apóstrofe, 1999) 89-105.

2 Idem, p. 90.3 Le Corbusier, “Plan Piloto de Bogotá”, Pórtico (special edition, 1952) 194 Frampton says: “After his visit to the United States in 1936, Le Corbusier

inclined, in a more decisive way, to develop a form of viable urban growth and of a open city type, that corresponded more of the reality of the generic megalopolis that at that time was being born spontaneously in the peri-pheral zones that surrounded to the main capitals. […] The city delimited, centralized and neohumanist, like the Ville Contemporaine, has dissolved definitively, while the white architecture and without joints has give inn com-

pletely. We are in 1944 and Le Corbusier is 57 years old. He has accepted the Pandora’s box that is the infinite megalopolis and still has ahead other 21 years of exercise and thought around the open-city”. Kenneth Framp-ton, “El otro Le Corbusier: la forma primitiva y la ciudad lineal, 1929-1952”, Arquitectura 264-65 (Madrid: COAM) 36-37.

5 Idem.6 Le Corbusier, Precisiones respecto al estado actual de la arquitectura y el

urbanismo (Barcelona: Apóstrofe, 1999) 89-105.7 Idem.8 Translation of the text of the croquis de Le Corbusier H3-5-36-001, 24

June, 1947.9 Translation of the text of the croquis Le Corbusier H3-5-37-001, 26 June,

1947.10 AAVV., Bogotá, estructura y principales servicios públicos. Cámara de Co-

mercio de Bogotá. (Bogotá: Villegas, 1978).11 Julián Galindo, Cronelis van Eesteren. La experiencia de Ámsterdam:

1929-1958 (Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 2003) 41.12 Interview with Germán Samper, Bogota, April 2009.13 Proa 162 (November 1963). Monographic number on the Avianca buil-

ding.14 Julián Galindo, Cornelis van Eesteren. La experiencia de Ámsterdam

1929-1958 (Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 2003) 39-53.15 Le Corbusier: « Rien n’est transmissible que la pensée », Volume 8 des

Œuvres Complétes – Les dernière Œuvres (Zúrich: Willy Boesiger, Les Editions d’Architecture Artemis, 1970) 168-169.

16 Julián Galindo, Cornelis van Eesteren. La experiencia de Ámsterdam: 1929-1958 (Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 2003) 39-53.

17 Le Corbusier, Precisiones respecto al estado actual de la arquitectura y el urbanismo (Barcelona: Apóstrofe, 1999) 105.

The Tequendama-Bavara complex: the lower foundation and the street-level relationships of spa-tial continuity. The urban carpet; low bodies and platforms. The composition of large volumes, towers and blocks. © Mayorga-Fontana

Van Eesteren, Commercial area for a contemporary city, La Haya, 1926. © Julián Galindo, Cornelis van Eesteren. La experiencia de Ámsterdam: 1929-1958. Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, Barcelona, 2003, pp. 50.


Le Corbusier and Proa magazine, or the history of a misunderstandingHugo Mondragón L.

1.

In August of 1946, the first number of the magazine Proa was published in Bogota. Le Corbusier’s first trip to Bogota took place between the 16th and the 24th of June 1947; that is to say, ten months passed between the first and the second event. These facts are relevant if we take into account that the historiography of the 20th century architecture in Colom-bia has usually assigned to Proa the role of main diffuser of the ideas of the modern architecture in the country, while Le Corbusier is one of the more influential figures of the interna-tional movement in local context. In May 1947, in the editorial of number of Proa 7, Le Cor-busier’s visit to Bogota was announced as an unparalleled event for the architectural culture of the country: “For Bogota and particularly for the architects’ guild, this visit is a cause of fair pride, of imponderable value and a pledge of pres-tige before the international world of architects, urbanists and planners”.1 This editorial concluded by maintaining that, as of that moment, the challenge consisted of maintaining the relationship between Le Corbusier and Bogota for the longest possible time. In Proa 8, published in August 1947, once the first visit from Le Corbusier to Bogota was already a concluded fact, a series of articles was published that tried to define his com-plex personality: a Renaissance man, who besides being an architect was also an urban planner, a painter, and a math-ematician. The articles had an unmistakable tone of admira-tion for the figure of the Franco-Swiss architect and a sense of excitement over his recent visit.

In the editorial of that same number, Le Corbusier was compared to figures like Marx, Freud, Einstein, and Picasso, at the same time mentioning the behind the scenes events of his first visit to Bogota. One particular episode that the local historiography has made part of the mythology of the history of the 20th century Colombian architecture is the supposed “star” reception that the students of architecture offered him, shouting “Down with the Academy, viva Le Corbusier”. In the article “Le Corbusier, arquitecto”, Jorge Arango Sanín tried to take apart the myth according to which Le Cor-busier was the creator of contemporary architecture. His im-portance, instead, was to be found in the relationships that he tried to establish between architecture and the machine; in the incorporation of new construction materials like steel and concrete, which were added to new applications of the traditional materials; and in “the functional” advantages that were obtained from the separation between support structure and dividing walls. In this way, affirmed the author, Le Corbusier “maquiniza” architecture as Ford mechanized the car. The production and the reduction in price of the construction costs were the way in which Le Corbusier opened architecture. This mechaniza-tion, nevertheless, did not mean that the man was forced to be part of the mechanism; rather, according to Arango, what he wanted was to give more functionality and freedom to ar-chitecture. The text of Arango ended by emphasizing the propagan-dist condition of Le Corbusier, presenting him like a great diffuser of the new architecture’s ideas, who faced the most reactionary visions of the society until managing to install a discussion at international level.

This text was accompanied by images of the prototype Dom-Ino, the house studio of Ozenfant, a photo of the interior of the pavilion of L´Esprit Noveau and a sketch of the build-ing, an image of the project for the Centrosoyuss, the house in Mathes (that explains the new use of the stone), and the build-ing of the Ministry of Health and Education in Rio de Janeiro.

Carlos Arbeláez, on the other hand, chose to present in his article on “Le Corbusier polemicist”. More than works or proj-ects, the article was centered on books, articles, and confer-ences that had made Le Corbusier a well-known personage internationally. Arbeláez drew up a route that began with the foundation of the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau and that, according to his point of view, had excellent moments in the publication of the Ville Contemporaine; of the text Une maison-un palais, in the presidency of the CIAM; of the magazines Plans and Prelude, and over all, of the book Precisions, to which Arbeláez as-signed the title, “door of entrance” of Le Corbusier’s ideas to America. The article continued with a reference to the conferences that Le Corbusier gave in the Teatro Colón in Bogota, which, according to Arbeláez, had turned around three basic as-pects: the revolution of the new materials and the height of the new buildings; the revolution in the circulation and the four ways: highways, railroads, waterways, and aerial transport; and finally, the proposal of three types of human settlements for the city worker: the productive agricultural establishment, the industrial linear city, and the radiocentric city. The article finished with the invitation of Le Corbusier to the Colombian architects to constitute the local seat of the

95Le Corbusier and Proa magazine, or the history of a misunderstanding | Hugo Mondragón

Photograph of Le Corbusier with his firm, published by Jorge Arango Sanín in his article “Le Corbusier arquitecto” Proa magazine (which included images of the do-mi-no prototype, the Ozenfant workshop, an interior photo and sketch of the L”Esprit Noveau pavillion, an image of the Centrosoyus project, the house in Mathes and the Ministry of Health and Public Education in Rio de Janeiro). © Proa

Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning cover from the first edition (1930), in which he relates his conferences in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. © FLC

Self-portrait of Le Corbusier published in Proa no. 7 in the article entitled “Psyco-genisis of Le Corbusier’s painting” © Proa

Diorama of the entire horizontal city published in Proa magazine no. 7, in the article entitled, “Le Corbusier urbanist”. © Proa


ASCORAL (Assembly of Constructors for an Architectural Renovation), over which he presided in France.

“Psychogenesis of Le Corbusier’s paintings” was the title of the article written by Jose de Recansens. It was a very singu-lar article, full of psychology concepts, which made its read-ing difficult for those who were not familiar with that discipline. Nevertheless, what was more or less clear from the reading of the article was that Recansens proposed as a hypothesis that, through his work as a painter, Le Corbusier had found a vent for his frustrations—non-realized works—as an archi-tect. In this sense, the pictorial work of Le Corbusier would be made from his architectonic frustrations and therefore would be complementary of the architectural work. It was a sugges-tive interpretation. Augusto Tobito, on the other hand, presented “Le Cor-busier city planning”, making a route by the today rather well known proposals of the Ville Contemporaine, the Plan Voisin, La Ville Radieuse, the Plan of Algiers, etc. More than in trying to set out the ideas and arguments that guided the city-plan-ning proposals of Le Corbusier, the article was concentrated in trying to present a synthetic listing of the urban proposals developed by Le Corbusier between 1918 and 1938. Finally, to close Proa 8, dedicated to constructing a enthu-siastic profile of Le Corbusier’s figure, an extract of Le Modu-lor, by Le Corbusier, was published. After this enthusiastic reception that Proa offered to Le Corbusier immediately after his first trip to Bogota in 1947, two things attract attention of the attentive reader of the mag-azine: first, the silence that was kept between 1947 and 1952 in relation to the assigning of the Regulatory Plan for Bogota to Le Corbusier (1947), the creation of the Office of the Regu-latory Plan of Bogota—OPRB (1947)—and the official deliv-ery of the plan director (1950). Secondly, the acid editorial published in the magazine in November 1952, against Bogo-ta’s Regulatory Plan and the “urbanism by correspondence”. What could have happened in these five years to make the magazine change its position radically in relation to Le Corbusier and the work that he had developed for Bogota? Perhaps the answer is in a sequence of articles and projects

that had the objective of transforming Bogota into a modern city, which they published in the magazine prior to hiring Le Corbusier for the Regulatory Plan for Bogota.

2.

Between August 1946 and June 1948, five proposals were pub-lished in the magazine Proa to transform Bogota into a modern city. They were: 1. The extension of the 10th Carrera; 2. The roadway plan for the next 20 years; 3. The re-urbanization of the central market place and of the 16th neighboring blocks; 4. The city of the employee; and 5. The reconstruction of Bogota.2

These proposals had been developed by people like Ed-gar Burbano, Luz Amorocho, Enrique García, Jose J. Angle, Jorge Gaitán, Alvaro Grouse, Gabriel Solano, Augusto Tobito, Alberto Iriarte, and Jorge Arango; all of them close to Car-los Martínez, publisher of Proa, and although up to a certain point these plans were not more than schematic drawings accompanied by provoking phrases, at a distance, it is clear that their authors had serious pretensions of directing the city-planning destiny of Bogota. By examining these plans and several of the articles on urbanism published in the magazine between 1946 and 1951, it has been possible to infer some clues. For example, for Proa, the public administration was not anything other than the institution in charge of ensuring that the common benefit took precedence over particular interests and, in that sense, one of its tasks was to guarantee that the growth of the city was carried out in an orderly way. But this was not the case. It would seem to that this institution—or its absence—was the responsible for, at least since 1936, a very significant phenomenon in Bogota that in the magazine was known by the name of the “… beginning of the era of feudal urbanism”.3

What characterized this era of feudal urbanism was the inversion of the scale of values between collective and pri-vate interests that the publishers of the magazine prepared themselves to denounce. Feudal urbanism was the living representation of what happens to the growth of a city when the individual interests were privileged over the collective in-

terests.4 This was considered an unacceptable inversion of values since, within the conceptual framework constructed by the magazine, the city had to be understood, first of all, as a communal property. In this sense, the definition of planning that appears in the magazine is not a surprise. Planning was understood as: “… the science that studies, anticipates, orders, and distributes the patrimony or wealth of a region for a communal property; and by communal property one must understand the one belonging to the collectivity. Planning is the fair relationship between official works of pubic service and the satisfaction of the needs of the collectivity”. It is possible to infer that planning had only to be ad-vanced by the public administration, that is to say, an institu-tion of the state, so that in this way the privilege of the collec-tive interests in the processes of construction of the city could be guaranteed. Nevertheless, towards 1946, Bogota did not seem to be a city that stood out indeed by the interest demonstrated by the public administration in opportunely solving the problems of growth and accelerated urbanization faced by the city.

Even in the first issue of Proa, there were attacks against the top figure of the public administration at that time, the mayor of the city. “Bogotá”, wrote Carlos Martinez “has had abun-dant number of mayors, but few that deserve a place in city-planning annals of this city”. The unique mayor who escaped of the criticisms of Mar-tinez was Jorge Soto del Corral, since “he was the first in conceiving the vast project of extension and opening of road-ways, that with the name of Plan Soto-Bateman was sent to the consideration of the public in 1934”.5

According to what we have expose, the plan was widely debated within the Sociedad Colombiana de Arquitectos (Colombian Society of Architects - SCA)6 and some of its members presented a new plan, based on the previous one, that contemplated the extension of some existing routes in the city. This project appeared published in Proa with the name of “Extension of the 10th Carrera” and according to what it affirmed: “The mayor Llinás, successor of Soto del Corral,


Between August 1946 and June 1948 Proa magazine published five proposals intended to transform Bogota into a modern city. They were: 1. The widening of 10th ave.; 2. The road plan from the 1920’s; 3. The reconstruction of the Plaza Central de Mercado and the surrounding 16 blocks; 4. The “employee city” (Ciudad del Empleado); 5. Reconstruction of Bogota. 5c Plan from the reconstruction proposal for Bogota. © Proa

Model of the “employee city”. © Proa Drawing of the street-widening project for 10th Ave. © Proa

One of the models created by students that were published in Proa maga-zine no. 1, in the article entitled: “To Make a Bogota a Modern City.” © Proa


made the council to approve, in 1945, according to the prin-ciples set out by the SCA the definitive project of extension of this important roadway”.7

Despite the triumph for the architect’s guild that the ap-proval of this project on the part of the administration of the city could have meant, it is probable that the magazine con-sidered that the projects of transformation of the city did not depend on “good sense” or “good will” of the governor in power, or, perhaps more important, of the good relationship that the architects guild had with him. For this reason, in the same number in which the approval of the extension of the 10th Carrera was celebrated, a cam-paign was launched so that the Administration of the city cre-ated a “Departamento Municipal de Planificación Autónomo” (Municipal Department of Independent Planning), an organ-ism that “… already exists in the capital of any State where the order, the hygiene and the growth of the city are con-cerns”.8

The question that arose then was: who would be the most suitable people to run this department? It is obvious that they were not the present civil servants of the municipality, who were not spared criticism by the publishers of the magazine.9 The candidates were others. If, on the one hand, a call was made that this department, the one that would be in charge of the administration of the city, would be integrated by ca-pable people—and who more capable than a person who had urban studies—10 on the other, it was suggested that contributors be “… the young architects that in December, on the occasion of the exhibition of their thesis for their degree, showed what could be done in Bogota”.11

The strategy was becoming evident. On the one hand, they were proposing the candidacy of one of the members of the SCA to be appointed director of the mentioned De-partment of Urban Planning—it could be Carlos Martínez himself.12 On the other hand, the call for the inclusion of the young architects, some of whom already had been students of Carlos Martínez at the Universidad Nacional with whom, without a doubt, they shared similar ideological positions.13

But why did the magazine decided to enter into the fight to influence this organism? The answer is obvious if we con-

sider the fundamental role the Department of Planning played in the completion of the proposals published in Proa for the historical center of Bogota. Bear in mind that the viability of the plans depended on the application of the law of expropriation and, although this law existed, the organism in charge of applying it did not exist. Thus, the magazine did not hesitate in devising a modification to the administration of the city that allowed the creation of this organism and it did not hesitate either in entering in a direct fight for its control. For Carlos Martinez it was clear that, in that moment in the country, “To urbanize it is to govern”.14

The reforms demanded of the public administration had by final mission to smooth the way so that the administration of the city could adopt some type of strategy of planning for Bogota. In 1947, the year following the foundation of Proa, the architects’ guild, represented by the SCA, would achieve a significant success in this direction, obtaining the approval of Decree 88 by the Congress of the Republic.15

In that same year, the negotiations began to contract the plan for Bogota to a “professional of first order and compro-mised with the more advanced and modern proposals”.16 Some contacts were established with personages like Marcel Breuer, but it is very probable that Eduardo Zuleta Angel—at this moment, minister of Colombia before the United Nation—had postulated and impelled the candidacy of Le Corbusier and it is with this label that the Franco-Swiss master visited Bogota for the first time, 6 June 1947.17

This mythological event has been commented on widely by the Colombian historiography, indicating the unrestricted support that the Colombian architects and, mainly, Carlos Martinez Jiménez and a group of faithful followers of their ideas, lent to the master, that made him exclaim: “It is very good that they are in agreement with me in a one hundred percent, but is not possible that they are in agreement with me in a three hundred percent…”18

In the editorial appeared in issue 7 of Proa, the magazine announced the visit from Le Corbusier to Bogota and in the editorial of issue 8, dedicated entirely to the figure of the mas-

ter, there are transcribed some of the phrases he pronounced during his visit to the city.19

Nevertheless, the support that the magazine gave to Le Corbusier’s candidacy would seem to have diffuse limits. Recognizing the importance of the personage and his ideo-logical connection, as of that moment, the publishers to the magazine were in charge to promote the assigning of an ur-ban study of Bogota to Le Corbusier. Nevertheless, and for some reason, they did not ask for anything with precision, but rather quite vaguely, using the words “contribution” or “he contributes”, which seem to sug-gest the figure of an adviser instead of a contractor; conse-quently the publishers of the magazine didn’t seem resigned to the possibility of carrying out the plans that they had pub-lished in Proa to modernize Bogota.

In the article that served as introduction to the timely and of the moment project of Reconstruction of Bogota, in 1948, the publishers of the magazine maintained that once this project was shown to the well-known city planner Maurice Rotival, and in repeated occasions he maintained that “you architects of Bogota, have arrived at an unsuspected professional ma-turity. You do not need foreign technicians but a kind of critics for 10 or 15 days every 6 months” (sic).20

With this operation, he was indicating a work scheme in which Colombian architects—probably of the circle of Proa—carried out the plan for Bogota with the advise of a consultant foreign technician—read Corbusier. But in addition, the ap-pearance of this figure is not chance. Rotival was a French city planner and a defender of the culturalist approach, one of the harshest critics of Le Corbusier and his competitor in the market of Latin American cities.

Eight months later, in February 1949, during the administra-tion of the mayor Fernando Mazuera, Le Corbusier made a second trip to Bogota with the aim—according to what ap-peared in the magazine—“to decide the work plan and the details of the respective contract”.21 In this way, Le Corbusier had been commissioned to realize “the city-planning study that demands the capital of Colombia”22 and the director of


Proa offered a languid support to this decision maintaining that “the valuable collaboration of Le Corbusier, in this study, will be of immense importance for Bogota”.23

From then, and excluding a solitary article of Rafael Ser-rano Camargo titled “Review of the Regulatory Plan of Bo-gota”, published in April 1950, the subject of the plan would disappear quietly from the pages of the magazine, to the ex-tent that the compilation book that the magazine published in 1951 did not publish any of the plans, nor make reference some to the Plan Director or Pilot Plan elaborated and given by Le Corbusier to the authorities of Bogota between the months of August and September 1950. The mentioned article of Serrano Camargo informed us that until that date, the Office of the Regulatory Plan for Bo-gota, which had under its control the Director Plan made by Le Corbusier, had two directors: Herbert Ritter and Carlos Arbeláez Camacho, both personages close to the publish-ers of the magazine. With them they obtained, partly, what the publishers of Proa had set out for from their foundation in 1946: to have some type of influence in the decisions on the planning of Bogota.

3.

Jorge Arango Sanín, who at the moment of Le Corbusier’s first visit to Bogota was the head of the Office of Administration of Public Buildings and was coauthor of one of the plans for Bogota published in Proa, affirms in his memoirs that he was consulted by the mayor of Bogota of that time on the conve-nience of inviting Le Corbusier. Arango says that he agreed, because at that time he was convinced that it would be very beneficial for the reconstruction plan of Bogota that he and other architects had developed after the disturbances of 9 April 1948 and that was being used by the city as the basic plan for its reconstruction, to receive the commentaries and observations of Le Corbusier.24

Nevertheless, his testimony is evidence that he never imagined that the Regulatory Plan for the city was to be com-missioned to Le Corbusier himself, who he saw more as an

adviser for a plan in which he would share responsibility with some other members of the circle of Proa magazine. This would explain the silence and later attack of the di-rector of the magazine on the Regulatory Plan of Bogota that the municipal authority had commissioned to Le Corbusier, Sert, and Wiener. In the editorial of Proa 65, published in No-vember 1952, Carlos Martinez accused of deceit to the “for-eign architects” authors of the plan. In “¿Puro timo el Plan Regulador de Bogota?” (Regulatory Plan of Bogota: A Pure Hoax?)25, Carlos Martinez denounced irregularities and made acid criticisms of the Regulatory Plan. The centers of Martinez’s criticism were the breach in the dead-lines for delivery and a reduction of twenty thousand dollars in the contract in favor of the municipality of Bogota to hire third parties to realize demographic social, statistical, economic, of mobility, topographical, and geological studies. The questions that Martinez asked were: on what has the two hundred thou-sand dollars that they have been paying to the contractors until this moment had been spent? And: How could they have been able to advance in a serious and rigorous plan without having before them such fundamental information? According to Martinez, the few drawings that the contrac-tors had given up to that moment did not represent anything that professional Colombians would not have been able to re-alize in Bogota. To complete the matter, the regulatory plans that the company of Wiener and Sert had realized for Tuma-co, Medellin and Cali had shown to be a failure. As it is known, the Pilot Plan was turned into law by means of the Decree 185 of 1951, but it would quickly become ob-solete due to the incessant arrival of masses of immigrants expelled from the fields by the political violence that followed the murder of Gaitán in 1948. These masses destroyed the anticipated statistics of growth and quickly overflowed in re-ality the limits that, on paper, the plan had fixed for the urban-ization of the city. In the heated social and political atmosphere of the be-ginning of the 1950s, the Pilot Plan not only lost its political and legal endorsement but, in addition, during the military government of Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957) was struck a final blow by the annexation of the municipalities of Engativá, Usa-

quén, Raise, Fontibón, Bosa and Usme to Bogota. This kind of legal conurbation was denominated the Special District of Bogota. In those same years, the National Administrative Center (CAN), the international airport El Dorado, and the av-enue of the same name were constructed outside the perim-eter that the plan of Le Corbusier had anticipated for the city.

After the “misunderstanding Le Corbusier” and with the rees-tablishment of the democratic regimes in 1959, Carlos Marti-nez Jiménez, director of Proa, was appointed director of the Administrative Department of Distric Planning. During the management of the man who has been pinned down by critics urging from the pages of Proa the irrational and indiscriminate demolition of the historical center, Law 163 of 1959, on the defense and conservation of the histori-cal, artistic patrimony and of public monuments of the nation in the center of Bogota; and the remodeling of the Plaza de Bolivar was carried out. The facts show that the critics were been mistaken, not only with the figure of the director of Proa, since it has been demonstrated that he was interested in the architecture of the past long before those who endured the same criticism, but also when assigning to the magazine, in its first years, the role of mute diffuser of the ideas of Le Corbusier. It would be worth the pain to ask instead for the relation-ships that could be constructed between the Colombian ar-chitects, Proa and Le Corbusier, if the worn away prejudice of ideological patronage and the non-reflexive repetition had been changed.

A possible influence of the projects published in the magazine on the sphere of preoccupations of the master seems to be something not so preposterous, mainly when we read the so-called philosophical grounds of the project that Le Corbusier developed for Bogota, in which the Franco-Swiss architect seems to speak from the same conceptual ground and al-most with the same words that the publishers of the magazine had used years back in the publication of the plans.

The revolutionary work—wrote Le Corbusier—consists of put-ting in order again that which carelessness, inexperience,


egoism, demagoguery, have disturbed, denatured, turned into the grotesque and ineffective, hostile to the public good. It is because all that, that often the revolutionary work mani-fests itself by means of one of highly traditionalistic charac-ter… Here in Bogota, history and geography, topography, the regime of the sun and that of the waters, of the winds, etc. (…) have lead the Pilot Plan to respect the same laws that were discovered, respected and used by the founders of the city.

Hugo Mondragón L. Architect, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. MA in Architecture Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. MA in Architecture, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Ph.D., Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Head of the Master’s program in Architecture.

.

1 Proa 7, May 1947.2 A description of these plans can be read in an extract of: Hugo Mon-

dragón, “Arquitectura Moderna en Colombia, 1946-1951. Lectura crítica de la revista Proa” in Textos 12, publicación del programa de Maestría en Historia y Teoría del Arte y de la Arquitectura (Bogotá: Universidad Nacio-nal de Colombia, 2005).

3 Next to a plan of the city it is possible to read the following: Bogota in 1936. By this time the developers had appeared and the picoteros city planners tried their drawings. Bogota shows here a set of agglomerations of frightful disorder. The city, that had its first growth in obedience to elementary man-dates of order and in observance to the principles that regulate the urban morphology, exchanged as of this moment its economic layout for a con-fused and badly-shaped aspect. Sacrificed to the economy, the direction of his routes and the logical urban composition were traded for the currencies that filled pocket of the speculators. Faraway lands once destined for farm-ing, by work of pernicious interests, exchanged their functions for those of new neighborhoods. The benefits of the collective were defeated by the benefit of a few. Nevertheless, the city is a communal property, but this consideration was empty. Also at another time, almost barbarian, between dukes and princes, duchies and bishoprics, the unfortunate rules of the individual interest bloomed and this policy determined a pitiful era of his-tory: for relief of those that have taken part in the development of Bogota, this city also indicates a distressing era that is called “Feudal Urbanism” in “criminal plans” (sic). Proa 9, November 1947.

4 More recent studies have demonstrated that what frightened the members of the magazine so much was no more than a manifestation of the “natural growth of the city of the capital”. For more information on this subject see: Marino Folin, La ciudad del capital y otros escritos (Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, S. A., 1976).

5 “La carrera décima” Proa 1, August 1946.6 It is important to indicate that the guild of architects was for that date in-

volved in an ongoingfight to professionalize the exercise of the architec-ture, trying to accede to the spheres of power, in which fundamental deci-sions were taken for the urban future of the city.

7 “La carrera décima”, op. cit.8 “Para que Bogota sea una ciudad moderna”, Proa 1, August 1946.9 “The people who are interested in these subjects—the urban subjects—

have communicated to us that the Department of Municipal Urbanism is in the offices of Proa. Such declarations are stimulating. The Municipal Urbanists, when they have taken care of notion of Street have confused it to Corridor, and when they have found out about the necessity Housing have taken his skills to the service of the demagoguery, executing small houses whose set is sad, desolated neighborhood (sic).” “Bogota puede ser una ciudad moderna. Reurbanización de la plaza central de mercado y de las 16 manzanas vecinas”, Proa 3, 1946.

10 “We must leave the constancy that Bogota has not had city planners. Paris had Colbert, great minister superintendent of constructions of Hauss-

mann, the minister of Napoleón III. Washington had Jefferson to L´Enfanta. Caracas had Guzmán Blanco and lately Medina Angarita. Rio de Janeiro had to Rey Juan and Getulio Vargas and Buenos Aires to Rivadavia. In Bo-gota the people of urban progress do not appear in their facts. It is certain that the virrey Espeleta ordered great works but unfortunately their orders were not fulfilled”. “Para que Bogotá sea una ciudad moderna”, Proa 1, op. cit.

11 The photos of the works of these students serve to illustrate the article idem “Para que Bogotá sea una ciudad moderna”, Proa 1, op. cit.

12 One remembers that Carlos Martinez Jiménez had obtained in 1933 the title of city planner, granted by the Institute of High Studies of the Univer-sity of Paris.

13 In fact, the article “So that Bogota is a modern city” is illustrated with pho-tographs of the thesis works of the students the magazine mentioned.

14 Editorial, Proa 27, September 1949.15 “By means of the Decree 88 of 1947, which was the result of the negotia-

tions realized by the Colombian Society of Arquitectos (SCA) and by one of its more outstanding members, Jorge Gaitán Cortés (mayor of Bogota in the following decade), managed itself that the Congress adopted a spe-cific legislation on the urban planning, like basic instrument to regulate the growth of the cities.” In: Rodrigo Cortés, “Le Corbusier en Bogotá: por un urbanismo de los “tiempos modernos””, Textos 4 (Bogotá: Publicación del Programa de Maestría en Teoría e Historia del Arte y la Arquitectura, 2000).

16 Rodrigo Cortés. Idem, 80.17 “Le Corbusier had a good friendship with Zuleta thanks to the unrestricted

support that this one had given him, being the president of the decision making commission to assign the contract to the project presented by the Swiss architect to the summoned contest to choose the designer of it the headquarters New York of just created the UN”, op. cit.

18 Phrase supposedly pronounced by Le Corbusier in his visit to Bogota, according to Germán Téllez, en Crítica & Imagen, Ministerio de Cultura, República de Colombia (Bogotá: Escala, 1998) 93

19 In what follows, some of these phrases are transcribed: “The inhabitants of Bogota in their eagerness to enjoy the landscape of the savannah are giv-ing the back to the beautiful landscape of the mountains. The savannah is dominable from an airplane, Bogota’s mountains from a room”. “The urban layout of the old Bogota is a good layout. Spanish squares with its right angles, a beautiful creation. The disorder of Bogota is in its new neigbor-hoods”. “The city-planning case of Bogota looks to me like one of those young ladies who when 17 years old decided to leave their home to enter the adventure of a life without control”. “The great majority of Bogota’s architects are young full of optimism and their works are agile; I believe that with them I could make a good work in Bogota”. “If in you the Colom-bians persist by some years more the characteristic gentility, a Colombian civilization will bloom”. “Your Capitol pleases Me. He is sober and it has distinction. The use of native materials, like these stones, indicates in you the sense of the functional thing”, Proa 8, August 1947.


20 “La reconstrucción de Bogotá”, Proa 13, June 1948.21 “Le Corbusier y el Plano Regulador de Bogotá”, Proa 21, March 1949.22 Ibid.23 Ibid.24 Arango dice lo siguiente: “I was consulted by the major and I was more

than happy to agree upon the benefit of having Le Corbusier look over what Carlos [Martínez] and I had done and the city had been using as a basic plan for reconstruction”. Jorge Arango, Villa Sofía (London: Athenea Press, 2003).

25 Editorial, Proa 65, November 1952.


The eminent visitor and a professor of architecture Mauricio Pinilla

Architecte Rother de Bogota, auteur de l´edifice postal gou-vernamental de Barranquilla. (Centre Civique). Très bien. (Beau béton et inspiration).

Le Corbusier. Carnet D-14.

Leopoldo Rother arrived in our country in the middle of 1936, responding to an open request by the liberal administration of President Lopez Pumarejo to bring highly qualified techni-cians who would contribute to his newly undertaken project of modernization of the Colombian state. In Germany, the political circumstances were becoming more difficult and complex every day. The primacy of the Na-tional Socialism was taking root at a very fast pace, exhibit-ing in that process the first signs of the organized violence that soon would reach devastating dimensions for all Europe. When the Nazis had access to the administrative apparatus of the state, they immediately undertook the task of consoli-dating power, removing from their positions those who did not belong to the party to be replaced by supporters or directly by party members.

Rother was one of the many victims of those events. Edu-cated with the classical formal principles, which were the tradition in all the academies of his time, he began to be interested and to deeply identify himself with the ideals of modern architecture that in the Weimar Republic had pro-duced such decisive space conquests to culture. Moder-ately, in the buildings that he made for the state, and in frank and eloquent way in the projects he did for competitions, Rother unfolded his familiarity with the new language and with the ideas that in Berlin already had began to materialize

in the new residential colonies and that were the object of discussion in all Europe. Rother was of an essentially kind character —he is re-membered that way, without exception, by all those who later would be his disciples in Colombia— and he was also an intellectual of deep humanists convictions.1 He did not fit in any way in the restricted ideological frame that by force was imposed to him in his country. In Christmas of 1935, he was informed that had been removed from his position as a deputy director of National Buildings of Germany.2 He had arrived at this responsibil-ity working with discipline and in a very commendable way since his graduation from the Technical Superior School of Berlin, in August of 1920. He was 41 years old, was mar-ried to Susane Treuenfels, and had two very young children with her. With much distress and preoccupation he would undergo that blow to his career and would see the threats that were hanging over those he loved, discerning reason-ably and clearly the perspective of the discrimination and the brutality, and all the doors closed before them. The call from the distant Colombian Government arrived providentially.3

Colombia will not merely be for him a temporary refuge to save his family. Our country will become a new hospitable motherland, closely held and valued. His new residence, with the responsibilities that the state assigned to him and with its variety of climates and landscapes, will influence his archi-tecture decisively. He brings with him recognized experience as a designer, which includes the conception of some of the most impor-tant buildings of the University of Clausthal.4 Surely this was preponderant when deciding to hire him, because one of the

Leopoldo Rother: portrait. © Marta Devia de Jiménez, Leopoldo Rother en la ciudad universitaria, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, p. 51.

103The eminent visitor and a professor of architecture | Mauricio Pinilla

central intentions of the administration of Lopez Pumarejo was the construction of a university city. His first contact with Colombia must have made a deep impression. We get a glimpse of this experience when Hans Rother described his father’s arrival to our country. I do not know yet if, once he arrived at Barranquilla, he undertook the hard trip to Bogota on a steamboat through the Magdalena river, as it was usual, or if he did it by flying as passenger of the already reasonably well-established German Colombo Society of Aerial Transport, that covered with its hydroplanes the route to the river port of Girardot in ten hours, following the channel of the river and being substantially shorter than the several weeks that could take the steamboat route. Or if he arrived by the port of Buenaventura, as his compatriot the painter Guillermo Wiedemann would do in 1939.5

But as it happened with Wiedemann, the new and diverse people, their music and their easygoing character, the vast-ness of the landscape and its contrasts, the light and the col-ors of the tropics and the strength of the climate all exerted an enormous influence on his sensibility. A painter can make these syntheses much faster and more intuitively. In the case of an architect, the process must be necessarily slower and more settled, understanding the cultural foundations and construct-ing technical arguments harmonious with the logic of the proj-ect. Rother, being a mature architect, must have approached with the curiosity of a scientist the experience of living in the middle of high relative humidity and with temperatures that at the time of the hottest point of the day would go up to around 35ºC—thus becoming aware of the reasons why these hard conditions can only be palliated by architecture if it provides refuge with abundant shade and ample wind exposure. When going into the country, contact with the farmers’ houses in warm climate conditions was unavoidable, constructed with vegetal materials with little capacity for thermal storage, with wide high ceilings and with transparent rooms, supported by posts between which the hammocks are hoisted and the wind crosses through without any obstacles. What until then it would have been for him only an erudite anthropological refer-ence—the primitive Caribbean cabin only seen in the context of a specialized publication or in a European museum—would

Hydroplane Junkers operated by the Scadta Company based in Girardot after landing on the Magdalena river coming from Barranquilla. © Homepage of the Municipality of Girardot.

Eugène Burnand: drawing of a Carribean cabin; notes from Gottfried Semper’s class about its style (1869). © Archivo de la ETHZ. Zürich.

acquire now an unexpected and appropriate reality. Rother’s objective and rational spirit must have identified clearly the agreement between the cabin and the essential data of the climate, and confronted it with his ideology and his knowledge to prepare little by little, certainly with the influence of the intel-lectual debate of his time, the evolution of his language and of the space conception of his architecture. This is a deep transformation that is not limited exclusively to formal aspects. He could only acquire the maturity that he exhibits when tying, in the architect, the rational and precise understanding of the meteorological peculiarities of the lati-tude to which he has moved, to an integral and affective un-derstanding of the forms of inhabitation and with the culture of his new residence on Earth. Evidence of his precise knowl-edge of the solar position in relation to the latitude, the sea-son of the year, and the hour, are the class notes that he com-posed patiently throughout his life as a university professor. He put together 2,103 folders, in which are found, carefully archived and with titles, the needs their classes suggested to him, different materials to show to his students: cuts from magazines, sometimes with projects, others with the informa-tion of the characteristics of a specific material or construc-

Cabin located in the area surrounding Ciénaga de San Mar-cos In the Mojana region of Colombia (2008). © M. Pinilla.

Leopoldo Rother: drawing of a Tukano hut, based on a construction of Luis Raúl Rodriguez, used to explain the relationships between build-ings and the breeze. © Tratado de Diseño Arquitectónico. Tomo I, Figura 78, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Artes. De-partamento de Arquitectura 1970.


Leopoldo Rother: cover of Tratado de Diseño Arquitectónico, edited by the Department of Architecture at Univer-sidad Nacional de Colombia in 1970. © Taken from the volume stored in the Ar-chitectural Library at the Universidad de los Andes, which is part of the collection donated by the architect Gabriel Serrano.

Leopoldo Rother: Diagram of the Earth’s ecliptic and its relationship to its axis. © Tratado de Diseño Arquitectónico. Tomo I. Figura 56. Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Arts Faculty. Department of Ar-chitecture 1970.

Rother’s competition project for the city of Essen: isolated blocks of police lodging that are arranged in line with the sunlight and connected by bridges like the Bauhaus building in Dessau. It is not surprising that these drawings decisively influenced the perception that the national-socialist bureaucracy based itself on his work.© Hans Rother, Arquitecto Leopoldo Rother, Escala, 1980.

Hannes Meyer, children’s housing in Solothurn, Switzerland (1938). © Hannes Meyer, Bauten, Projekte und Schriften, Architectural Book Publishing Co., New York 1965.

Leopoldo Rother, Escuela Normal de Pamplona, Colombia (1936). © Hans Rother, Arqui-tecto Leopoldo Rother, Escala, 1980.


tive system, cuts of technical catalogues, students’ exercises on diverse programs or explanations of certain problems, in-termingled with drawings and texts made by him.6 Testimony to his knowledge of solar geometry is given by the publica-tion, made by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia many years later, of the first part of the treaty of architecture that he dreamed to conclude, in which he extensively tackles the problem of the shade in the facades.7

Le Corbusier himself, whose encounter with Rother is the reference for the title of this essay, had documented not long before the transformations that the American landscape had provoked in him, describing how powerfully the Brazilian ge-ography and light and the enormity of the pampas stimulated his sensibility.8

The German architect who arrives at Colombia in 1936 comes convinced of the ideas of the new objectivity.9 The Bauhaus had been closed in Berlin in 1933 by the Nazis, just as they ascended to power. They must have seen with initial mistrust Rother’s moderated transit, in his high state position, towards a less ornamented language in his buildings. They would have declared themselves frankly scandalized when,

inquiring into his antecedents, they found the project with which he was a finalist in a public competition for a police lodging in Essen in 1929. It is an asymmetric composition of regular prisms, articulated to each other with bridges, like in Dessau, and placed in such a way that they followed the oval outline of a peripheral footpath. It is a composition that is very much analogous to the project just built in the outskirts of Berlin for the school of the German Federation of Unions, made by Hannes Meyer and dated between 1928 and 1930. The Normal School of Pamplona, the first project that Roth-er drew up in the Directory of National Buildings and that will be developed between 1936 and 1940, surprises us by its relations with another building of Hannes Meyer, composed between 1938 and 1939, when Rother was already installed with his family in Bogota. The plan of the central building of the normal school outlines an open cloister in a flank, with two short wings of asymmetric lengths. The children’s home made by Meyer in the mountains of the Solothurn region in Switzerland is more of a square, but the stairway located at the end of the longest side projects itself perpendicularly and creates the illusion of a third very short wing that, however,

aids in shaping the communal space. In both compositions a circular space appears, articulating between the volumes and the landscape and the valleys that are predominant. In the case of Meyer, the cylinder encloses the dining room and uses its flat roof as place for the children’s morning gymnas-tics, receiving the first rays of the sun from the east. In the case of Rother, the cylinder will occasionally enclose a class-room for the education of the arts and will be used as a cha-pel. Although the symmetrical garden and the almost artisan constructive conception of the circular pavilion of the school of Pamplona contradict the modern spirit of its plan, there are essential affinities between the two compositions. The confrontation between the radical ideas of the mod-ern movement and the received classic formation during his university years will be present and in constant tension in the work that Rother developed during his first ten years in Colom-bia, mainly in the conception of the master plan for the Univer-sidad Nacional de Colombia and in the buildings he projected for it. These are buildings in which admiration for modernist ideas is intertwined with the classical principles of monumen-tal composition learned in the academy. In the buildings of vast programs, like the one of the Instituto de Investigaciones Veterinarias (Institute of Veterinary Investigations) and those of the set of the Instituto Químico Nacional (National Chemical Institute) and the Instituto Geológico Nacional (National Geo-logical Institute), he frequently articulates isolated pavilions with dynamic asymmetries, going from one body to another under very slight and transparent pergolas. Nevertheless, the tension and the decomposition of the frontality that are visible in the relations between the volumes disappear in each indi-vidual body, which tends to base its force on a great central lobby with two wings on its flanks. The geometric simplicity of the forms and their nakedness place them near the modern vocabulary, but the symmetry dominates and freezes them. To the glazed lobbies arrive stairways that are graceful in their form, but they are not free of the imposing impression that their presence used to acquire in the neoclassic public con-structions. The facades were drawn with strict codes of the repetitions of the bays, following the symmetries of the plant and crowning them with an austere superior cornice.

Leopoldo Rother, Veterinary Research Institute (IIV), Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Bogota (1938-1941). © Marta Devia de Jiménez, Leopoldo Rother en la ciudad universitaria, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, p. 102.

Le Corbusier, Casa le Lac (1923): fotographe of the roof © Dorothée Imbert. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DA AGP, París / FLC. 2006.


Rother’s biographers indicate the arrival of Bruno Violi as an important influence in those years, who passed Per-ret’s ideas on to him with vehement enthusiasm.10 For a while, the asymmetric explorations of his language (remainders of his interest on the Bauhaus approach and of his project for the competition of the shelter for the Essen’s police of 1929), dissapeared. With Violi, he develops an almost archetypal building for the Faculty of Engineering. In it the proportions are rigorous, the location of the stairs is impeccably logical, and the facades frankly express the functions behind them. It could be said that more than being in front of a classic com-position, we are in this case in front of a strictly typological composition, almost eternal.

But Leopoldo Rother—kind, amiable, a little timid, disci-plined and austere—in his personal life has an inquisitive spirit based on a great creative force. The last volumes of Le Corbusier’s works have arrived at his hands, with their deep critical force. Also have arrived other books on the architec-ture that a new generation of architects from Brazil has been recently making. Those buildings are fresh and full of glad vigor. With them, the ideas of the modern movement acquired

an extraordinary power, enriched by the tropical climate, by the necessity of shade, and by the exuberance of the vegeta-tion that Robert Burle Marx went to find in the jungle.11

It is important to remember that the language proposals of the modern movement have arisen mainly in Central Europe, in latitudes with very harsh winters and where the tradition dic-tated building in a compact and massive way. The lightness and transparency of the revolutionary projects of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe would seem more appropriate for warm climates without seasons, as in the tropics, than for the long pe-riods of cold weather of the northern hemisphere. They would seem to be made on purpose for the breeze that is so benefi-cial here, for the fresh shade that buildings raised on pilotis can provide, or so that in the terrace-gardens the widely greater diversity of biological relations of the tropics would reproduce with speed. Indeed, that natural miracle that Le Corbusier iden-tifies, excited, when speaking of the roof of his mother’s house on the shore of the Lemán lake, takes place in our latitudes with multiplicity and power unimaginable in Europe.12

The contact with the work of Reidy, Niemeyer, Costa, Burle Marx, and the other architects of Brazil made a deep impression in Rother. The phenomenon that took place there is one of an exceptional syncretism of the European modern ideas and the local climate and landscape. The conferences dictated by Le Corbusier—in 1929 in Rio de Janeiro, and the controverted collaboration in 1936 with the young people who would be designing the building for the Ministry of Edu-cation in Rio de Janeiro—have much influenced the process. The experience is extraordinarily dynamic and suggestive, and beyond the author’s jealousy expressed by Le Corbusier, the feed and inspire one another, American and European. What the Brazilian architects had done, and in particular the creators of the building for the Ministry of Education, dazzled the developed world when it was exhibited in New York in January of 1943. Certainly, it could not be conceived without the antecedent, persistent, peculiar, reflective, and creative of the work of Le Corbusier, who, since the years of his visit to the Cartuja of Ema, has been elaborating both a theory on the forms of inhabitation in height and also a urban criticism of convincing arguments. The two connected in a powerful

Cover of the book Brazil Builds. Rother had an edition in his li-brary. © The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1943.

Costa, Niemeyer, Reidy, Leao, Moreira, Vasconcellos, Brazilian Ministry of Education and Public Health. © L´architecture d´aujourd´hui. Special Number. August 1947.

Le Corbusier, an alternative project for the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Public Health, situated on bay’s waterfront that became a marvelous opportu-nity for the team of talented young professionals that carried out the final proj-ect. Le Corbusier, like a modern-day Baron von Humbolt cum architect taught the cultured American elites about the European perspective of seeing and appreciating (and taking control of) the place’s magnificent geography. Taken from the Œuvre Completè, Vol. 3, p. 80: “Minister Capanema’s cabinet”. © FLC

Leopoldo Rother, drawings based on Le Corbusier’s famous sketches of Río and Pan de Azúcar, which he used to show his students the important relation-ship between the sun, nature and architecture. Rother worked at an equatorial latitude that gives the tropical climate an exuberant force, much greater than in Rio de Janeiro located nearly on the Tropic of Capricorn. He includes no details about the geography but instead includes a solar disc and emphasizes the vegetation and some of the large leaves typical to certain plants found along the Magdalena river. © Tratado de Diseño Arquitectónico. Tomo I, Figura 53, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Art Faculty. Department of Architec-ture 1970.


message that has been widely spread. But the buildings that the Brazilian young people had drawn had at the same time their own life and a new strength, deeply anchored in their social history and their cultural idiosyncrasy. I cannot say with precision at what moment the book from Philip Goodwin arrives to the library of Leopoldo Rother. Given that it is published in 1943, and that the circumstances of that time do not allow us to suppose its ample diffusion, much less its immediate arrival in Colombia, it is reasonable to think that until a little after the conclusion of the war, in 1945, the book was unknown to Rother. According to his son, Hans, his father studied its pages carefully. Imagine the intellectual emotion with which he looks at the works. He is already fifty years old. He has projected and constructed in abundance, with great technical and compositional maturity. The site plans of several important commissions in his life have arrived recently at his drawing table, two of them in very warm and demanding cli-mates: Girardot and Barranquilla. He is beginning to make the first sketches for the printing press building at the Universidad Nacional. The warm climates to the borders of the Magdalena river surely have posed him numerous questions that he can-not answer with the composition arguments with which he has worked until now. Like a good German, his vision of the world moves between two poles: precise and disciplined rational-ism and exalted romanticism. After, perhaps, one first skeptical impression by the newness of the forms, he would have found in the suggestive Brazilian interpretations numerous logical reasons for that architecture, and, little by little, he would have been identifying the reasons for such a suggestive composi-tion, in which the prisms are broken and allow the free passage of the breeze, the facades acquire depth, with textures of light and shadows, and the inhabited roofs with vaults and gardens, from which it is possible to dominate the vastness of the land-scape. He would have discovered, probably with admiration, the affinities of that architecture with the tasks that he has un-dertaken, like the precious miner who discovers a very rich and precious vein. He would have understood, with complete certainty, the essential bonds that exist between the Brazilian buildings and the heart of Le Corbusier’s ideas, whose intel-lectual work admires and knows well.

The influence of that syncretism also arrives at Rother through magazines. In class notes for his students, he in-cluded the cover of the magazine Pencil Points of Septem-ber 1946, with the project of the Ciudad de los Motores that Wiener and Sert completed for the Brazilian government.13 There are several other publications that probably arrived at his hands then in which the Brazilians dazzled the North Americans, although they do not appear in the collections of the periodicals library of the National University.14

And, confronted with that which he sees and understands, he has the strength to leave behind what until that moment had been a secure terrain of a whole life of work in the profes-sion, with all the convictions achieved from and rooted in that experience. And, with plenty of the vigor that gives him his technical knowledge and his artistic formation, he embarks in the transformation of its vision of the project. Rother completed a first draft for the civic center of Bar-ranquilla, and the influence of his friend Violi is evident. The

Cover from Progressive Architecture. Pencil Points, September 1946. Includes a perspective from Wiener and Sert’s firm for the project of the “motor city” that was to be constructed en route to Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro. Rother includes the clipping in one of the folders for his classes. Folder 1197, Civic Center, Second Selection. Archivo de memoria institucional. Universidad Na-cional de Colombia. © Copy of the issue stored in the newspaper library at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Leopoldo Rother, perspective of the preliminary plan for the civic center in Barranquilla. Memorias del Ministro de Obras Públicas (1946), which was first published in the Barranquilla newspaper, El Heraldo, July 7th, 1945. The con-struction plan for the blocks dates from September 18th, 1945 and is held in the Archivo General de la Nación. © Carlos Niño Murcia, Arquitectura y Estado, second edition, Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2003.


newspaper El Heraldo published a perspective of this first approach on 7 July, 1945. The initial preoccupation of the architect with taking care of the circumstances of the climate is noticeable. He has projected a set of buildings oriented strictly according to the more favorable angles for the sun. Although there is no evidence of it in the headwalls, which are strictly closed, the prisms’ proportion makes us suppose that the plans are organized in one bay, with the open corridor at the back side of it. The volume does not indicate where the stairways’ and elevators’ cores can be located. Being aware of Rother’s knowledge of the trajectory of the sun in the celes-tial vault in relation to the latitude, the facade of the drawing must be the north one, although it still lacks some parasol eaves or and special considerations regarding the ventila-tion. The side facing the south, more exposed, would be pro-tected by the corridors. The columns come out of the external plane’s surface, expressing themselves in the form of heavy pilasters that frame the windows rhythmically. The building leaves free the first two floors, rising over very slim cylindrical

columns, whose contrast with the robustness of the upper pilasters forms a plinth. This elevation of the columns reminds us more of the gallery of the Greek agora than the idea of transparency of Le Corbusier’s piloties. The general composi-tion assumes a strong classic character, ended on the top by an attic articulated to the pilasters by a concise cornice, as can be seen in some Violi’s work. The ceiling, completely flat, does not lodge any activity. Soon, this scheme will explode, literally. Conserving the direction, the building will thicken its section to work with one central bay. The headwalls demonstrate this, showing in the east side the semicircular stairway through which the breeze coming from the northeast is directed to cross the corridors. In the western headwall, a lattice window that prevents the entrance of the sun offers an exit to the air captured in the opposed end, allowing to ventilate the sanitary services. In some drawings found in the Archivo General de la Nación (General Archives of the Nation), Rother slightly slanted the planes of the internal facades of the offices, eluding subtly

Leopoldo Rother, perspective of the civic center. Traced by P.J. Esta, it is probably the perspective that Rother showed Le Corbusier during his interview in the Dirección de Edificios Nacionales. The building’s proportions are deformed and do not represent the true relationship between its height and its depth, a mistake that Rother never made in his own drawings. Today it is surprising to see the contrast with the surroundings of that time—with its single-story houses and their patios. From almost every floor it would be possible to see the ocean to the north and the mouth of the Magdalena rive to the northeast. Archive from the Museo de Arquitectura Leopoldo Rother. Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Folder C. Panel no. 12B. Undated, judging from the nomenclature and the dates from other plans from the project, it is probably from 1946.

Diagram of regional wind currents. © Ideam.

Aerial photograph from 1937 of the site for the future civic center, nearly a decade before construction began. © Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi.

Photograph of the civic center construction site in 1953 shortly after finishing work on the Nacional building. The rest of the project remained unfinished. Lat-er additions made up of aggressive forms presented by various authors were of questionable architectural qualitiy. © Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi.


Leopoldo Rother, north façade of the National building. Although the corner with the date is missing, judging by the plan’s general nomenclature it was probably drawn near the end of 1946. The “functionaries’” staircase projects outward from the volume of the building facing the mouth of the Magdalena river. Most of the city was composed of single-story houses with patios filled trees and palms, none of which obstructed the view of the ocean. Panel No. 11 of the general project (481B). © Archivo MALR. Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Leopoldo Rother, south façade of the National building. There are notes in pencil with instructions to remove two floors from the buildings, to lower the upper chamber of the public elevators and eliminate the employee elevators. Rother, very probably influenced by the organizational plan from the Ministy of Education and Public Health in Brazil, included two sets of elevators and stairs on each extreme of the floor plan: one for functionaries and one of the public. Panel No. 8 of the general project (481B). © MALR Archive. Universidad Nacional de Colombia.


Leopoldo Rother, floor plan for the second story of the National building with access and parking ramps as well as employee and public access. Panel No. 32 of the general project (481B). © MALR Archive. Universidad Nacional de Colombia.


the cylindrical columns and producing a funnel type that ac-celerates the caught air. The system of vertical circulations breaks the building’s envelope and comes outside in search of the freshness of the breeze and the view of the landscape. From the high floors, the presences of the Magdalena river towards the east and of the Caribbean Sea towards the north are involved in the conception of the building. A careful study of solar geometry produces deep and shaded facades with eaves, concrete blinds, and tilted windows, appropriate for maintaining ven-tilation even during the very slanted heavy rainshowers that sometimes fall on the city. In the upper box, the columns are behind the facade, cylindrical and free. Down they run, now solid and heavy, arriving at the ground and leaving three levels empty, inter-connected among themselves with platforms reachable by automobiles and with a hung slab that, when withdrawing itself towards the interior of the plan, is protected from di-rect solar radiation. The space conquered in these levels be-comes public and is now powerfully dynamic. In it, the stairs dance individually and amusingly, with their winding curves. The scrupulous, almost neoclassical, composition of the first draft has been transformed into a modern, asymmetric com-position and comes alive, once the traditional codes of rela-tion between the parts are broken. The ceiling becomes an inhabitable space; Rother projects in it the casino and other communal services covered by reduced vaults of concrete whose forms, prominent in the top and short where they start, resemble eyelids that control the direct radiation in a very ef-fective way.

These are the plans that were of much interest to Le Cor-busier during his visit to the Oficina de Edificios Nacionales (Office of National Buildings), in 1948. The occasion portrays Rother’s character as a teacher who knew and admired his work and who was perfectly aware of the magnitude of the occasion.

Le Corbusier had been received in the Techo airport by a group of enthusiastic young people with placards and cheers, as if he was a sports hero. In a rather anachronis-tic way, the students shouted “Down with the Academy” in French, as if the controversy sparked by the competition for the Palace of the Nations was a matter of the previous week. Everyone would be hanging on his words and of seizing the drawings that the teacher made in large sheets that hung with hooks of a tended cord from side to side of the stage of his conferences. But Leopoldo Rother was German and just at that time he had a class to teach at the university. Discipline and the sense of responsibility for his students comes first, taking precedent over the interest to meet the eminent visitor; he discreetly chooses not to be present. When Le Corbusier sees on one of the tables of the Di-rección de Edificios Nacionales the drawings for Girardot’s market place, he decided to remain in the place, to wait and to meet him. When Rother returns, they talk for a long time. He shows Le Corbusier his plans for the National Building and Le Corbusier asks him for a copy of them.15

For Le Corbusier it had to be impressive to see those drawings when just at that moment the foundations of the

Leopoldo Rother, perspective of the project for the Girardot market plaza, pub-lished in the magazine Proa No. 4. Drawing by P.J. © Proa

Leopoldo Rother, main façade of the market plaza in Girardot. © Hans Rother, Arquitecto Leopoldo Rother, Escala, 1980.

Leopoldo Rother, details about the structural system of the paneling cover-ing the market plaza in Girardot. © Hans Rother, Arquitecto Leopoldo Rother, Escala, 1980.


unite d’Habitation for Marseilles were being built. The close relationship of the project with the climate, that Rother surely would have described to him briefly, must have been of inter-est to him. He was going to make contact with the rich indus-trial bourgeoisie of Ahmedabad and to have commissions in which he aspired with all his strength to built an architecture capable of interpreting both the tradition of the forms of build-ing and living in India as much as the climate of a city that has a latitude similar to the one of Havana.16 Although, certainly, he had used vaults one decade before in Les Mathes, he had done it over load walls. The idea of placing them over a small forest of columns, as Hans Rother called them, had as much to do with Leopoldo Rother as with Guillermo González Zuleta. They are proposing a space that could be considered new by its freedom, and is possible that Le Corbusier had it in mind when doing the drawings, years later, for the unbuilt house of Mr. Chimanbhai, covering the program with a para-sol of elevated vaults over columns. The encounter was enormously significant for Rother and he would remember it for the rest of his life. Perhaps for Le Corbusier it would mean, after the turbid events related with the Ministry of Education of Brazil, acquiring awareness of the way in which his reflections of so many years began to take on a universal dimension and to construct a especially rich and expressive language that was offered to humanity like a step in advance in the harmonic construction of the difficult relations between culture and civilization.

Mauricio Pinilla. Doctoral candidate in Arts and Architecture of the Universi-dad Nacional de Colombia. Professor of the Faculty of Architecture and Design at Universidad de los Andes.

Le Corbusier, project for the house of Mr. Ahmedabad Chimanbhai (1952): southwest façade. There are no precedents in the Swiss master’s previous work of such vault-like areas, supported by columns and not support walls. One other project included the same constructive and environmental tech-niques, the house for Mr. Hutheesing. Neither would not be built. Œuvre com-plète 1946-1952. © FLC

Perspective of the civic center after completing construction. Memorias del Ministro de Obras Públicas. © Illustrated in the book El Movimiento Moderno en Barranquilla. 1946-1964. Carlos Bell Lemus. Universidad del Atlántico. Bar-ranquilla. 2002.

1 “This humanist with taste for drawing and music, marked by everything

that the European culture has of more spiritual, did not approached ar-chitecture, understood only as a trade, not even like a vocation, with all that this entails and has of mystic, but as one of the great subjects of the human knowledge, like one of the means to produce civilization”. Rogelio Salmona, “Testimonio y recuerdo”, Arquitecto Leopoldo Rother (Bogotá: Escala, 1984).

2 Marta Devia de Jiménez. Leopoldo Rother en la Ciudad Universitaria (Bo-gota: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Faculty of the Arts, 2006).

3 “A brother of Susana Rother, importer of coffee, read in the Colombian consular representation of Hamburg a notice indicating that the service of architects was required for the Directory of National Buildings in Bogota. Rother asked for an interview with the Minister of Colombia, Dr. Rafael Obregón, to find out the details of the supply. Because he did not speak Spanish nor the Minister the elusive German, the conversations took place in French. In May of 1936 Rother traveled to Colombia by sea, ahead of his family, who would follow three months later”. Hans Rother, Arquitecto Leopoldo Rother (Bogotá: Escala, 1984).

4 In 2005, when celebrating the 225 years of its foundation, the Technical University of Clausthal coined commemorative medals of gold and silver. One of its faces exhibits with pride the inner image of the great classroom, projected by Rother in 1927.

5 Hans Rother, Arquitecto Leopoldo Rother (Bogotá: Escala, 1984). “The impact that the tropic has, for the first time, on a European, has been described by many travelers and writers, among them with mastery our Pedro Gómez Valderrama in The other ray of the tiger. We ignore the won-derful sensations that the colors, perfumes, and sounds had awoken in the sensible spirit of the architect and the thoughts that would lead to it”.

6 Leopoldo Rother, Notas de clase. “Asoleación exterior”. II/III. Carpeta no. 507. Bogota: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Original material in pro-cess of classification for its transfer to the archives of institutional memory of the University. Consulted Sindu Library, August 2009. This folder con-tains a solar letter for the latitude of the city of Sogamoso (Colombia), accompanied by the drawings of construction of the same. There is also a succession of drawings of analysis of the shades projected by diverse simple solids, given solar height and angles of azimuth. Red and colored pencils are used to make evident the relations of the projections of the facades towards the plans. Finally are the cuts of the analyses of sole-amiento of streets of the city of Turin (Italy), in reference to the name Rigotti and the numbers 4-59/4-60.

7 Leopoldo Rother, Tratado de Diseño Arquitectónico. Asoleación (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1978).

8 “The course of these rivers in this earth, that do not have limits and are completely level, calmly develops the implacable consequence of phys-ics; it is the law of the line of major pending and later, if everything be-comes level, it is the stirring theorem of the meander. And I say theorem inasmuch as the meander that is from the erosion is a phenomenon of


cyclical development, totally similar to the one of the creative thought, of the human invention. Drawing from the stop of wind the alignments of the meander, I have explained the difficulties that find the things human, the jams within which they find themselves and the solutions of miraculous appearance that solve suddenly the most tangled situations. For my use I have baptized this phenomenon the law of the meander and in the course of my conferences, in Sâo Paulo and Rio, I have profited by using this prodigious symbol to introduce my proposals of urban or architectural reforms, to take support from the nature, a conjuncture in which I had a feeling of a public capable to accuse to me of quackery”. Le Corbusier, Precisiones. Respecto a un estado actual de la arquitectura y el urban-ismo (Barcelona: Apóstrofe, Col. Poseidón, 1999).

9 “It is impossible to recreate the spiritual trajectory of change of the archi-tect, from the classicist education of Berlin to the conviction of the artist who arrived in 1936 at Colombia, with books of the Bauhaus in his light luggage, plenty with annotations and commentaries in the margins”. Hans Rother, Architect Leopoldo Rother, op. cit.

10 “Against the franciscan poverty and slight like a dove of the white walls and simple large-windows, considered, dialectically, the proposal of the neoclassic school. Powerful lawyer was the young architect Bruno Violi who just came from Paris, where he had collaborated with Denis Hon-neger, old head of the office of Auguste Perret. This last one finished erect-ing his masterpiece, the museum of public works of Paris. Violi entered to the Direction of National Buildings and soon it collaborated with Rother in more than a work. Movable, enthusiastic spirit, felt like his presence in all the area of the Direction…” Idem.

11 “The books just appeared from the Museum of Modern Art of New York, Brazil Builds and Built in USA and the new volumes of the work of Le Corbusier have a remarkable influence immediately. Examples of a certain modern classicism exist there, for example in works of Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Sergio Bernardes and other Brazilian architects, but certainly, not of the classicism of Perret. Due to the force of expression and newness of these works, Rother, with inclination towards the vanguard, according to what is seen in his biography, Allows that the new currents of the contem-porary architecture permeate his creation. From 1945, perhaps superior to the previous ones emerges in his work a new language (!), that owns the character of a synthesis of his own, polished and already simultaneously original…” Idem.

12 “Attention! It is the end of September. The autumn plants have bloomed, the roof has turned green again. A dense down of wild geraniums has covered everything. It is so beautiful. In the spring there are young grass and flowers of the prairie, in the summer very high grass. The garden of the cover lives with its own force, fed by the sun, rain, winds and the birds that bring the seeds. Now, in April of 1954, the roof has been put blue of Forget-me-nots. Nobody knows how they arrived here”. Le Corbusier. DAS kleine Haus, Ger-man version of Elsa Girsberger. Translated to the Spanish of M.P.

13 The cover is dedicated to a bird‘s eye perspective of an urban project. An-other cut of an inner page of the magazine shows the general plant without

naming the authors. Some geographic references in the plan indicated that it is a project in Brazil. The buildings follow a strict direction with respect to the sun and own facades with shade elements that enrich their texture. When investigating more deeply, it is found out that the university periodi-cals library owns a unit of the magazine. The project is signed by Wiener and Sert. One is the proposal for the Cidade dos Motores in the environs of Rio de Janeiro”. Leopoldo Rother, Notas de clase, “Centro Cívico. Selección II”. Carpeta no. 1197. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Original material, in process of classification for its transfer to the archive of institu-tional memory of the University. Consulted in SINDU Library, August 2009.

14 “One first revision in the periodicals library of the Universidad Nacional allowed verification that in the institution the collections of Architectural Review and Architectural Forum begin months after the numbers enunci-ated by professor Mondragón. Number 4 of volume 27 of Pencil Points, on the other hand, does not talk about the work that then had been realized recently in Brazil, as it is indicated in the article. (The edition of April 1946 contains local subjects of the USA. Two contests are reviewed: the College Dormitory Competition and the Small House Competition, and addition-ally it includes an article in which it invites to the accomplishment of the contest for the building of the United Nations in New York.) It is still unclear which were the numbers that the magazine dedicated to Brazil. In any case, it had already reviewed the exhibition in January 1943 and the enor-mous interest that its content awoke in the critic and the North American professionals”. Hugo Mondragón, “Chile en el debate sobre la forma de la Arquitectura Moderna”, ARQ no. 64, (2006) Santiago, Chile.

15 “In 1948, the architect Le Corbusier visited the Directory of National Build-ings. After presenting a few good works to him, a set was exhibited, per-haps a little conventional, of buildings of apartments for Bogota, the “City of the Employee”. The visitor was impatient. A sketcher, the artist Carlos A. Pinilla J., had placed on his table of drawing a perspective of the market place that impressed Le Corbusier. Rother was not present. He was dictat-ing class at the university. Le Corbusier waited for him until his arrival and had a discussion with him in French: the market seemed excellent to him. He made some observations: the premises, that descended in sequence towards the river earthwork, “could not be won”. Rother was perfectly aware of the difficulty. It would be necessary “to look for some horizontal”, but it was impossible… The circular stairs of the corners were “medieval”. (29) Rother constructed them like that, luckily. Later he wanted to erase them, with his own hand, from a good photograph that still shows the author.

The second work that sparked the interest of the great Swiss architect was the ensemble for the civic center and the national building of Barranquilla. Rother’s proposal was, indeed, bold and beautiful…

There Rother proposed to locate four parallel buildings, three major, and one intermediate, with smaller length. All would be oriented to the north and the south, forming a slight diagonal. In the future there would be a contrast with the traditional block form. It will create a new scale and rate! At this time, Le Corbusier would use the same disposition of blocks in diagonals in several projects of urbanism.

It had been said that the proposal for the national building of Barranquilla was bold. Rother devised a slim building that had a platform of parking in the second floor, to which vehicles were led by a ramp with a slightly canted projection. The block was very open in the lower part; that is to say, it had much “excavation”, consisting of transparency and the perception, in the top, of a slab made of exposed beams and joists, in several floors; it had again, like in Girardot, a small forest of columns, this time with diverse heights, one, two, and more floors. An entrance to the building is in the end of the block, underneath a circular stairway that is seen in the top, in surprising image; effects of “claire-obscure”; much ventilation in the torrid climate; brise-soleils; vaults in some roofs. Le Corbusier asked that they give the plans to him, and to the author, a graduate young person, cor-responded the honor of giving them in person”. Hans Rother, op. cit.

16 “Ahmedabad offered him relatively modest commissions in which he could pioneer his “architecture for modern times adjusted to the climate of India”, then transform the lessons to the larger and more arduous proj-ects of Chandigarh. But he did not relegate Ahmedabad to the status of a side-show. His patrons were a unique and demanding group. The city possessed a rich cultural and architectural legacy of its own: there was an identifiable ethos to which an artist might respond”. William Curtis, Le Corbusier. Ideas and Forms (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1995).


Bogota, Le Corbusier titled a tapestry that he completed in 1950. In the tapestry it is possible to see a group of person-ages conversing in a musical meeting. The first questions that arise from the fabric are clear: what relation has this musical scene with the city of Bogota? Has it something to do with the Pilot Plan for that city, that was commissioned to the Swiss master in 1947 and which he presented in 1950? The tapestry and the urban project coincide in time, but the motives expressed in it do not necessarily have some direct relationship with the Plan, nor with the city. In fact, the same adjustment of the plastic work, with very slight variations, was created again by Le Corbusier on successive occasions, at-tributing to all of them different names. So it is the case of the tapestry titled L’Ennui régnait au dehors, of 1953, where he maintains the original drawing of Bogota, but changes the background from clear to dark; or in the lithograph Musicians (1951-1959), where he modifies the drawing slightly and re-places the gray textures with spots of color.

The title

On what basis did Le Corbusier give titles to his plastic works, particularly those with the names of cities? Vézelay, Ozon, CAP Martin, Barcelona, Algiers, Rio, New York, Lon-don, and Bogota are names of towns or cities with which he designated some of his paintings and sculptures, but the motives expressed in these works do not have a direct rela-tion with those places. Sometimes, the titles obeyed more to the artist’s personal circumstances. For example, the se-ries of paintings called Vézelay were in fact created in that

Bogota: The nomadic mural that Le Corbusier painted Jaime Sarmiento

Le Corbusier, Bogota, 1950 (Tapestry). In Le Corbusier, Œuvre Tissé, Philippe Sers, Paris, 1987, p. 30 © FLC

115Bogota: The nomadic mural that Le Corbusier painted | Jaime Sarmiento

town of the French Pyrenees, where he was sheltered during World War II. In the case of paintings and sculptures titled Ozon —the name of another French town in which he was also a refu-gee—Le Corbusier was working on a concept he called the “phenomenon of visual acoustics”, being the relation that is established between some organic forms and the space that surrounds them. Starting from the drawing of a human head, he separated and exaggerated the mouth and the ear—the organs of emission and reception of sound. With these el-ements he generated winding forms, concavities and con-vexities that would metaphorically cause the emanation and reception of sound waves, establishing in this way a com-munication between the work and the surrounding space. From this comes the name of the “phenomenon of visual acoustics”, coming from the possibility of seeing the sound, in a clear game of transferences between the senses. These plastic explorations would have repercussion in his architec-ture and urbanism, as in the undulated forms of the Pilot Plan for Algiers, the chapel of Ronchamp, or the Swiss Pavilion in the university city of Paris.

The series of Barcelona paintings of 1939 coincides in time with the Spanish Civil War, with the fall of the, by then, republican city to the hands of the pro-Franco army. In this series, Le Corbusier explores the unit and division of the human figure. In a strip of the paintings, the body remains complete, whereas in the other zone the organism is decom-posed, the parts separated until some acquire autonomy from the others. This would be the beginning of the individ-ual identification of some parts of the body that would be winning in importance, like the hands, which will reach their maximum expression in Chandigarh in the monument of the open hand. The series Arbalète London, 1953, also can be classified another example in which the title of the painting has little or nothing to do with the named city. In these linen cloths it is possible to see a guitarist with his head reclined on the musi-cal instrument. Le Corbusier began to draw this series in one of hia travel carnés, on the airplane that would take him from Paris to Rome, after having remained several days in London, where he agreed to receive the prize of the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture granted him by the RIBA. This series can be

Le Corbusier, L’Ennui régnait au dehors, 1953 (Tapestry). In Le Corbusier, Œu-vre Tissé, Philippe Sers, Paris, 1987, p. 31 © FLC

Le Corbusier, Musicians, 1951-59 (Lithograph). Image taken from Le Corbusier, The Graphic Work, Heidi Webwe, Zurich / Montreal, 1988, p. 65 © FLC

Le Corbusier, Ozon opus I, 1947 (Sculpture) © FLC

Le Corbusier, Arbalète Londres I, 1953 (Oil on canvas) © FLC 434


understood as the continuation of another series of paint-ings—with an equally musical theme—from the middle of the 1930s, titled Les Musiciens. This other series was begun in 1936, in Rio de Janeiro, where Le Corbusier drew a meeting of musicians around a table1. Returning to the initial question on the relation that keeps the Bogota tapestry with the Pilot city or Plan, we would dare to say that there is no direct connection, or very little, un-less the plan and the carpet coincide in the same year, 1950. Probably Le Corbusier simply baptized the tapestry with the name of the city for which he was, in that precise moment, completing the urban project. Having come to this point, it is convenient to emphasize the great importance that Le Corbusier gave to his plastic work—how he understood it, as sculpture and painting in their different versions: drawings, pictures, lithographs, tap-estries or murals. This work, less public than his architecture and his urbanism, was the laboratory in which many of his projects would germinate. From his encounter with Ozenfant, and until his death, Le Corbusier maintained a reserved activ-ity as a plastic artist in tandem with his more well known facet of architect and city planner. He used to dedicate the morn-ings for painting in the studio of his own apartment, whereas in the afternoons he moved to his office in Rue de Sèvres to take care of the projects of architecture and urbanism. “In truth, the key of my artistic creation is my pictorial work…”, he responded once in an interview, when asked about the secret of his varied production.2

Le Corbusier did not explain the reasons for his paintings. For him, they were intimate issues, personal, and if he re-vealed them it would be like exposing and betraying himself.3 On an exceptional occasion, he explained some of the sym-bols that appear in the carpets of the justice courts in Chandi-garh. In spite of his hermeticism, there are some studies that contribute to the understanding of his personal iconography. Among them can be noted the writings of Mogens Krustrup, Richard Moore and the most recent editions of the pictorial work of Le Corbusier.4

The technique

Although the first tapestry he created was done in 1936, with the participation of Marie Cuttoli,5 it was not until 1948, with the collaboration of Pierre Baudouin, that Le Corbusier undertook in a definitive way the tapestry as a technique of expression, which would continue until the end of his life. Baudouin was a professor of art history in the National School of Aubosson, a French city with a long tradition of wool dyeing and carpet making. Baudouin’s knowledge of the technique would help Le Corbusier develop an initial series of about thirty carpets, among which are Bogota and L’Ennui régnait au dehors. The first carpet made with Cuttoli had the dimensions of a picture (147 x 175 cm); the following, with Baudouin, were larger; they were regulated by the table of measures from the mod-ulor and were thought to go from ground to ceiling. Years later, in the middle of the 1950s and 60s, he would use still ampler weaves to cover great surfaces, like in the carpets of the courts (8 x 8 meters) and capitol of Chandigarh, where he covered a total surface of 650 square meters, and in the museum of Tokyo, in which he covers 250 square meters. In 1950, the year in which he made Bogota, had he just “re-discovered” this technique? What did this means of expression represent for Le Corbusier? The tapestry was, as he himself baptized it, “Le Muralnomad”, the nomadic mural of the mod-ern man: “J’ai baptisé mes tapisseries du terme de “Mural-nomad”, ce qui signifie que ce sont des oeuvres éminmment murales, mais qu’on peut décrocher et rouler sous son bras quand on veut les changer de place ou de maison”.6

The tapestry is not comparable with the painting on the linen cloth—it does not behave like a picture. Besides its greater scale, the carpet does not have that connotation of decorative object that the picture superposed in the wall can have; on the contrary, it works as a space’s defining element. It is more closely related to mural paintings, since it also tries to extend all the way to the limits of the plane, “from the ground to the ceiling”, and because it also has the condition of constituting space. The carpet, like the mural, is assigned to break the wall, to dematerialize it, eliminating the sensation of stability and weight that the wall can have.7

The tapestry has several advantages over the mural. First of all, it can be taken down, rolled, transferred and hung in another place; it does not have the limitations on mobility that the fresco does. Another advantage is that the tweed ab-sorbs sound waves; it wraps the space and avoids the rever-berations of the sound. Like, for example, the large carpets of the courts and the capitol of Chandigarh, it has, in addition to a symbolic function, an important acoustic mission. Certainly, the tapestry would have been a suitable solu-tion to the difficulty that Le Corbusier experienced with the murals he painted in the house of Eileen Gray and her friend Badovici, which were spoiled during the Nazi occupation in World War II. The house was contiguous to its summer cabin in Cap Martin. Apparently, Le Corbusier painted the murals without the owners’ permission; “he had occupied” the dwell-ing of others with his personal works, which he guarded with great distrust. Once Badovici died, Le Corbusier undertook an enormous project for the conservation of the murals. He sent letters to the person in charge of selling the house, to his friends and to the governmental authorities to demand that whoever acquired the building had as a condition the preservation of the paintings.8 In a letter to his friend Oscar Niemeyer, he shows the “danger” the murals are exposed to and his preference for tapestry:

J’ai peint beaucoup de murs directement, mais c’est une conception assez périlleuse. Voyez, par exemple: Badovici est mort il y a deux années, laissant dans deux maisons qu’il possédait à Cap Martin et à Vézelay, huit peintures murals dans la première et une dans la secone, faites par moi. Il n’avait pas d’hériiers sauf de trés lointains et, maintenant, on va vendre ces maisons aux enchères et le premier résultat sera que l’acquéreur nouveau fera gratter ces peintures et fera passer de la peinture blanche à leur place. Si j’avais fait des tapisseries, rien n’aurait été compromis. Ceci est un exemple très frappant.9

For the tapestry Bogotà, Le Corbusier made a reduced scale model using cellophanes of colors and plots denominated Zyphaton. Baudoin was in charge of enlarging the model by means of photographic impressions, until it reached its de-


Le Corbusier, Deux musiciennes au violon et à la guitare, 1937 (Oil on canvas) © FLC 151

Le Corbusier, studio of Les musiciennes, 1936 (Pencil drawing), Carnet C12, Rio, 1936, nº 720 © FLC

Le Corbusier, Deux femmes à la balustrade, 1936 (Oil on canvas) © FLC 220

Le Corbusier, Femme nue sur canapé avec chien, 1934 (Oil on canvas) © FLC 109

Pablo Picasso, Tres músicos, 1921 (Oil on canvas), Philadelphia Museum of Art (A. E. Gallatin Collection)

Pablo Picasso, Bouteille de vieux marc, verre, journal, 1912 (glued paper and drawing) Private Collection, Paris


finitive dimension of 200 x 226 centimeters. Three units were made of the first version and then another other five of the second one.

The composition

In the tapestry is possible to observe four personages: three of them are frontal feminine figures; a masculine one shows his back to the observer. It is clear that the woman on the left is playing the accordion and the man the violin; neverthe-less, it is not clear what instruments the remaining person-ages play; by their positions and the gestures of their hands, we can intuit that the one in the middle strikes a drum and the one on the right plays a stringed instrument, like an harp. As it is usual in the compositions of Le Corbusier’s paint-ings, this tapestry can be divided in horizontal and vertical strips, forming quadrants. We can divide the carpet as fol-lows: the strip of the left includes two of the feminine person-ages; the one on the right, a a man and another feminine presence; the upper strip has their heads; and the lower, their feet. The left and right strips are differentiated by a pair of spots that function as a background. On the left this spot is mixed with the woman who touches the accordion; it is a rectangular frame whose interior is subdivided in quadrants. On the right it is a filled background, a curved silhouette, that serves as a nook for the violinist and the woman playing the harp. The rectangular background of the left corresponds to a symbol of the personal iconography of Le Corbusier, which consists of a square with a cross in its interior. This sign is de-nominated the “window”. The signal is present in a series of paintings from the middle of the 1930s, titled Deux Femmes, the first plane of which shows a pair of women and a win-dow in the background (figure eight). The cross inscribed in the rectangle would be the genesis of some architectural works, as it is the case of the cloister—with corridors that are crossed in the interior—of the convent of La Tourette, or in the sequence of patios of the project for the hospital of Venice. The symbol of the window unifies the closed contour of the square with the cross’s open outline. Essentially, it symbolizes

a bond that simultaneously relates the interior and exterior spaces and, paradoxically, can be understood as a separa-tion element that defines a border.10

The emblem of the window is contrasted with the rounded silhouette located on the right of the tapestry, which is distin-guished more clearly in the Musicians lithograph. The profile of this spot is very similar to the oval contour that serves as background in a series of paintings of the thirties and tap-estries of the fifties, called Canapé, in which it is possible to distinguish an undressed woman lying on an oblong piece of furniture. The woman is usually accompanied by a dog that is lying down on the ground. By the sight, it is a representa-tion of Le Corbusier’s own family, where the woman would be his wife, Yvonne, and the animal his dog Pinceau.11 Canapé, then, represents the object of permanence, of privacy and withdrawal, as opposed to the exteriorizing and liberating el-ement of the window. The title of L‘Ennui régnait au-dehors (“boredom reigns outside”) makes implicit this differentiation between an inner and an exterior space, between that which happens inside and that which occurs outside. There is a well-defined diagonal line separating the upper and lower strips. This oblique direction begins from the right with the inclined head of the woman who touches the harp, continues with the shoulders of the violinist, followed by the tuning fork of the violin, the lower part of the accordion and finishes in the left with the sex and the hips of the accordi-onist. In the Musicians lithograph, the diagonal is still more emphasized by means of the color spots and by the bottom edge of the window. The slanted line is also explicit in many of the paintings from the series Les Musiciennes. Unlike the first drawing in Rio, where the tuning forks of the musical instruments mark different diagonals, in all the series of paintings Les Mu-siciens, in the tapesty Bogota and in their variations, there is a constant, unique, and very marked diagonal that descends from right to left, crossing the whole composition. It would be possible to ask where this inclination comes from, if elements of the horizontal reign in the vast majority of Le Corbusier’s compositions? A possible reference could come from another painting, also with a musical subject, by Pablo Picasso, titled

Tres músicos, of 1921. In this work is possible to perceive three musicians dressed, apparently, for a circus act. The musicians are facing the viewer and are clearly differentiated by their contrasted attires of spots and colors. The composi-tion, separated in vertical strips, is connected horizontally by means of a diagonal that comes out of the guitar’s tuning fork and connects all the personages. Picasso was the painter that Le Corbusier most admired: “Picasso est un ami de moi, c’est le peintre que j’admire le plus”, he wrote in one occasion to Bollé Reddat, priest of Ronchamp.12 The Swiss architect felt very gratified when the Spanish painter accepted to attend the inauguration of unité of Marseilles. In his personal library he had a great amount of books on the work of the artist, and even used to reproduce fragments of his paintings. This example of Picasso’s influence on the Corbusian work would not be unique. Peter Smithson affirmed that Le Corbusier’s first villas of the 1920s referred strongly to a pic-ture that the Malagan artist painted in 1913, Botella de Vieu Marc, copa, guitarra y periódico:

Perhaps the forms of Le Corbusier are daughters of a unique painting, a more or less completely flat one and with notice-able debt to the rectangle of the frame: Bottle of Vieu Marc, glass, guitar and newspaper (1913) of Pablo Picasso. From this the villas of Le Corbusier grew: Villa Stein, in Garches (1927) and Villa Savoie, in Poissy (1929-1931). Was one long gestation [sic].13

The relation of the painting with the houses does not seem so evident, but if we pause to compare another one of the versions of the series of bottles and guitars of Picasso with Nature morte au siphón(1921) by Le Corbusier, we will find several similarities between them. They both share a certain selection and disposition of objects: the winding profile of the guitar, placed vertically, serves as a background to a central rectilinear element, that in the case of Picasso seems to be the tuning fork of a violin and in Le Corbusier’s case, it is a bottle with siphon. In both paintings, also, the vertical and the horizontal axes are very defined.


The composition of Le Corbusier’s still life makes strong references to the traces of the plans of Villa Savoye. The in-cline of the house assumes the central position of the bottle and the curved wall of the access responds to the skirted sil-houette of the guitar. Years later, Le Corbusier himself would confirm that his first houses in France were preceded by the search of a plastic expression through the painting:

Mes recherches picturales «Verres et bouteilles» de 1918 à 1928, forment un premier cycle de dix années d’un discipline de fer: recherche d’une expression plastique liée à l’esprit de l’époque. J’avais été architect avant 1914. Aussi ces recher-ches ouvrirent-elles la porte à l’architecture qui y trouve une expression nouvelle: esthétique et plastique. Témoins: la villa La Roche, la maison Cook, la villa de Garches, etc.14

Picasso and Le Corbusier also shared a common inter-est—that seemed more an obsession—in the Greek myth of the Minotaur. The man-bull of Picasso has been interpreted sometimes as a self-portrait. In the work of Le Corbusier, it is a process that begins in the 1940s, with the transformation of one of his still lives of the 20s and ends with a series of paint-ings from the 1950s and 60s, called Taureaux (Bulls). The

Le Corbusier, Nature morte au siphón – 2nd version, 1921 (Oil on canvas) © FLC 139

Le Corbusier, lower level of the Ville Savoye, 1929. En: Le Cor-busier, OEuvre Complète, vol. 2, 1929-1934. © FLC

Pablo Picasso, Minotauro con una copa en la mano y mujer joven, 1933 (et-ching) Geiser, 349 II. Bolliger. S. V. 83, Bloch I, 190

Le Corbusier, Unité 1 (Lithograph). In: The Poem of the Right Angle, 1947-1953, p. 99 © FLC

Le Corbusier, Le grand verre à côtes et l’echarpe rouge, 1940 (Oil on canvas) © FLC


Le Corbusier, the transformation of the bull. Carnet F24, India, 1952, nº 713 © FLC

Le Corbusier, Unité 2 (Litografía). In The Poem of the Right Angle, 1947-1953, p. 149 © FLC

Le Corbusier, study for Bogota, 1950 (Pastel). In: Le Corbusier, Œuvre Tissé, Philippe Sers, Paris, 1987, p. 48 © FLC

Le Corbusier, La Lycorne passant la main (Black ink and red pencil) © FLC 4598

Le Corbusier, mural from the Swiss Pavillion at the univeristy campus in Paris (Fresco). Photograph by Igor Stefan, Fondation Suisse CIUP, taken from Naïna Jornod y Jean-Pierre Jornod, Le Corbusier, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Skira, p. 796. © FLC


painting Le grand verre à côtes et l’echarpe rouge of 1940, introduces an ear in the middle of the subjects of the still life, one of the forms of the “phenomenon of visual acoustics”, with which he was working in those years. The transformation process is evident in a page of one of his travel notebook of 1952, where he first rotates the painting 90 degrees, exag-gerating the size of the ear, and then in a second version unifies and fuses the pieces of the still life by means of the aggregation of contours. The resulting figure has reminis-cences of objects, animals, and people. In the upper part, underneath the turned bottle, a feminine head emerges that looks towards the top; her breasts descend and fuse with the ear. On the left side, a tip stands out that seems represent the nose or the beak of the head of an animal and whose eyes coincide with the woman’s breasts. The figure of the Minotaur represented for Le Corbusier a symbol of unity, the fusion between a human being and an animal, the bull. He expresses this union clearly in a pair of correlative lithographs published in his book Le Poême of l’angle droit (The Poem of the Right Angle), that he wrote between 1947 and 1953, where he compiles the most distin-guished elements of his iconographic repertoire.15 In the first image, Unité 1, it is possible to observe a bull and a woman embraced; in the following one, Unité 2, the personages fuse themselves in one, mixed with other allegories.16 This last il-lustration is divided in three horizontal, separated strips by two horizontal lines. In the upper part heads, horns, tails of fish are intuited; in the middle zone the silhouette of a bird may be glimpsed—a crow, regarding the French denomina-tion of corbeau and to the nickname of Le Corbusier: Corbu, as his closest friends used to call him—and so it would be possible to think that the figure of this bird is a reference to himself.17 The eyes of the crow are also the breasts of a woman, whose head is in the upper strip, and also the nasal grooves of the bull, which can be seen by turning the image 180 degrees (the mouth of the bird turns out to be the eye of the head of the bull). In summary, in this image diverse al-legories are mixed and reunited, regarding the figure of the bull, to the crow, the fish, the woman, and even Le Corbusier himself. The composition condenses, as if it was a melting

pot, a series of references that come from very diverse sourc-es. It ifor that reason that the image is called Unité. Ahead, we will see that the emblem of the bull also is present in the “the Nomadic Mural” titled Bogota.

The content

In the tapestry Bogota, the feminine figure in the middle has a strange head. Her hair seems broken in the middle; from the front two protuberances emerge that are are directed to-wards the sides as if they were a pair of horns. Indeed, when reviewing one of preparatory sketches for the tapestry, we can verify that what this personage has in his head is a pair of horns. Her face even seems to be that of an animal. To which strange being, with a human body and the head of an animal, can this figure refer to? In the middle of the forties, Le Corbusier was drawing, in an almost obstinate way, a somewhat similar presence. In the series of the Ahrenberg collection are some fifteen drawings with the same motif: a peculiar specimen with a woman’s body, wings instead of arms, and the head of goat.18 The figure, with her head seen in profile, showing a single horn, would years later be known as Licorne (Unicornio). In numerous drawings and paintings, like in those in the Ahrenberg series, the litho-graph for The Poem of the Right Angle, or the mural of the Swiss Pavilion of the university city of Paris, Licorne usually is accompanied by a gigantic hand on which she leans one of her wings. On one of the many sketches showing this pair, on the chest of Licorne, Le Corbusier wrote “ici ‘von’”. “Von” is the abbreviated name of his wife Yvonne., It has been interpreted that the figure with wings and horns is related to her; she was, after all, born under the zodiacal sign of Capricorn, which is represented by a goat. Between the body of the woman and the hand, locked in a circle, the following phrase can be read: “garder mon aile dans ta main” (“keep my wing in your hand”): it is a text extracted from one of Mallarmé’s poems. Thus, it seems the protective hand is Le Corbusier’s, who serves as a nook to the wing of his wife, to whom he used to call “my guardian angel”—a kind of a self-portrait .19

The mysterious presence of Licorne also has been ex-plained from other perspectives. In some, it is associated with the mythological figure of Pegasus, the flying horse. Dur-ing his “trip to the east”, Le Corbusier acquired for his per-sonal collection a ceramic jar with a somewhat peculiar form; the top was decorated with two figures, one of them a hu-man form and the other a horse with wings, which served as handles for the container. He was so impressed by this object that he reproduced it in his book L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui, showing it as an example of the “lyrical power of a popular culture” and adding, “the lapse of the time will bring Pega-sus again”. In a 1922 photograph, in which Le Corbusier ap-pears with Albert Jeaneret and Amédée Ozenfant, he is seen gracefully carrying the jug on his head, perhaps wanting to incorporate into himself its mythological form20. In any case, the effigies of Licorne and the Pegasus both symbolize the hybridization of beings pertaining to the Earth with others that move freely in the sky. The woman-goat fused with a bird, the horse that has wings, and even the bull and the woman that mix themselves with the crow in the Taureux series are associations which make reference to people or animals that walk on the Earth and are combined with animals that fly in the air. This theory can be confirmed by a draw-ing that Le Corbusier made on an illustrated copy of the Iliad (we will come back to it again), which depicts the combat between the troops in the middle the walled city of Troy on the bottom, and up top shows an eagle in of flight, carrying a goat between its claws. The ensemble of the predatory bird and the caught animal exemplify this tie between animals of the sky and from the Earth. The personage of Licorne rambles through the Bogota tapestry, not only by the head and the goat horns of the cen-tral figure, but also by the superimposed red stain on the vio-linist. The silhouette of the stain is very similar to the one seen superimposed over Licorne, only that turned 90 degrees. But where are Licorne’s wings? In Bogota, the woman-bird-goat needs hands, instead of wings, to play her instrument. The wings have passed to the adjacent feminine figure, who also needs hands to interpret the accordion; the wings have moved to her head, to her hair. There are other paintings by


Le Corbusier in which it is also possible to see winged heads: in the tapestry Les Musiciennes (1953), where the feathers of the wings became abstracted as a curly line, or in the paint-ing Appuyes a la rambarde (1953-1936), where the person-age on the left exhibits a wing stuck to his head. The legs and the hip of the violinist in Bogota—including her sex—are similar to those of Licorne. It is as if this unusual creature has been divided in two personages, the one of the head with horns and the one of the winged head. It is very probable that Le Corbusier “had unfolded” the magical presence of Licorne, which is latent in the two feminine figures of the left of the tapestry. The image of Licorne is without a doubt another amalga-mation between human being and animal, similar to the one of Taureaux. A clear example of hybridization between animal

and humans, lifted to the category of supernatural beings, can be seen in a sequence of drawings that Le Corbusier made in its travel notebooks in 1952, during one from its visits to India. The compendium of these figures, drawn and ex-plored throughout his life, he denominated Bestiaire:

Intutivement depuis 20 ans j’ai conduit mes figures vers des formes animales porteuses du caractére, force du sig-ne, capacité algébrique d’entrer en rapport entre elles et déclachant ansi 1 phénomene poétique (…) Faire un groupe-ment de ces formes et idées et notions en les rassemblant isolées du context (…) un Bestiaire (…) Cette idée (notion) de bestiaire humain m’est peut-être venue inconsciemment du contact si fréquent et à travers tout le monde et à travers tout les couhes socials, avec les hommes et les femmes, dans les affaires, les comités, l’intimité (sic).21

In the sequence of drawings are Licorne; another hybrid fig-ure with the face of a moon; and the bull in two different ver-sions, one, like the left figure of the Swiss Pavilion’s mural, which appears to come out of of stone and pieces of wood— “objects to poetic reaction”—which give form to the face of the animal, and another one made by superimposing the bull’s horns and a human head turned towards the sky, which is repeated in the top strip of the Taureaux series. There is also the presence of another strange figure with a giant ear that comes out of her head (another allegory to the acoustic forms), as large as the head itself.The ensemble reconciles the head with an anthropomorphic body. This other being would become known years later its own name, Le biche, also the name of another animal with horns. The shape of Le biche’s ear is equal to the silhouette of the horns of the

Le Corbusier holding a pitcher allusive to a Pegasus. Cro-pping of a photo in which Ozenfant and Alber Jeanneret also appear,1919 © FLC

Le Corbusier, The Eagle and the Goat. Color drawing for an illustrated version on The Illiad. Image taken from Mogens Kustrup, L’Iliade de Le Corbusier, Editrice Abitare Segesta, Milano, 2000, p. 63 © FLC Le Corbusier, Appuyes a la rambarde, 1953-36 (Oil on canvas) © FLC 177


bull, rotated 90 degrees. One of the bull’s most character-istic traits—if not the most characteristic—are its horns. For Le Corbusier it was enough to draw that round gesture with pointed ends to make the figure of the bull appear. In one of his printed drawings he synthesizes the presence of the bull with two distinguishing characteristics: the horns and the snout. In the middle of both he wrote, “Le signe de taureaux” (The sign of the bull). This same simultaneously curved and pointed form that reminds us of the presence of the bull is repeated in several of its works, like in the sculpture La petite confidence, 1962, where the stuck heads of a man and a woman are finished off by the horns of a bull. The “small secret”, whispered to the ear, surely speaks the amalgamation in which man, woman and bull are fused as one. The figure of the bull, with its representative characteristic horns, is also present, though in a guarded way, in the tap-estry Bogota. The horns of the animal are turned downwards. They serve as a seat for the man who plays the violin. The clear presence of this sign in the carpet can be verified in the preliminary study and in its later versions of L’Ennui régnait au dehors and Musicians. Another mystical figure frequently appears next to Licorne: a feminine semblance with interlaced hands, its trunk is crowned by three points directed upwards and its face in the form of a half moon. The image arises from a painting, titled Portrait of femme à la cathédral de Sens, of 1943, which de-picts a woman with the interlaced hands and a small section of the church in the background. The picture was inspired by a woman that Le Corbusier saw praying in the cathedral.22 The neck, shoulders, and breasts of the woman are elongat-ed into points; the face is also sharpened into a half-moon shape. The transformation is present in numerous paintings, like the mural of the Swiss Pavilion, and the tapestries of the Prèsence series. It acquired its definitive name in the series of paintings Icône (Icon), another clear reference, in a game of words, to his wife Yvonne: “Dans Mon ‘Poème of l’angle droit’, elle occupe la place centrale”, said Le Corbusier referring to her.23 Indeed, in the central square of the poem (square E3) is seen the image of Icône. According to Richard Moore, this

Le Corbusier, drawings from Bestiario. Various figures, Carnet F24, India, 1952, nº 701 © FLC

Le Corbusier, drawings from Bestiario. Bulls heads fused to a human body, Carnet F24, India, 1952, nº 703 © FLC

Le Corbusier, drawings from Bestiario. Unicorn and a figure with a moonface –Icône, Carnet F24, India, 1952, nº 707 © FLC

Le Corbusier, drawing from Bestiario. Le Biche, Carnet F24, India, 1952, nº 715 © FLC


image of the woman with a body in the form of trident and a moon face corresponds to a classic representation of the Moon goddess in Greek mythology.24

Le Corbusier’s interest on Greek mythology is demon-strated in a lithograph titled Femme Rose, 1961-1932, in which he paints, in first plan a pair of women and at the back, semi-concealed, the profile of a bull.25 In the lower part of the lithograph is a ball of yarn, in whose interior he wrote, “Ariadne and Phasiphae”. The adjustment of the personages and objects that take part in the picture is a clear reference to the Greek myth of the Minotaur. In short, it is about this: the two women are indeed Ariadna and Phasiphae, her mother, whose face is drawn like a half moon and who also is known in Greek mythology with the name the Moon goddess. The ball of yarn is the one Ariadna gave her fiancé, Teseo, so that he would unroll it while he was entering the labyrinth and thus he could find the exit once he had killed the Minotaur. The beast, half bull and half man, was the consequence of the prohibited relations between queen Phasiphae and a bull sent by the Gods to king Minos, to be offered as a sacrifice.

But the king, instead of sacrificing it, kept the bull for himself, among his flocks. The Gods, as revenge for his insult, made the queen fell in love with the bull and seduce the animal with a cow disguise made by Deadalus, who was then asked by Minos to build the labyrinth to hide the fruit of his dishonor. In the lithograph of the Femme Rose, the bull is in the back-ground behind a screen, partially hidden, as it would be it in the labyrinth.26 Another test that would confirm the influence of Greek my-thology in the work of Le Corbusier is the fact that at the end of his years, he had planned to create an illustrated edition of the Iliad.27 Between 1955 and 1961, he was underlining and redrawing in a book with graphical representations of the Iliad, a translation with prose by Paul Mason and drawings by Jhon Flaxman. The text and drawings of this book seemed to him academic and conventional. They displeased him so much that he decided to redraw the Homeric themes himself, superimposing them on the original illustrations as though wanting to correct them.28 In one of these interpretative draw-ings Helena is seen on the walls of Troy in the company of

some women; the heads of the women have horns, similar to those of Licorne. Licorne appears again in the chapter “Fusion” of The Poem of the Right Angle and in other drawings of the Nivola Album of 1950-1951, in which her body turns downwards, her head goes beyond the horizon, and her horn nails dig into the bellies of a couple that is lying down, copulating. Next to the couple is a dog. The scene of the pair in the presence of the dog is related to a preparatory study on the subject Le Divan, which is the continuation of the series Canapé, where the woman is Ivonne and the dog Pinceau, and we can de-duce that the man represents Le Corbusier.29 The assembly of Licorne entering itself into the couple could mean the con-junction of a mythological appearance that descends from the sky to connect with the union of a man and a woman on the earthly plane. That is to say, something of the sky de-scends to Earth and connects them, establishing a relation-ship of union between celestial and earthly conditions, be-tween mythology and human beings, between the imaginary and the real.

Le Corbusier, The Sign of the Bulls (etching on copper). Image taken from Le Corbusier, The Graphic Work, Heidi Webwe, Zurich / Montreal, 1988, p. 36 © FLC

Le Corbusier, La petite confidence, 1962 (Sculp-ture) © FLC

Le Corbusier, Prèsence II, 1949-65-75 (Tapestry). In: Le Corbusier, Œuvre Tissé, Philippe Sers, Paris, 1987, p. 72 © FLC


The interpretation

If it is not the city nor the Pilot Plan for the capital of Colombia, what is the image of the tapestry Bogota? The carpet shows a celebration, a meeting that turns around music, which has drawn together a diverse group of personages from differ-ent places and realities: cosmic and imaginary ones, like the two feminine adaptations of Licorne on the left; and real and earthly ones, like the man and the woman on the right, ref-erencing actual beings who inhabit the planet. The carpet shows a merrymaking, an incidence in which mythological beings and the human species, the celestial and the terres-trial, the imagination and the reality, and, on a deeper level, the spiritual and the material come together. This confluence between opposed beings, scopes and aspects, between a mysterious universe and a recognizable world, is perceived throughout the work of Le Corbusier, per-haps with a greater emphasis at the end of his career. The Bogota tapestry is a sample of it. Little otherther than the as-sociation of these wildly different aspects seems to capture his interest,, and thus it could be deduced from the other title, Bogota: L `Ennui régnait au-dehors (“ boredom reigns out-side”), that the artist is suggesting that what is outside this scope of confrontation and resolution of oppositions is not of interest to him. Licorne, Le biche, Taureaux or Icône, the strange results of the mixture between animal, human beings, and stars; con-centrated in the bestiary, they have the extraordinary capac-ity of transmutating themselves. That quality of transformation triggers, according to Le Corbusier, a “poetic phenomenon”. This last word reminds us that something very similar hap-pened with the “poetic objects of reaction”: stones, pebbles, bones, some collectible objects that powerfully attracted his attention, that by their form and their erosion could evoke other objects. A stone with veins, for example, could looked like a head with a mouth, nose and eyes—and he drew it—or a seashell could suggest the cover of a building—and he built it in the Chapel of Ronchamp.30 The poetic is understood here as what has the faculty to produce multiple associations and reminiscences.

Le Corbusier, Femme Rose, 1961-32 (Litografph). Image taken from Le Cor-busier, The Graphic Work, Heidi Webwe, Zurich / Montreal, 1988, p. 70 © FLC

Le Corbusier, Helena and the women of Troy on the city walls. Drawing by Le Corbusier printed in an illustrated version of The Iliad. In: Mogens Kustrup, l’Iliade de Le Corbusier, Editrice Abitare Segesta, Milan, 2000, p. 35 © FLC

Le Corbusier, Unicorn and its partner, drawing from Nivola album. In: Mogens Kustrup, Le Corbusier, Porte Email, For-lag, Copenhagen, 1991. © FLC

Le Corbusier, Le Divan (Drawing) © FLC 3629


In that same carnet, he made twp drawings ofa brick fac-tory located on one of cultivated hills of the plateau. Next to one of the drawings he wrote: “12 de mai 51 \ Bogota \ je découvre ce four à briques au sommet de la carrière, de la colline huit jours après avoir envoyé à Simla le projet du Capi-tol (Palais du Gouverneur) Et je trouve ici une extraordinaire confirmation.”33

What is this “extraordinary confirmation” Le Corbusier sees in a situation that happened thousands of kilometers away from India, on another continent, another culture? The factory has something in common with the project for the pal-ace of the governor: its capping. Both have a curved roof, a kind of inverted vault. The most distant sketch of the factory is more synthetic than the one from nearby, which is colored and more detailed. The more distant drawing insinuates the smooth undulations of the Earth and the prism of factory on a promontory above, topped with a roof whose concavity is di-rected upwards, as if it were a satellite dish that was directed towards the firmament, like the profile of a moon: as though what is below, down on Earth, is still connected with the sky above.

The creatures of the bestiary, through their extraordinary capacities of hibridization and transformation that trigger the “poetic phenomenon”, become supernatural beings, not pertaining to the Earth, and therefore rise to the category of cosmic and mythological organizations. These apparitions of another dimension meet and converse with animal and peo-ple, with the living beings who inhabit the planet. This idea of coexistence and brotherhood is manifest in a reflection that Le Corbusier made in India:

Au bout de la course 1951, à Chandigarh; contact possible avec les joies essentielles du principe hindou: la fraternité des rapports entre cosmos et êtres vivants: étoiles, nature, animaux sacrés, oiseaux, singes et vaches, et dans le vil-lage, les enfants, les adults et les vieillards actifs, l´étang et les manguiers, tout est présent et sourit, pauvre mais pro-portionné.31

This seems to be Le Corbusier’s particular mission, to place into contact and fraternize the oppositions: “the one lives because of the other”, would say when talking about to the horizontal and the vertical that are based on The Poem of the Right Angle, the site of confluence, where both opposites fuse into one.32

This vision of the unified earthly and celestial, worldly and divine, is what makes places as remote as Bogota and Chan-digarh similar; in both, Le Corbusier found reflected one and the same substance, one and the same spirit. In one of his visits to Bogota, Le Corbusier drew a cow with her young in the background, in the heights, the profile of Monserrate and in the lower part the layout of the city and the cathedral of the Plaza de Bolivar. In the previous page is a woman observing the horizon with a baby in her lap; on the bottom, the profile of the sacred mountain is visible again. Both drawings make reference to geography, the sacred sites and the beings who inhabit the place. The drawing of the mother with her son will be reproduced years later in The Poem of the Right Angle ( 39) and in the ceremonial door of the capitol of Chandigarh. This last reproduction is on the internal side of the door, in the upper strip, which is the quadrant dedicated to man and in which has also appeared the bull, Licorne, and Icône.

Le Corbusier, drawing of a women in Bogota holding a child in her arms, Car-net D15, Bogota, 1950, nº 74 © FLC

Le Corbusier, distant drawing of the brick factory in Bogota, Carnet E20, Bo-gota, 1951, nº 430 © FLC

Le Corbusier, close-up drawing of the brick factory in Bogota, Carnet E20, Bogota, 1951, nº 431 © FLC

Jaime Sarmiento: Architect, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin (1988), Ph.D. from the Superior Tecnic of School Architecture of Barce-lona, from the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (1997), with the thesis: La capilla de Ronchamp de Le Corbusier. Professor of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin (1993-2000) and of the School of Archi-tecture of La Salle University, of the Universidad Ramón Llull, Barcelona (2002-2009), where he has also been the cultural coordinator (2003-2006) and charged of the internationnal relationships (2007-2009). He has been in parallel to his academic work, designer in Colombia and Spain. He has done conferences in different universities of Colombia and Europe. He has published in international books and reviews. His is Actualy developing a research on a modular construction system that has been registred with an invention license.


1 Naïna Jornod and Jean-Pierre Jornod, Le Corbusier, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint (Skira, 2007) 600.

2 “En vérité la clef de ma création artistique est mon œuvre picturale entre-prise en 1918 et poursuivie régulièrement chaque jour (...) Le fond de ma recherche et de ma production intellectuelles a son secret dans la pra-tique ininterrompue de la peinture. C’est là qu’il faut trouver la source de ma liberté d’esprit, de mon désintéressement, de l’indépendance, de la loyauté et de l’intégrité de mon œuvre”, Jean Petit, Le Corbusier, lui-même (Geneva: Rousseau,1970) 160.

3 “La peinture est une bataille terrible, intense, sans pitié, sans témoins: un duel entre el artiste et lui-même. La bataille, est intérieure, dedans, incon-nue au dehors. Si l’artiste la raconte c’est qu’il est un traitre vis à vis de lui même”, Le Corbusier, Carnets, Electa y FLC., Vol. 4, Graf. 506.

4 Mogens Krustrup, Le Corbusier, L’ilíade Dessins (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1986) and Le Corbusier, Porte Email (Copenhagen: Forlag, 1991); Rich-ard A. Moore, ”Le Corbusier: Myth and meta architecture. The late pe-riod (1947-1965)”, catalogue of the exhibition Le Corbusier Images and Symbols, 1977, and “Alchemical and Mythical Themes in The Poem of the Right Angle 1947-1965”, Oppositions 19/20 (1987); Naïna Jornod and Jean-Pierre Jornod, op. cit.

5 Marie Cuttolli was an art collector and simultaneously she had a workshop for tapestry in Aubusson. She had asked for several artists, among them Leger, Picasso, Watched, Matisse, Braque, and Le Corbusier about the possibility of transferring some of its pictures to the tapestry.

6 Le Corbusier, Œuvre Tissé (Paris: Philippe Sers, 1987) 14.

7 “J’admets la fresque non pas pour mettre en valeur un mur, mais au con-traire comme un moyen pour détruire tumultuesement le mur, lui enlever toute notion de stabilité, de poid, etc.” Le Corbusier, “Le passé a réaction poétique”, catalogue of exhibition Caise nationale des Monuments histo-riques et de Sites/Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (Paris, 1988) 75.

8 Beatriz Colomina, “Le Corbusier y Eileen Gray: una casa de mala reputa-ción”, Arquitectas, un reto profesional, memorias de las Jornadas Interna-cionales de Arquitectura y Urbanismo desde la Perspectiva de las Arqui-tectas (Instituto Juan de Herrera y Ministerio de la Vivienda, C/A Gráfica) 343-353.

9 Le Corbusier, OEuvre Tissé, op. cit., 15.10 “Permettez-moi d’ouvrir la fenêtre vers les horizons illimités de l’art”. Le

Corbusier, in Stanislaus Von Moos, Le Corbusier, l’architecte et son mythe (Paris: Horizons de France, 1971) 272.

11 “Ce tableau, d’où émanement une grande tendresse et une douce quié-tud, semble exprimer le portrair de ‘la famille’ de Le Corbusier (…) Yvonne se trouve sur le canapé, récemment acquis; l’animal est Pinceau, leur pre-mier chien, un griffon, reconnu à la frisure de ses poils”, Naïna Jornod and Jean-Pierre Jornod, op. cit. 573.

12 Letter, 26 November, 1964 l’abbé Reddat. Archivos FLC. Q(1) 5, 174.13 Peter Smithson, Conversaciones con estudiantes, G. G., 2114 Le Corbusier, Œuvre Tissé, op. cit., 14.15 On the interpretation of The Poem of the Right Angle, see Richard A.

Moore, “Alchemical and Mythical Themes in The Poem of the Right Angle 1947-1965”, Oppositions 19/20 (1987) 110-139.

16 This lithograph can be considered as “passed to clean” of the last one of the sketches that served in the process as transformation from the still-life to the figure of the bull, mentioned before.

17 In fact, Le Corbusier used the image of the crow like a kind of personal signature. In paintings of the ceremonial door of the Capitol of Chandi-garh, intermingled with his signature in letters, he painted the crow like his graphical identity.

18 Le Corbusier secret: dessins et collages de la collection Ahrenberg (Lau-sanne: Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 1987).

19 Richard Moore, “Le Corbusier: Myth and meta architecture. The late pe-riod (1947-1965)”, op. cit.

It is about the interpretation of the mural in the Pavilion Swiss20 “(…) Le Corbusier stood the base on its head as if he wanted to transfer

its attributes to himself and make the perspective of Pegasus his own”. Mateo Kries, “S, M, L, XL: Metamorphoses of the Orient in the work of Le Corbusier”, Le Corbusier – The art of architecture (Vitra Design Museum, The Netherlands Architecture Institute y RIBA, 2007) 184-185.

21 Le Corbusier, Carnets, Electa / FLC., Hrescher / dessain et Tolra, París, 1982–1984, Vol. II, F-24, Graf. 701, 703, and 707.

22 “I was impressed by the natural concentration of the simple ritual ex-pressed in the gesture of her hands with fingers interwoven, the low table with candles and the broad forms of her chest and head frankly staring at

the invisible object of her faith”. Le Corbusier, in Richard Ingersoll, Le Cor-busier, A Marriage of countours (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1990) 12.

23 Jean Petit, Le Corbusier: Lui-même, Rousseau, Genève, 1970, 121. See also Jaime Coll, Le Corbusier: la forma acústica, dissertation ETSAB

- Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, 1994. It is a study on the pictorial production of Le Corbusier.

24 Richard Moore, Le Corbusier. Myth and Meta Architecture. The late period (1947-1965), op. cit.

25 This lithograph of Femme Rose connects with the series of paintings Deux Femmes of the middle of the 1930s, in which one of the two women has the face of the moon and to the bottom the window is appraised.

26 This relation between Phasiphae and the bull also can be stated in the lithograph of the poem, titled Unite I, in which a woman embraces with a bull.

27 Mogens Kustrup, l’Iliade de le Corbusier (Milan: Editrice Abitare Seges-ta,2000) and Mogens Kustrup, Le Corbusier, L’Ilíade Dessins (Copenha-gen: Borgen, 1986).

28 “Cap Martin 21/2/55. Cette édition me dégoûte! La typo est bête, les il-lustrations nous plongent au gouffre le plus noir de l’académisme. Art des Olympes pour professeurs et bicornes d’Institut. Grèce non-combattante, verbeuse, en fauteuil et pantoufles. Pas une seul signe de vie. Homère est assassiné. J’ai le sentiment que la traduction est néfaste, lugubree.” Mogens Kustrup, l’Iliade de le Corbusier, op. cit., 71.

29 Naïna Jornod and Jean-Pierre Jornod, op. cit., 870-871.30 Le Corbusier commented that the cover of the chapel was inspired by a

crab shell that he gathered while he was walked by the beaches of Long-Island: “Ramassée Unites coke of crabe à Long-Island près New York, in 1946, est owns the south table à dessin. Elle deviendra him toit of the Chapelle…”, Le Corbusier, Ronchamp, Hatje, Stuttgart, (1957) 89.

31 Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier. Œuvre Complète (Zurich: Willy Boesiger (Dir.), Les Editions d’architecture / Artemis, 1929-1969, Vol. 8) 169.

32 Le Corbusier, Precisions (Barcelona: Apóstrofe, 1999) 98.33 Le Corbusier, Carnets, op. cit., Vol. II, E-20, Graf. 430 and 431.

Le Corbusier, model of the Govener’s Palace in Chandigarh. In: Le Corbusier, OEuvre Complète, vol. 6, 1956-57, p. 102 © FLC

LE CORBUSIER IN BOGOTA

le corbusier, project for the plan director (1950): first...

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