Businessman Diego Marulanda says that Alto Prado was a neighborhood of single-story houses, with lush gardens and strong trees, where children could play without the restriction of bars or fences. That each block defined the group of friends and weddings, fifteenth parties or social presentations were held in residences with structures devoid of any ornament, with clear lines on the façade and details such as niches or lattices to ventilate domestic life in a humid and suffocating city like Barranquilla.
They were the fifties, sixties and seventies of the last century. The neighborhood, founded in the 1920s, has given way to a succession of buildings and establishments with Anglo-Saxon names such as The Closet, The Bronx or Home Burger. More than a hundred houses like those described by Marulanda have been demolished since the eighties, destroying an architectural complex of heritage value. A moment in the history of the city in which local and interior designers allowed themselves to be guided by the ideology of the modern movement, that kind of manifesto that relied on the plastic features of the industry and wanted to break the seams of academic formalism.
(Left) Archive photo of a street in the Alto Prado neighborhood, (right) the same street today. Personal archive of Carlos Bell Lemus/María Roa
Today there are only seven houses left from this period, which spanned the years 1946 to 1965, scattered under the shade of old rubber trees that cushion the heat on undulating streets. One of them belonged to the in-laws of Marulanda, 72, who retains fresh memories of his in-laws: “The Jaars arrived by boat from France. “They were industrialists of Palestinian descent who founded a very important textile factory more than 70 years ago that had 1,200 employees.” Its description serves to form an idea of the foundations of the port city, the gateway to artistic innovations, and atypical in Colombia due to its diversity of Jewish, Chinese, French and Arab immigrants.
With the demolition of the houses in Alto Prado, the work of a group of Barranquilla architects such as Roberto Acosta (95 years old), Ricardo González Ripoll (1925-1981) or José Alejandro García (1922-2011) has been passed over. Fortunately, all of them have been the subject of an academic claim by the architect Diego Agamez, who in a master's thesis, awarded by the National University of Medellín, retraces his steps and his silent work in the urban configuration of the capital of the Atlantic. and the fourth city in the country by number of inhabitants.
Agamez says that the disregard for these coastal architects reached the point that their housing projects were never reviewed by the defunct Bogotá magazine Proa, a reference platform for anyone interested in the architectural avant-garde of the last century: “The only thing that can be found , sporadically, are comments on some institutional buildings, some works by Leopoldo Rother. But the only means of dissemination for them in reality was the magazine La Prensa de Barranquilla, more local and, if you will, provincial.”
A house in the Alto Prado neighborhood of Barranquilla.María Roa
The agony of this piece of Barranquilla's cultural history is described by heritage expert Alberto Escovar as dramatic. In his opinion, Agamez's work serves as an alert to safeguard other examples of good architecture that date from a period that in the United States is known as the mid-century and that is still quite misunderstood in the country: “One hundred works lying down is a figure devastating. Modern architecture, due to its temporal proximity, has had many problems in being valued in its true dimensions.”
This has not been the case with Rogelio Salmona, perhaps the most recognized designer in the country, and whose works, such as the General Archive of the Nation or the Torres del Parque in Bogotá, are protected. The pillars of his work fit, in fact, within the same modern period whose most media references at an international level are, perhaps, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Escovar warns that of all the buildings demolished in Barranquilla, few would have been the subject of a heritage declaration in themselves: “But in this case the interesting thing would have been to preserve the complex to understand what was behind the design exercise, what was what the society of that time wanted to represent with that style that coincided in time with other cultural movements such as La Cueva.”
It refers to a group of friends among whom were Gabriel García Márquez, Alejandro Obregón, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio and the architect Ricardo González Ripoll. In the La Cueva bar, which still survives in the Boston neighborhood, they met in the middle of the last century in gatherings that, like modern architecture, aimed to overthrow social conventions and explore the hallmarks of contemporary culture. But with the arrival of drug trafficking, the so-called marimbera bonanza of the late 70s, that intellectual spirit began to fade.
Gabriel García Márquez, the architect Ricardo González Ripoll and the writer Álvaro Cepeda Samudio. La Cueva Foundation
The Prado, which today as then continues to be a privileged environment, suffered an urban mutation as it saw the gradual disappearance of its low houses by buildings with imitations of Doric or Corinthian columns. The urban and life model, the aesthetics and the vision of the world, had changed forever. “At first they modified them, filled them with marble and other ostentatious materials,” laments Diego Agamez, and points out that “real estate speculation, the desire to maximize the use of each square meter, and the enclosure of the new collective housing buildings ” break violently with the daily life and urban landscape of the old suburb.
Paradoxically, the only houses that have been preserved from other eras are in the Republican style, prior to that of the “half a century.” The legendary Hotel El Prado is, perhaps, the best-known example, but there are other cases with the same influence that evoke, to a greater or lesser extent, the style of the American White House. These are examples from the 1920s and 1930s that have deserved greater attention in the collective imagination of Barranquilla residents. Katya González is the daughter of the architect and two-time mayor of the city Ricardo González Ripoll: “There is hardly anything left of my father. They destroyed everything.” In her opinion, the biggest urban problem is that the city, from the most exclusive neighborhoods to the poorest, resembles a “barred prison.” Even the nice houses that remain standing are enclosed between walls and private security booths.”
The truth is that the historiography of architecture in Colombia is a relatively recent exercise, Alberto Escovar adds, “but the story has always been told from Bogotá. The rest have been peripheral episodes. I myself must admit my ignorance because I had never heard the names of most of these Barranquilla architects.” He concludes that this is also a wake-up call for other cities like Cali or Medellín. An incentive to write his own biography and prevent more works of modern architecture capable of generating pleasure to the human eye from continuing to disappear.
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