Rogelio Salmona Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Rogelio Salmona (1929-2007) was a Colombian architect, born in Paris, and one of the most important architects of Latin America. Working almost entirely in brick, he created buildings of ramps, courtyards, water channels and terraces open to the mountains and sky, from the Torres del Parque apartments in Bogotá to the National Archive and the Virgilio Barco Public Library.

Paris, Bogotá and Le Corbusier

Salmona was born in Paris in 1929 to a Spanish father and a French mother, and his family moved to Bogotá in 1931. He began studying architecture at the National University of Colombia and, after meeting Le Corbusier during his visit to Bogotá in 1947, went to Paris to work in his studio, where he stayed for nearly ten years while studying sociology and art history.

Brick and the city

Back in Colombia from 1958, Salmona developed an architecture of local brick, inspired by pre-Columbian, Andalusian and Islamic precedents as well as modernism. The Torres del Parque (1964-1970), three curving brick towers that step down towards the bullring and the Parque de la Independencia, gave Bogotá a new public landscape.

Public buildings

His later works include the Casa de Huéspedes Ilustres in Cartagena (1981), the General Archive of the Nation (1992), the Virgilio Barco Public Library (2001), set among pools and earth mounds, and the Gabriel García Márquez Cultural Centre of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, completed after his death.

Recognition

Salmona received the Alvar Aalto Medal in 2003 and many Colombian national prizes. He died in Bogotá in 2007.