BOGOTA - Le Corbusier en Bogotá

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

Part two 

BOGOTA

Bogota, 1940-1950: Towards modernization 

Alberto 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 towards 

the improvement of the conditions of its public services, 

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 special 

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: 

60 Le Corbusier in Bogotá: Precisions around the Master Plan 

Office of the Regulator Plan (OPR), Five-Year 

Plan, street-widening, Avenida 

Norte Quito Sur, and the placement of 

Paloquemao market plaza, 1951. 

© A-D Archivo de Bogotá 201-001-23 

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 advances 

of the capitalism, found in the bank, industry, commerce, 

and entertainment, horizons of modernization, and 

approached them. Therefore, a bicephalous conception of 

modernization and progress became established, one liberalizing, 

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 approximated 

number of 330,000 inhabitants; in 1951 it registered 

715,000. The urban plans of that period show a city of an elongated 

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 western 

edge. The streetcars’ routes and some of the important 

roads, like the 7 th 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, surrounded 

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, Independence 

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

after the murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, should have manifested 

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 centenary 

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 Brunner, 

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 development 

of a large area of land located in the western periphery 

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 disposition 

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 analogous 

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 original 

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 development 

model applied to the rest of Bogota, based on building 

“urbanizations” or “neighborhoods” by private businessmen, 

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. 

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

61

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 housing 

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 formulated 

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 applied 

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 expressly 

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 project. 

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 Corbusier”, 

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 modern 

city”, concentrated on the “re-urbanization of the central 

market place and of the 16 neighboring blocks”, an ambitious 

project of urban renovation that covered from 7 th Street, 

in the south, to 11 th Street, in the north, and from the 9th 

Carrera, to the east, until the 12 th 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, becoming 

a fragment of a modern city. There was no mention of 

an interest in its patrimonial value. That attitude was characteristic 

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 understand 

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 modernization. 

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 population 

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 completed 

in the east-west axis: the Official Administrative Center

and the El Dorado airport. The north freeway was built as an 

extension of Caracas Avenue. These works were not anticipated 

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 dictatorship, 

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 Universidad 

Nacional de Colombia (1965). Specialized in Housing and Planning 

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), Arquitectura 

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 Architecture 

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. Cartografía, 

1791-2007 (Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá: Planeta, 2007). 

2 Guillermo Hernández de Alba, Álbum de Bogotá, 1938, Sociedad de Mejoras 

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 

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

63

Notes for a context on the Pilot Plan and the Regulatory Plan of Bogota 

Hernando 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 distinction 

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 reference 

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 awareness 

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 disentailment 

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 industrialization 

and improvement announced new molds and problems. 

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 public 

transportation networks, expressed how the population 

growth and the specialization of the urban centers during the 

republican period demanded more space and better standards. 

On the other hand, there appeared normative indications 

on building control, efforts to make technical surveys, 

hygiene campaigns promoting green spaces and cleanings. 

With the arrival of the railroads in Colombian cities (Barranquilla, 

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 Sierra, 

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 consciously 

organized framework of future city, drawing from 

international experience. Olano, after attending the international 

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 economic 

expansion of the twenties— with public money received 

from the indemnification of Panama and local and international 

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 landscapes 

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 architectengineers 

like Enrique Uribe Ramírez, who led improvement 

proposals on the continent. We should not forget that the engineer 

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 infrastructure 

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 Barranquilla, 

this resulted in advanced models for the management 

of municipal services. For its part, the problem of housing 

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

code of urbanism from the prestigious Bartholomew, pioneer 

of the new profession in North America. And that, in circumstances 

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 demanded 

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, aestheticizing 

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 commissioned 

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. Despite 

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 international 

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 commerce 

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 proposals 

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 controversy. 

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, especially 

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 planner 

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 European 

architect, although it was very unusual that then-mayor 

Mazuera, who would go on to great accomplishments in government 

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 culminated 

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 

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

65

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, 1934 

2. Prelimary plan for El Campin, 1934 

3. El Retiro, 1939 

4. Medina, 1935 

5. Workers’ Neighborhood, Social and Sports Center, 1935 

6. Project for El Campin 

7. San Luis, 1936 

8. El Bosque Izquierdo, 1936 

9. El Centenario neighborhood, 1938 

10. Ciudad Del Empleado (The Employees’ City), 1942 

11. Satellite City, 1942 

Street expansions and road plans 

12. Study of the Ensanche Sur, 1934 

13. Study of the Ensanche Occidental, 1934-35 

14. Study of the Ensanche de la Calle Real, 1935 

15. Study of construction of the Avenida Central, 1935 

16. Road plan for Bogota, 1936-37 

17. Road opening, 1934 

18. Regulator plan and street-widening in Bogota 

19. Regulation of the Avenida Caracas 

20. Regulation of the Avenida Jiménez 

Other constructions: 

21. Media Torta cultural center 

22. Gardens at the Escuela Bellavista 

23. El Campin stadium 

24. Humboldt Monument 

25. Emergency Clinic 

26. “Daytime” Hotel project (subterranean) 

27. Lookout Terrace at the Paseo Bolívar 

28. Extension of 26 th St. 

29. Tranvia stops 

30. Kiosks for the Paseo Bolívar 

Parks 

31. Paseo Bolivar Park 

32. Park on 13 th St. and 26 th Ave. 

33. Plaza de Nariño 

34. Santander Park 

35. Santa Sofia Park 

36. San Martin Park 

37. San Diego Park 

38. El Salitre Forestal Park 

39. Panamerican Forest 

40. San Fernando Park 

41. Park in the La Estrella neighborhood 

42. Calderón Tejada Forest Park 

43. 20 de Julio Park 

44. Los Rosales Park 

45. Sebastián de Belalcázar Ave.

works in his words a lasting accomplishment and an orientating 

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 million 

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 prestige 

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 construction. 

Several main assignments were considered: managing 

and using the ten million dollars that the International Bank of 

Reconstruction and Promotion had approved for the reconstruction 

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 making 

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 immediate 

consequence was the commission that Serrano, Ritter 

and Arango formed to handle the reconstruction and that tested 

the possible integration predial on the 7 th 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 programs 

of infrastructure modernization. 18 At that time in Medellin, 

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 profits 

in works like breaking canals and forming new routes. Restrepo 

invited Le Corbusier to Medellin to interest him in formulating 

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 unequal 

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 systems 

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 criteria 

for their application were mentioned. 20 

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the foreigners were 

learning in Colombia. In the notebooks there appear references 

to Pizano and the Catalan vault and in the correspondences 

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 different 

temperaments, like those of Gaitán Cortés or Arbeláez 

Camacho. The first one, a technocrat, a politician, was interested 

with Sert, from Tumaco, in the urban plans. His multiple 

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-ofthe-art. 

Germán Téllez speaks to us of their dean at the time 21 

(note six) and on the obvious difference between the Corbusian 

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 culminated 

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 essential 

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 member 

of the CIAM—and therefore a guarantee for the consultants. 

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 proximity 

with the mayor and the president (note 8). With Francisco 

Pizano and an increasing team of architects and engineers, 

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 buildings 

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 commercial 

growth, distribution of population and activity of construction 

of house per years. 26 


67

It is very clear that the mayoralty of Santiago Trujillo Gómez 

(from April 1949 to July 1952) imposed pressure in time, detail, 

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 concluded 

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 private 

developers. 27 

Examining the their correspondences in the period of elaboration 

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 development 

with local means. 29 

The proximity and distance of the group of Proa with respect 

to the Pilot Plan has been examined before. It is a history 

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 Bogota, 

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 intermediate 

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 irremediably 

spending the credit of the project and its authors. 

A key opponent, Brown Manuel Umaña, represented the interest 

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, created 

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 photomosaic 

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 international 

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 transform 

itself into a linear city of a precise Biology. They are multitude 

of empty areas in the zones destined to housing, emptiness 

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 demographic 

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 centers. 

The automation of agriculture and the means of urban 

transportation, followed by means of individual transportation, 

made possible this tremendous growth in the radical 

numbers and changes in the conditions of life and environment. 

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 countries, 

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 characterized 

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 international 

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 Official 

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 mechanisms 

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 rurality 

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 problems 

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 mobilization 

of the workers, and basic education. And he summarized 

characteristics of a city to surpass that, instead of 

a culvert, had the “old Spanish sewer”, with space for automobiles, 

since the railroad was considered “perfectly uneconomical”, 

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 making 

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 oneself 

… 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 benefit 

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 corresponds 

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 problem 

as complex as the urban zoning. Each case in particular 

must be studied and be solved by a living organism that constitutes 

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 similarity 

between the social conditions of India and Colombia 

with respect to undernourishment, illiteracy and lack of assistance. 

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 traditional 

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 deficiency. 

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 commitment 

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 committed 

in the past and trying to avoid their repetition in the 

future”. And it was pointed out that its “suggestions and standard 

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 10 th Carrera. 

In this context, in which the services of aqueduct, sewage 

system, and electricity did not bear on the urban growth, 

with buildings ventilated by small patios, norms as the Act 


69


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 organized 

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 exactly 

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 bibliography. 

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 urbanizations, 

to conceive systems of road intersections with several 

successive phases of development with bridged rotaries 

after round points. 

The difficulty of advance without an embryonic regulatory 

frame was seen. At that time Luis Cordova Mariño, advisory 

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 marginal 

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 parcellings 

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 considered 

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 establish 

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 Service 

Report of 1949, questions regarding construction and operations 

in hills were considered, although the OPRB would not 

demonstrate specifically how to handle slope urbanizations, 

secular subject of the Colombian Andean city 41 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 maintenances 

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 inhabitants 

after 50 years, handling densities of 200, 300, 350 and 

400 inhabitants by hectare in different zones. It was an imperative 

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 mention 

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 economic 

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 citizenship 

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 restore 

the concept of vicinity, giving each sector its own character 

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, inadequate 

speculation on the ground, and construction had generated 

a series of answers on perimeter, roadways, superblocks, 

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. 


71

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 decades 

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 course 44 (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 Management 

and Engineering of construction. Member of the Academia Colombiana 

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 actividad 

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 Perseverancia 

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 parquímetros. 

Fabio Zambrano, Exposición Bogotá Siglo XX (Bogotá: Museo de 

Desarrollo Urbano, 2000). 

5 Richard Morse, Formação histórica de São Paulo: de comunidade á metrópole 

(São Paulo: Difusão Euopéia do Livro, 1970). 

6 Luis Fernando González, Medellin, los orígenes y la transición a la modernidad: 

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: Unibiblos, 

Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2007) 119-128. Antonio Amézquita, 

“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 Colombia, 

Camacol, 1957-2007, (Bogotá: Panamericana, 2007). 

14 Hernando Vargas Rubiano (1917-2008) belonged to the first group of architects 

graduated from the Universidad Nacional, in 1941, which included 

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 Boyacá,1987). 

15 About ATBAT and Bodiansky, ver Bruno Reichlin (Dir.), “Le Corbusier”, Enciclopedia 

Electa (1988) 97-98. 

16 Hernando Vargas Caicedo, Cincuenta años en la construcción de Colombia, 

op. cit. 

17 Jorge Arango, Herbert Ritter, Gabriel Serrano, “La reconstrucción de Bogotá”, 

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 surface 

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 considered 

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 Faculty: 

one was the famous “Grille CIAM” (Grid of the International Congresses 

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 scholastic 

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 Institute. 

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, “Historia 

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 Universidad 

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 modernization: 

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 reconstrucción 

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, arquitectos 

como Gabriel Solano, Francisco Pizano, Germán Samper G., 

Guillermo Bermúdez y Fernando Martínez S. Véase Carlos Niño, Arquitectura 

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 singlefamily 

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: vivienda 

Banco Obrero en Venezuela (1955-1957)”, Tecnología y Construcción, 

vol. 24, no. 2, May 2008. 

29 Luis Fernando Acebedo, “El CINVA y su entorno espacial y político”, ponencia 

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 Santamaría, 

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: Informe 

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 Tiempo, 

(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 Geológico 

Nacional, informe, August 1949. 

42 EAAB ESP, El agua en la historia de una ciudad. Vol. 2, EAAB ESP (Bogotá: 

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. 


73

“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 everything, 

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 happened 

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, urbanism 

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 Corbusier 

was imagining a city that followed the laws of nature 

and that was related to its history: he understood that the geography 

defined from the beginning the territorial and urban 

structure of the city, and that simultaneously, the city’s history 


a) b) c) 

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 

would define the urban landscape. And, in fact, is he himself 

who states very clearly from the beginning what the departure 

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 Bogota, 

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

a) b) 

geography of the territory, where the new unit of aggregation 

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 dimensions 

is put on stage, where volumes, streets, and spaces 

overlap and confront directly with geography and history, responding 

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. 

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 

It is, in fact, in the city’s central area—that is to say, the 

civic center—where the urban-architectural proposal integrates 

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 conviction 

of “the new” possibilities of city-making through architecture, 

in the case of Bogota’s center, we will initially approach 

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 architecture 

and urbanism, formal and compositional pattern procedures 

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 order? 

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 interior 

forms, interior channeling and exterior forms and exterior 

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

75

a) 

b) 

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, urbanism 

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 7 th , 10 th , and 14 th Carreras, intersected 

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, 


c) 

Series of three sketches, Le Corbusier, 1947. 

a) Le Corbusier, Bogota June 24 th , 1947. © FLC H3-5-36-001 

b) Le Corbusier, Bogota June 26 th , 1947. © FLC H3-5-37-001 

c) Le Corbusier, (Bogota, date unkown). © FLC H3-5-38-001 

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 relation 

of the center is noticeable, supported by the decision 

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 National 

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 

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

© FLC 

- In the third, he tries a new urban order that is superimposed 

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 10 th 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 preexisting 

structures are marked; among them are the urban 

plots around the Plaza de Bolívar and the 7 th Carrera.

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 between 

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 continuity 

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 define 

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. 

Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 607a 


77

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, although 

the latter limits itself. It is possible to see some historical 

buildings as references. The 7 th Carrera along with 

the 8 th 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 appear 

drawn with a similar degree of definition. What is configured 

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 26 th Street, 

the 9 th Carrera is emphasized by means of a series of elements 

that are still not defined. A plot of streets in the eastwest 

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 detail; 

there are no important changes with respect to the previous 

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 begins 

in the Santander Park and that includes the arrangement 

of the 9 th 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 preponderance 

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 Plaza. 

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. 


Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 31564

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 accesses. 

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 geographic 

conditions of the city and the structuring role of the 

rivers. In the second, he continues reflecting on the arrangement 

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 7 th Carrera. The 

role played by “Broadway” as a structuring axis in the northsouth 

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 markedly 

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 tension 

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 


79

Le Corbusier, Carnet 2–D14–27-28 © 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 specific. 

This system was established by means of the final disposition 

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, reaffirming 

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 process 

of the proposal is more legible. 


Le Corbusier, Pilot Plan for Bogota © FLC 33689





81

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 composition 

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 platform—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 ensemble 

can already be seen, where in addition each urban area, 


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

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 buildings 

and preexisting streets and guidelines of relation with 

the city, marking the direction of the dynamics of the development 

and the continuity towards its longitudinal sense— towards 

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 7 th Carrera, reaffirming their structuring role, 

and other defined by low buildings, platforms, and green 

public spaces, which contribute complexity to the urban fabric 

and that would animate the “Broadway” of Bogota. 

In the scheme we have marked in red the archetypal buildings 

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 7 th 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.

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 previously 

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 10 th 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 center. 

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 relations 

(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 7 th 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 


83

a) b) 

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 

ensemble. Definition of the high blocks like urban tensionmakers. 

The urban carpet, the low platforms and buildings 

appear drawn schematically, but not detailed. 

5. Integration of all the elements and systems that compose 

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 Corbusier 

puts in practice an “urbanism in three dimensions”; 

that is to say, a way to take part in the constructed city assuming 

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 functional 

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 seriality 

and sequence, by means of the disposition of the blocks; 

the continuity and space integration, by means of the definition 

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 addition 

of elements (tower, block, bar, low body, platform, etc.). 

The Pilot Plan for Bogota was approved by means of Decree 

185 of 1951, with different results: a roadway network 

that would organize the sectors is one of the most evident aspects 

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 approved, 

but its repercussions, in our opinion, are and can be 

important. His guidelines and bets agree with basic postulates 

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

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 

a) b) 

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. 

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 located 

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 Martínez 

Sanabria of 1960, acquired a new appearance that 

adapted to the colonial weave valuing the historical preexistences 

of the Plaza, redefining the powerful “urban void” like 

an opening to the natural scene, releasing totally the horizontal 

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 reshaped 

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 characterization 

of the city. 

Finally, the International Center (and specifically the Tequendama-Bavaria 

urban ensemble) is the test of a new way 

to make a city; a new center with a strategic location, an area 


85

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 previously 

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 representative 

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 transformation 

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 7 th Carrera, in a context that stands out for its historical 


and urban value, and in addition is part of a set of buildings 

varied by its use, time and architecture, that define and delimit 

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 highest 

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 respect 

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 competition” 

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 

Urban role of Le Corbusier’s Gran Immeuble in the Plaza 

de Bolívar and the Avianca building in the Parque Santander. 

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: Metrópoli 

moderna, Servicios Técnicos Editoriales, 1970. a) b) 

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 immediate: 

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 construction, 

balanced, that by its simplicity lasts through the years”; 

“Plastic Contribution that becomes symbol for the promotional 

company and the city”; “Synthesis at the present time of 

urbanism, architecture and technique”. 13 

Evidently the Avianca building conceived as a new urban 

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 

7 th Carrera, as vertical element of “resistance” necessary to 

compensate the horizontality of the urban space in which it is

Van Eesteren, Propuesta para el área de Rokin, Amsterdam, 1924. Tension, 

counterpoint and balance between urban elements. © Julián Galindo, Cornelis 

van Eesteren, La experiencia de Ámsterdam 1929-1958, Fundación Caja 

de Arquitectos, Barcelona, 2003, pp. 38. 

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 categories, 

arranged on different levels: Santander Park, outstanding 

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 7 th Carrera, to a higher level with respect 

to the street, it configures itself as an outer-inner space of access 

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. 

Images of the relationships between the lower foundations of buildings facing 7 th 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. 


87

Le Corbusier, Carnet 2–D16’–187-188, sketch from February 28 th , 1950. Proposal for a new centrality in the area near the bull ring (San Diego): the proposed 

buildings form a unitary whole connected to nature, public spaces and present builidngs. © FLC 

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 visual, 

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 principles, 

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 center, 

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 capable 

of establishing new mechanisms of relation of different 

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, commercial, 

and cultural) that conforms the civic center. 

In a sketch from February, 1950, Le Corbusier drew a proposal 

of a composition of a set of urban buildings situated 

ahead of the Bullring. They are, evidently, high and far-reaching 

buildings that grant to this area of the city an important 

strategic role as a new urban and territorial centrality, a cultural 

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 general 

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 urbanism 

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 realization 

of a very emblematic urban setting for the city of Bogota: 

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 International 

Center of Bogota, that in spite of a little well-known process 

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 project 

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 conformed 

by the 7 th Carrera and the 10 th 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, throughout 

the 7 th Carrera, solving the transition between the city of a 

colonial layout and the new formation one. 

At an architectural level, the diverse buildings with programs 

and uses (residential, of commercial offices and of 

leisure) are urban elements that establish diverse types of relations 

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 composition 

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 10 th Carrera

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 26 th 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 


F. Second extension Tequendama Hotel 1966-1967 


G. Residences Bachué (today Tequendama) 1978-1982 


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) 

C 

D 

AB 

F 

E G 

a) b) c) 

b) 

a) Plans of the urban composition © Mayorga-Fontana, 2009 

b) The perspective from the Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez proposal for the Tequendama complex, 1952. © 

L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui num. 80, 1958. 

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. 


89

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 project 

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 consolidation 

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 represented 

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 relations 

with the existing: in the same line of Le Corbusier’s proposals 

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 without 

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 “Tequendama 

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 preexistences 

and to clearly adhere to a tension directive reaffirming 

the importance of the 7 th Carrera as the structuring 

axis of the city. 

Both parts fulfill these objectives by means of different urban 

compositions: to the area of the Tequendama set, for example, 

if we pay attention to the first proposal of Cuéllar-Serrano-Gómez, 

instead than in the set that was built, we identified 

an urban grouping composed by four buildings in bar (including 

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 


Perspective of a three-dimensional model of the Tequendama-Bavaria urban complex. 

© Mayorga-Fontana, 2009. 

Plans made by the creators of the connecting mechanisms between the blocks and platforms that make up 

the complex. © Mayorga-Fontana, 2009.

one, longitudinal on the 13 th Carrera, in such a way that the 

set is open towards the mountains and in addition defined a 

sequence of headwalls on the 7 th Carrera, as well as a more 

compact facade on the 13 th Carrera. 

In the final realization, the second extension of the Tequendama 

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 instead 

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 disposition 

of these elements allows for different visual relations with 

the mountains (framing or trimming silhouettes) or with the existing 

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 recognize 

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 extension, 

for example, the two blocks located cross-sectionally in 

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

View of downtown Bogota on Google Earth, 2008. 

relation to the street are imposed upon a low body. In the Bochica 

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 commercial 

street-passage. In the Bavaria set, the two residential 

Location and section of the Tequendama-Bavaria Complex. 

© Mayorga-Fontana, 2009. 

towers rest on a large urban platform that lodges commercial 

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 urban 

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 between 

the buildings and their surroundings. 


91

a) b) 

c) d) 

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. 


“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 accelerate 

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 accomplishments 

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 carried 

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 Corbusier 

explains: 

I have expressed a silhouette of city. Why lacking of moderation 

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 cacophony. 

[...] 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 intervene 

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 Bogota, 

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. 

The Tequendama-Bavara complex: the lower foundation and the street-level relationships of spatial 

continuity. The urban carpet; low bodies and platforms. The composition of large volumes, 

towers and blocks. © Mayorga-Fontana 

They have been invited editors of DPA 20 Cosenza (2004) y DPA 24 Bogotá 

Moderna (2008). They have been curators of several exhibitions, among 

them Colombia. Arquitectura Moderna. 50-60, UPC - La Salle, Barcelona 

(2004); Colombia. Contribución a la modernidad, Museo de Bogotá. 

Bogotá (2005); Ciudad y arquitectura moderna en Colombia. 50-70, Ministerio 

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, Precisiones 

respecto al estado actual de la arquitectura y el urbanismo (Barcelona: 

Apóstrofe, 1999) 89-105. 

2 Idem, p. 90. 

3 Le Corbusier, “Plan Piloto de Bogotá”, Pórtico (special edition, 1952) 19 

4 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 peripheral 

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- 

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. 

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 Frampton, 

“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 Comercio 

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 building. 

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. 


93

Le Corbusier and Proa magazine, or the history of a misunderstanding 

Hugo 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 16 th and the 24 th 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 20 th century architecture in Colombia 

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 international 

movement in local context. 

In May 1947, in the editorial of number of Proa 7, Le Corbusier’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 prestige 

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 complex 

personality: a Renaissance man, who besides being an 

architect was also an urban planner, a painter, and a mathematician. 

The articles had an unmistakable tone of admiration 

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 20 th 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 Corbusier 

was the creator of contemporary architecture. His importance, 

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 mechanization, 

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 architecture. 

The text of Arango ended by emphasizing the propagandist 

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 LÉsprit Noveau and a sketch of the building, 

an image of the project for the Centrosoyuss, the house in 

Mathes (that explains the new use of the stone), and the building 

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 projects, 

the article was centered on books, articles, and conferences 

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 assigned 

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 aspects: 

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

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 domi-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 

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

Self-portrait of Le Corbusier published in Proa no. 7 in the article entitled “Psycogenisis 

of Le Corbusier’s painting” © Proa 

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

95

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 singular 

article, full of psychology concepts, which made its reading 

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 architect. 

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 suggestive 

interpretation. 

Augusto Tobito, on the other hand, presented “Le Corbusier 

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-planning 

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 enthusiastic 

profile of Le Corbusier’s figure, an extract of Le Modulor, 

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 magazine: 

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 Regulatory 

Plan of Bogota—OPRB (1947)—and the official delivery 

of the plan director (1950). Secondly, the acid editorial 

published in the magazine in November 1952, against Bogota’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 published 

in the magazine Proa to transform Bogota into a modern 

city. They were: 1. The extension of the 10 th Carrera; 2. The 

roadway plan for the next 20 years; 3. The re-urbanization of 

the central market place and of the 16 th neighboring blocks; 4. 

The city of the employee; and 5. The reconstruction of Bogota. 2 

These proposals had been developed by people like Edgar 

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 Carlos 

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 private 

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 advanced 

by the public administration, that is to say, an institution 

of the state, so that in this way the privilege of the collective 

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 abundant 

number of mayors, but few that deserve a place in cityplanning 

annals of this city”. 

The unique mayor who escaped of the criticisms of Martinez 

was Jorge Soto del Corral, since “he was the first in 

conceiving the vast project of extension and opening of roadways, 

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 10 th Carrera” and according to what 

it affirmed: “The mayor Llinás, successor of Soto del Corral,

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

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 10 th 

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 

One of the models created by students that were published in Proa magazine 

no. 1, in the article entitled: “To Make a Bogota a Modern City.” © Proa 


97

made the council to approve, in 1945, according to the principles 

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 approval 

of this project on the part of the administration of the 

city could have meant, it is probable that the magazine considered 

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 10 th Carrera was celebrated, a campaign 

was launched so that the Administration of the city created 

a “Departamento Municipal de Planificación Autónomo” 

(Municipal Department of Independent Planning), an organism 

that “… already exists in the capital of any State where 

the order, the hygiene and the growth of the city are concerns”. 

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 capable 

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 Department 

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 compromised 

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 ideological 

connection, as of that moment, the publishers to the 

magazine were in charge to promote the assigning of an urban 

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 suggest 

the figure of an adviser instead of a contractor; consequently 

the publishers of the magazine didn’t seem resigned 

to the possibility of carrying out the plans that they had published 

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 maturity. 

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 appearance 

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 administration 

of the mayor Fernando Mazuera, Le Corbusier made a 

second trip to Bogota with the aim—according to what appeared 

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 Serrano 

Camargo titled “Review of the Regulatory Plan of Bogota”, 

published in April 1950, the subject of the plan would 

disappear quietly from the pages of the magazine, to the extent 

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 Bogota, 

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 publishers 

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 convenience 

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 commissioned 

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 director 

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 November 

1952, Carlos Martinez accused of deceit to the “foreign 

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 deadlines 

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 thousand 

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 contractors 

had given up to that moment did not represent anything 

that professional Colombians would not have been able to realize 

in Bogota. To complete the matter, the regulatory plans 

that the company of Wiener and Sert had realized for Tumaco, 

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 obsolete 

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 reality 

the limits that, on paper, the plan had fixed for the urbanization 

of the city. 

In the heated social and political atmosphere of the beginning 

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 avenue 

of the same name were constructed outside the perimeter 

that the plan of Le Corbusier had anticipated for the city. 

After the “misunderstanding Le Corbusier” and with the reestablishment 

of the democratic regimes in 1959, Carlos Martinez 

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 historical, 

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 relationships 

that could be constructed between the Colombian architects, 

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 socalled 

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 almost 

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 putting 

in order again that which carelessness, inexperience, 


99

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 manifests 

itself by means of one of highly traditionalistic character… 

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 Mondragón, 

“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 Nacional 

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 mandates 

of order and in observance to the principles that regulate the urban 

morphology, exchanged as of this moment its economic layout for a confused 

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 farming, 

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 history: 

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 involved 

in an ongoingfight to professionalize the exercise of the architecture, 

trying to accede to the spheres of power, in which fundamental decisions 

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 LÉnfanta. 

Caracas had Guzmán Blanco and lately Medina Angarita. Rio de Janeiro 

had to Rey Juan and Getulio Vargas and Buenos Aires to Rivadavia. In Bogota 

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 University 

of Paris. 

13 In fact, the article “So that Bogota is a modern city” is illustrated with photographs 

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 negotiations 

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 specific 

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 giving 

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 neigborhoods”. 

“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 Colombians 

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. 


101

The eminent visitor and a professor of architecture 

Mauricio Pinilla 

Leopoldo Rother: portrait. © Marta Devia de Jiménez, Leopoldo Rother en la 

ciudad universitaria, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, p. 51. 


Architecte Rother de Bogota, auteur de lédifice postal gouvernamental 

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 technicians 

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 National 

Socialism was taking root at a very fast pace, exhibiting 

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 consolidating 

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. Educated 

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 produced 

such decisive space conquests to culture. Moderately, 

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 remembered 

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 responsibility 

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 married 

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 reasonably 

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 architecture 

decisively. 

He brings with him recognized experience as a designer, 

which includes the conception of some of the most important 

buildings of the University of Clausthal. 4 Surely this was 

preponderant when deciding to hire him, because one of the

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 vastness 

of the landscape and its contrasts, the light and the colors 

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 constructing 

technical arguments harmonious with the logic of the project. 

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 reference—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 intellectual 

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 latitude 

to which he has moved, to an integral and affective understanding 

of the forms of inhabitation and with the culture 

of his new residence on Earth. Evidence of his precise knowledge 

of the solar position in relation to the latitude, the season 

of the year, and the hour, are the class notes that he composed 

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 information 

of the characteristics of a specific material or construc- 

Cabin located in the area surrounding Ciénaga de San Marcos 

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 buildings 

and the breeze. © Tratado de Diseño Arquitectónico. Tomo I, 

Figura 78, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Artes. Departamento 

de Arquitectura 1970. 

The eminent visitor and a professor of architecture | Mauricio Pinilla 

103

Leopoldo Rother: cover of Tratado de 

Diseño Arquitectónico, edited by the 

Department of Architecture at Universidad 

Nacional de Colombia in 1970. © 

Taken from the volume stored in the Architectural 

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 Architecture 

1970. 

Hannes Meyer, children’s housing in Solothurn, Switzerland (1938). © Hannes Meyer, Bauten, Projekte 

und Schriften, Architectural Book Publishing Co., New York 1965. 

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. 

Leopoldo Rother, Escuela Normal de Pamplona, Colombia (1936). © Hans Rother, Arquitecto 

Leopoldo Rother, Escala, 1980.

tive system, cuts of technical catalogues, students’ exercises 

on diverse programs or explanations of certain problems, intermingled 

with drawings and texts made by him. 6 Testimony 

to his knowledge of solar geometry is given by the publication, 

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 geography 

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, 

Le Corbusier, Casa le Lac (1923): fotographe of the roof © Dorothée Imbert. 

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DA AGP, París / FLC. 2006. 

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. 

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 Rother 

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 gymnastics, 

receiving the first rays of the sun from the east. In the 

case of Rother, the cylinder will occasionally enclose a classroom 

for the education of the arts and will be used as a chapel. 

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 modern 

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 Colombia, 

mainly in the conception of the master plan for the Universidad 

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 monumental 

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 Geological 

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 individual 

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 constructions. 

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. 


105

Cover of the book Brazil Builds. 

Rother had an edition in his library. 

© The Museum of Modern 

Art, New York 1943. 

Costa, Niemeyer, Reidy, Leao, Moreira, Vasconcellos, Brazilian Ministry of 

Education and Public Health. © Lárchitecture dáujourd´hui. Special Number. 

August 1947. 

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 relationship 

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 Architecture 

1970. 


Rother’s biographers indicate the arrival of Bruno Violi 

as an important influence in those years, who passed Perret’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 composition, 

we are in this case in front of a strictly typological 

composition, almost eternal. 

But Leopoldo Rother—kind, amiable, a little timid, disciplined 

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 architecture 

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 

Le Corbusier, an alternative project for the Brazilian Ministry of Education and 

Public Health, situated on bay’s waterfront that became a marvelous opportunity 

for the team of talented young professionals that carried out the final project. 

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 

an extraordinary power, enriched by the tropical climate, by 

the necessity of shade, and by the exuberance of the vegetation 

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 dictated 

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 periods 

of cold weather of the northern hemisphere. They would 

seem to be made on purpose for the breeze that is so beneficial 

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 identifies, 

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 Education 

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

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 climates: 

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 cannot 

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 rationalism 

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 composition, 

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 landscape. 

He would have discovered, probably with admiration, 

the affinities of that architecture with the tasks that he has undertaken, 

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 intellectual 

work admires and knows well. 

The influence of that syncretism also arrives at Rother 

through magazines. In class notes for his students, he included 

the cover of the magazine Pencil Points of September 

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 

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 7 th , 1945. The construction 

plan for the blocks dates from September 18 th , 1945 and is held in 

the Archivo General de la Nación. © Carlos Niño Murcia, Arquitectura y Estado, 

second edition, Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2003. 

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 Nacional 

de Colombia. © Copy of the issue stored in the newspaper library at the 

Universidad Nacional de Colombia. 

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 profession, 

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 Barranquilla, 

and the influence of his friend Violi is evident. The 


107

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 celestial 

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 ventilation. 

The side facing the south, more exposed, would be protected 

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 


Diagram of regional wind currents. © Ideam. 

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. 

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 composition 

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 

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. Later 

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. 


109

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. 

110 Le Corbusier in Bogotá: Precisions around the Master Plan

Leopoldo Rother, perspective of the project for the Girardot market plaza, published 

in the magazine Proa No. 4. Drawing by P.J. © Proa 

Leopoldo Rother, details about the structural system of the paneling covering 

the market plaza in Girardot. © Hans Rother, Arquitecto Leopoldo Rother, 

Escala, 1980. 

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

the cylindrical columns and producing a funnel type that accelerates 

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 ventilation 

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, interconnected 

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 direct 

solar radiation. The space conquered in these levels becomes 

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 composition 

and comes alive, once the traditional codes of relation 

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 effective 

way. 

These are the plans that were of much interest to Le Corbusier 

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 anachronistic 

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 Dirección 

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 


111

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 techniques, 

the house for Mr. Hutheesing. Neither would not be built. Œuvre complète 

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. Barranquilla. 

2002. 


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 interest 

to him. He was going to make contact with the rich industrial 

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 building 

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 parasol 

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 Universidad 

Nacional de Colombia. Professor of the Faculty of Architecture and 

Design at Universidad de los Andes. 

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

that the European culture has of more spiritual, did not approached architecture, 

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 (Bogota: 

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 wonderful 

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 process 

of classification for its transfer to the archives of institutional memory 

of the University. Consulted Sindu Library, August 2009. This folder contains 

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 soleamiento 

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 physics; 

it is the law of the line of major pending and later, if everything becomes 

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 urbanismo 

(Barcelona: Apóstrofe, Col. Poseidón, 1999). 

9 “It is impossible to recreate the spiritual trajectory of change of the architect, 

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 Honneger, 

old head of the office of Auguste Perret. This last one finished erecting 

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 contemporary 

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, German 

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. Another 

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 periodicals 

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 institutional 

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 enunciated 

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 additionally 

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 enormous 

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 Buildings. 

After presenting a few good works to him, a set was exhibited, perhaps 

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 dictating 

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, corresponded 

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 projects 

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). 


113

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 


Bogota, Le Corbusier titled a tapestry that he completed in 

1950. In the tapestry it is possible to see a group of personages 

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, attributing 

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 replaces 

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, London, 

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 relation 

with those places. Sometimes, the titles obeyed more 

to the artist’s personal circumstances. For example, the series 

of paintings called Vézelay were in fact created in that

Le Corbusier, L’Ennui régnait au dehors, 1953 (Tapestry). In Le Corbusier, Œuvre 

Tissé, Philippe Sers, Paris, 1987, p. 31 © FLC 

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 refugee—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 elements 

he generated winding forms, concavities and convexities 

that would metaphorically cause the emanation and 

reception of sound waves, establishing in this way a communication 

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 architecture 

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. 

Le Corbusier, Musicians, 1951-59 (Lithograph). Image taken from Le Corbusier, 

The Graphic Work, Heidi Webwe, Zurich / Montreal, 1988, p. 65 © FLC 

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 decomposed, 

the parts separated until some acquire autonomy 

from the others. This would be the beginning of the individual 

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 musical 

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, Ozon opus I, 1947 (Sculpture) © FLC 

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

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

115

understood as the continuation of another series of paintings—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 table 1 . 

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, unless 

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, tapestries 

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 activity 

as a plastic artist in tandem with his more well known facet 

of architect and city planner. He used to dedicate the mornings 

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 revealed 

them it would be like exposing and betraying himself. 3 

On an exceptional occasion, he explained some of the symbols 

that appear in the carpets of the justice courts in Chandigarh. 

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 modulor 

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 “rediscovered” 

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 modern 

man: “J’ai baptisé mes tapisseries du terme de “Muralnomad”, 

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 absorbs 

sound waves; it wraps the space and avoids the reverberations 

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 solution 

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 dwelling 

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, Femme nue sur canapé avec chien, 1934 (Oil on canvas) 

© FLC 109 

Le Corbusier, studio of Les musiciennes, 1936 (Pencil 

drawing), Carnet C12, Rio, 1936, nº 720 © FLC 

Pablo Picasso, Tres músicos, 1921 (Oil on canvas), Philadelphia Museum of Art 

(A. E. Gallatin Collection) 

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

Pablo Picasso, Bouteille de vieux marc, verre, journal, 

1912 (glued paper and drawing) Private Collection, Paris 


117

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; nevertheless, 

it is not clear what instruments the remaining personages 

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 paintings, 

this tapestry can be divided in horizontal and vertical 

strips, forming quadrants. We can divide the carpet as follows: 

the strip of the left includes two of the feminine personages; 

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 denominated 

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 window 

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 separation 

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 distinguished 

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 tapestries 

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 representation 

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 element 

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 accordionist. 

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 Musiciens, 

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 composition, 

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 picture 

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 noticeable 

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.

Le Corbusier, Nature morte au siphón – 2 nd version, 1921 (Oil on 

canvas) © FLC 139 

Pablo Picasso, Minotauro con una copa en la mano y mujer joven, 1933 (etching) 

Geiser, 349 II. Bolliger. S. V. 83, Bloch I, 190 

Le Corbusier, lower level of the Ville Savoye, 1929. En: Le Corbusier, 

OEuvre Complète, vol. 2, 1929-1934. © FLC 

Le Corbusier, Unité 1 (Lithograph). In: The Poem of the Right Angle, 1947- 

1953, p. 99 © FLC 

The composition of Le Corbusier’s still life makes strong 

references to the traces of the plans of Villa Savoye. The incline 

of the house assumes the central position of the bottle 

and the curved wall of the access responds to the skirted silhouette 

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 recherches 

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 interest—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 paintings 

from the 1950s and 60s, called Taureaux (Bulls). The 

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

© FLC 


119

Le Corbusier, the transformation of the bull. Carnet 

F24, India, 1952, nº 713 © FLC 

Le Corbusier, study for Bogota, 1950 (Pastel). In: Le 

Corbusier, Œuvre Tissé, Philippe Sers, Paris, 1987, 

p. 48 © FLC 

Le Corbusier, Unité 2 (Litografía). In The Poem of the 

Right Angle, 1947-1953, p. 149 © 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, exaggerating 

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 reminiscences 

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 distinguished 

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 illustration 

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 denomination 

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 allegories 

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 sources. 

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 towards 

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 lithograph 

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 explained 

from other perspectives. In some, it is associated 

with the mythological figure of Pegasus, the flying horse. During 

his “trip to the east”, Le Corbusier acquired for his personal 

collection a ceramic jar with a somewhat peculiar form; 

the top was decorated with two figures, one of them a human 

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 Pegasus 

again”. In a 1922 photograph, in which Le Corbusier appears 

with Albert Jeaneret and Amédée Ozenfant, he is seen 

gracefully carrying the jug on his head, perhaps wanting to 

incorporate into himself its mythological form 20 . 

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 drawing 

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 central 

figure, but also by the superimposed red stain on the violinist. 

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-birdgoat 

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 


121

Le Corbusier holding a pitcher allusive to a Pegasus. Cropping 

of a photo in which Ozenfant and Alber Jeanneret 

also appear,1919 © FLC 

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 painting 

Appuyes a la rambarde (1953-1936), where the personage 

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 amalgamation 

between human being and animal, similar to the one 

of Taureaux. A clear example of hybridization between animal 


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 

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 explored 

throughout his life, he denominated Bestiaire: 

Intutivement depuis 20 ans j’ai conduit mes figures vers 

des formes animales porteuses du caractére, force du signe, 

capacité algébrique d’entrer en rapport entre elles et 

déclachant ansi 1 phénomene poétique (…) Faire un groupement 

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 figure 

with the face of a moon; and the bull in two different versions, 

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

ull, rotated 90 degrees. One of the bull’s most characteristic 

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 tapestry 

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 depicts 

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 elongated 

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. Unicorn and a figure with a moonface 

–Icône, Carnet F24, India, 1952, nº 707 © FLC 

Le Corbusier, drawings from Bestiario. Bulls heads fused to a human body, 

Carnet F24, India, 1952, nº 703 © FLC 

Le Corbusier, drawing from Bestiario. Le Biche, Carnet F24, India, 1952, 

nº 715 © FLC 


123

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 

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 demonstrated 

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. 


Le Corbusier, La petite confidence, 1962 (Sculpture) 

© FLC 

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 background 

behind a screen, partially hidden, as it would be it in 

the labyrinth. 26 

Another test that would confirm the influence of Greek mythology 

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 drawings 

Helena is seen on the walls of Troy in the company of 

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

1987, p. 72 © FLC 

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 deduce 

that the man represents Le Corbusier. 29 The assembly 

of Licorne entering itself into the couple could mean the conjunction 

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 descends 

to Earth and connects them, establishing a relationship 

of union between celestial and earthly conditions, between 

mythology and human beings, between the imaginary 

and the real.

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 different 

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, referencing 

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 terrestrial, 

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, perhaps 

with a greater emphasis at the end of his career. The 

Bogota tapestry is a sample of it. Little otherther than the association 

of these wildly different aspects seems to capture 

his interest,, and thus it could be deduced from the other title, 

Bogota: L Ènnui régnait au-dehors (“ boredom reigns outside”), 

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; concentrated 

in the bestiary, they have the extraordinary capacity 

of transmutating themselves. That quality of transformation 

triggers, according to Le Corbusier, a “poetic phenomenon”. 

This last word reminds us that something very similar happened 

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 Corbusier, 

The Graphic Work, Heidi Webwe, Zurich / Montreal, 1988, p. 70 © FLC 

Le Corbusier, Unicorn and its partner, drawing from Nivola 

album. In: Mogens Kustrup, Le Corbusier, Porte Email, Forlag, 

Copenhagen, 1991. © 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, Le Divan (Drawing) © FLC 3629 


125

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 people, 

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 village, 

les enfants, les adults et les vieillards actifs, l´étang et 

les manguiers, tout est présent et sourit, pauvre mais proportionné. 

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 Chandigarh 

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. 


In that same carnet, he made twp drawings ofa brick factory 

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 Capitol 

(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 palace 

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 directed 

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. 

Jaime Sarmiento: Architect, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellin 

(1988), Ph.D. from the Superior Tecnic of School Architecture of Barcelona, 

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 Architecture 

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. 

Le Corbusier, drawing of a women in Bogota holding a child in her arms, Carnet 

D15, Bogota, 1950, nº 74 © FLC 

Le Corbusier, distant drawing of the brick factory in Bogota, Carnet E20, Bogota, 

1951, nº 430 © FLC 

Le Corbusier, close-up drawing of the brick factory in Bogota, Carnet E20, 

Bogota, 1951, nº 431 © FLC

Le Corbusier, model of the Govener’s Palace in Chandigarh. In: Le Corbusier, 

OEuvre Complète, vol. 6, 1956-57, p. 102 © FLC 

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 entreprise 

en 1918 et poursuivie régulièrement chaque jour (...) Le fond de ma 

recherche et de ma production intellectuelles a son secret dans la pratique 

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, inconnue 

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); Richard 

A. Moore, ”Le Corbusier: Myth and meta architecture. The late period 

(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 contraire 

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 historiques 

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 reputación”, 

Arquitectas, un reto profesional, memorias de las Jornadas Internacionales 

de Arquitectura y Urbanismo desde la Perspectiva de las Arquitectas 

(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 quiétud, 

semble exprimer le portrair de ‘la famille’ de Le Corbusier (…) Yvonne 

se trouve sur le canapé, récemment acquis; l’animal est Pinceau, leur premier 

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., 21 

14 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 Chandigarh, 

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 (Lausanne: 

Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 1987). 

19 Richard Moore, “Le Corbusier: Myth and meta architecture. The late period 

(1947-1965)”, op. cit. 

It is about the interpretation of the mural in the Pavilion Swiss 

20 “(…) 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 expressed 

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 Corbusier, 

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 Segesta,2000) 

and Mogens Kustrup, Le Corbusier, L’Ilíade Dessins (Copenhagen: 

Borgen, 1986). 

28 “Cap Martin 21/2/55. Cette édition me dégoûte! La typo est bête, les illustrations 

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. 


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LE CORBUSIER IN BOGOTA

BOGOTA - Le Corbusier en Bogotá

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