Virgilio Barco Public Library: history and characteristics
The Virgilio Barco Public Library, located in the city of Bogotá, Colombia, is an architectural complex designed by the architect Rogelio Salmona and inaugurated at the end of 2001. Its characteristics have quickly made it a point of reference for contemporary Colombian architecture.
The work was not only an architectural challenge, but also an urban and landscaping challenge, since the building is located in the Simón Bolívar Metropolitan Park. This "megapark" located in the heart of the city, shelters in a single territory four parks, a botanical garden, a golf course, the Children's Museum, the Palace of Sports, the Simón Bolívar Aquatic Complex, the Salitre Sports Unit, the High Performance Center, the Plaza de los Artesanos and, finally, the Virgilio Library Boat.
Brief history
The Virgilio Baco public library is part of a national project that became a reality in 1998, called the Capital Network of Public Libraries or BiblioRed.
The chosen site was a sector of the Simón Bolívar Metropolitan Park located between Avenida 50 and Calle 63 in Bogotá, on a plot of land that had been for some time a deposit of waste from the construction of the park and that, before being used as the library, had been filled to build a restaurant.
The construction of the library thus began in 1999 and ended in December 2001. Originally, the Virgilio Baco public library was to be named after the hero of South American independence, Simón Bolívar. However, after the death of former president Virgilio Barco Vargas in 1997, promoter and sponsor of the project, those responsible decided to dedicate the library to his memory.
On October 25, 2007, the Colombian government, through decree 1773, includes the Virgilio Barco library on the “list of assets declared of cultural interest in the area national".
Architectural features
The Virgilio Barco library is located on an area of about 13 hectares distributed in the shape of a scalene triangle. The total construction area covers 16,092 m².
It is a work of contemporary architecture that deploys a number of technical and material resources to give rise to a novel treatment of the natural and architectural space at the same time.
In basic terms, the complex is shaped like a snail and is intercepted by a vertical axis. It is connected to the adjacent space by means of systems of bridges, paths and cycle paths.
For Juan Pablo Aschner Rosselli, as stated in an article called Virgilio Barco Library: disappearance of the city, invocation of the Savannah, the work as a whole is an evocation of the Bogotá savanna: integration of soil, hills and sky. Let's see why he holds this. Thus, the project constituted a landscape challenge, as we have stated in the opening paragraphs.
Seeking the creation of an environment that, in the middle of the city, could provide a feeling of contact with nature and immersion favorable to reading and reading. creative recreation, Rogelio Salmona treated the land in such a way that the complex and the natural space seemed to be on the fringes of the urban life that develops along the way. its sides.
With this concept, Salmona had the earth stirred at a depth of about 5 meters and, on a system of slopes (inclination of a plot of land), isolated the building from the city, giving rise to different levels and a perception of micro-site. In those depressions formed by the slopes, spaces such as water mirrors were created, whose function is to favor the integration of volumes and spaces around it.
For Aschner Rosselli, this concept forms a kind of decontextualization of the complex with respect to the city. He also sees it as a "staging" in that it creates an alternate, parallel world, a refuge that hides what happens "behind the scenes."
The landscape created by the architect Salmona is included from the interior vision of the building, overturned on that reality by means of a structure concentric in the shape of a snail, which in turn intersects with a section that combines a straight passage with a Cartesian grid, in Aschner's words Rosselli.
In this way, the architect avoids any hierarchy of one volume over another. Neither the vertical axis nor the concentric axis are imposed but rather dialogue.
Interior space
The building is structured on three floors. On the lower floor you can find a bookstore, shops, a cafeteria, a multipurpose room with a capacity of 250 people, an open-air theater and workshops. Also, at this level are the parking services, deposits, reception of books, classification and employee area.
The middle floor has a reading room for children, a newspaper library, the reading room called "Bogotá", an auditorium with capacity for 410 people and a music hall with a maximum capacity of 180 people.
The last level offers an exhibition room, an open theater, and the walkways on the deck.
Aerial view of the Virgilio Barco Library
Biography of Rogelio Salmona
Rogelio Salmona was a Colombian-French architect born in Paris on April 28, 1929 and died on October 3, 2007 in Bogotá. The son of a Spanish father and a French mother, he settled with his family in Bogotá since 1931.
During the 1940s he was trained in Le Corbusier's workshop for almost 10 years. He returned to Colombia in 1958, where he developed his most important work.
Salmona stood out in the development of contemporary style architecture projects, under the principle of communion between urban life and the values of Latin American culture. the use of materials such as concrete, brick and water as an aesthetic and connecting element is common in his works.
Some of his most important works are: the Environmental Axis of Jiménez Avenue, the Postgraduate Building in Human Sciences National University (Bogotá), the Gabriel Cultural Center García Márquez, the General Archive of the Nation, the headquarters of the Vice Presidency of Colombia, the House of Illustrious Guests of Cartagena de Indias and the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, among others.
In 2007, Rogelio Salmona was awarded the Alvar Aalto Prize, awarded by the Finnish Association of Architects (SAFA).
