For Felipe Uribe de Bedout (Medellin, 1963), the first feature violent of Latin american cities is the annihilation categorical nature. “The landscape is a key element in the pacification of a society”, he argues in his workshop, a sort of monastery devoted to the architecture, nestled in a dense forest and humid in the municipality of el Retiro. Your own office in that farm that was once a reforestadora promotes the state of the soul that is needed to raise city projects, reflects. It was from this idyllic spot, in the middle of streams and guaduales, devised a good part of the dazzling urban renewal of Medellín, that served as an antidote to violence.
The long years in which they lived besieged by bullets and bombs were the paisas to be collected, to withdraw. Medellín, much to her dismay, came to be known as the world capital of drug trafficking. At the end of the last century, after Pablo Escobar was shot on a roof, the city struggled to leave behind the stigma. In just 20 years, became an example of transformation.
“This was the seed of everything,” says Uribe, now in the middle of the Park of the Bare Feet (1999), which was designed together with Ana Elvira Vélez and Giovanna Spera, at the beginning of a tour of some of his most iconic. Originally a commission, in order to put a parking lot, the plaza in front of the headquarters of the Public Companies of Medellín (EPM), which encourages users to take off his shoes, became a point of meeting that convened both to the executive as to the inhabitants of the neighborhoods most humble.
Soon after came the contract for a modest remodeling of the Planetarium of Medellin, next to the campus of the University of Antioquia and close to some of the poorest communities, the focus of the crime that ravaged the city. Uribe was a project much more ambitious, with the idea that lie down to look at the stars or watch movies off an alternative to the spiral of violence. The space, which plays with ramps and inclines, and is complemented by the buildings in which works the network of youth orchestras, it has been aged with sophistication. Around have been sprouting up other symbols of the Medellín reinvented, as the Park Explores or the Orquideorama.
expand photo The Park of Desires, in Medellin. Alejandro Arango Escobar +UdeB Architects
Bare Feet and the Park of Desires, with their names dream, changed the way of understanding the public space. Some elements of such pioneering projects as the jets of water, natural stones, sand, wood and the detailed work of furniture, became distinguishing features of the city. In the background there was already a resounding declaration Retrobet of principles: the public deserves the best quality and the best materials.
The architecture became a major stamp on the development of Medellin. Sergio Fajardo, a mathematician son of an architect – took to the witness during his mayor (2004-2007), and with peatonalizaciones and parks library became the urban development with a social sense on one of the flags of his administration. The revolution was underway, and a number of projects have consolidated the turnaround in the capital of Antioquia.
Precisely because of these years, the plaza de Cisneros, a prelude to the governor and the mayor, had decades of neglect and decay. There, Uribe raised the Library EPM, conceived as an integral project together with the Park of Lights, of Juan Manuel Peláez. The infinite ways of sitting and studying inside the library to testify their obsessive attention to detail, the furniture and the ergonomics. When the sun set, the building also works as a great flashlight. “We had self-imposed a curfew. In a city that I had entered into a regime of violence, reclaim the night was critical,” he recalls.
“opened your eyes”
“The intelligence and above all the sensibility of this great architect was the one who opened the eyes. Their works demonstrated that it was possible -transforming the environment – change the behavior and to contribute to the joy and well-being of the citizens. Few times a physical transformation has contributed both to an improvement in the psychological sense of well-being of those who walk and live in the city”, appreciates the writer Héctor Abad Faciolince. Without boasting expensive and useless, adds the author of The oblivion that we will be, “he knew how to imagine, to see in his head, how is a person of Medellín could be better integrated into our landscape of mountains, our climate is high altitude tropical, and to a space that ceases to be narrow, strait, thanks to their interventions. He gave her air and beauty to what was a narrow, poor and dirty”.
The anthology of his work, a book under the title Host that includes testimonies of their colleagues, will be presented on 26 November in the framework of the Book Fair of Guadalajara and the 1 of December at the Casa Luis Barragán, in Mexico City. “Felipe Uribe is part of a generation of architects who dared to dream, by using the architecture, a possible city in moments in which the very notion of the city (Medellin) seemed impossible in the face of violence and the fear of the wars of the drug,” writes Francisco Sanin on those pages. “The work of Philip has only one purpose: to build open spaces for all, and insert the notion of the collective in our daily life, so that in these societies fragmented and polarized we can find out tissue common”, points out for his part, Camilo Restrepo -creator of the Orquideorama and a professor at Harvard – in another book devoted to Uribe de Bedout that presents the seal Arquine.
Your name is tied to Medellín, but their convictions about the public space can be traced in close to 200 projects, such as the two that develops in the colombian capital, next to Gerardo Olave and Andres Castro. The hazardous design of the building Ad Portas of the University of the fitted Sheet stretches like a hug on the campus, while the building University City links the eastern hills, the Javeriana University, and the congested race seventh, in the heart of Bogota. Also in the civic square of Rionegro, Antioquia, the municipality adjacent to his studio that wants to turn into laboratory of urban planning – or in his many projects in El Salvador, where it is time to put a foot. The main lesson of Medellín, he reflects, is that an inclusive city requires to overdo it on the opening, pulled down the fences, tear down the walls. “A good building should remind us that there is nothing more sublime or beautiful than the landscape.”
expand photo The building Ad Portas of the University of the Shroud, a project of Felipe Uribe, Andrés Castro and Gerardo Olave. Alejandro Arango Escobar +UdeB Architects
