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Architects: DARP - De Arquitectura y Paisaje
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Mauricio Carvajal
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Lead Architect: Jaime Eduardo Cabal Mejía, Jorge Emilio Buitrago Gutiérrez
Text description provided by the architects. The Gran Colombiano Park is a place with a heritage declaration, made up of four real estates of cultural interest of national order (BIC), the highest degree of conservation established by the Ministry of Culture. It is located less than two kilometers from the Colombian-Venezuelan border, a place of social, political, and environmental tensions that requires reconciliation actions.
It commemorates the signing of the 1821 constitution, which gave life to the union of American countries known as Gran Colombia and the birthplace of General Santander, hero of independence, one of the eal estates of cultural interest of national order within the park, which functions as a museum house bearing his name.
In order to reconnect the heritage and the site, a longitudinal structure and a series of transversal structures are proposed. These two structures organize the uses of the park, and its composition and recognize forms of connection at different scales.
The design of the project was arranged through a public competition in 2012, and has been executed in different phases during the last ten years. It seeks to understand heritage from a broad perspective, which considers the built and the natural as part of a binomial and interprets sustainable construction policies focusing on the preservation of heritage values from the point of view of three different actions:
- Promoting accessibility to heritage: The proposed interventions seek to physically recover the sites after their restoration while seeking to resignify them through a reorganization of the park routes and by combining pedestrian itineraries. Small low-impact infrastructures of a mimetic nature use different strategies to respectfully articulate the whole while encouraging appropriation and promoting new uses for a space that had become an unsafe place of social segregation.
- Reconnecting natural and urban systems: Pre-existing environmental values are recognized in the park. An old ditch in a state of desiccation due to mismanagement of neighboring urbanization, the park's wooded area with more than 80 centenary royal palms are restored. A connection with the urban area of the municipality is prioritized, starting from recognizing the urban fabric, incorporating transversal crossings to the park with safe passages on the roads, and mitigating the problem of pedestrian accidents on two high-flow roads that surround the complex.
- Working with the community: The project has been carried out at different stages for ten years, the last stage being the most important in size and scope. This has allowed a rapprochement with neighboring communities and has allowed the development of consultation processes that have led to modifications to the originally presented project.
The preservation of vernacular construction traditions, the use of local materials, educational initiatives and consultation processes, have allowed an early involvement of the communities of the sector.
Diverse social groups that inhabit the perimeter of the park begin their approach to this new scenario of urban life, giving their own meaning to the care and rehabilitation of tangible and intangible heritage.
