karl heinrich brunner 2: santa fe of bogotá 1934 - 1948

Santa Fe de Bogotá: the city in the 30th and main proposals formulated or executed by KHB (in red).

The type of growth that experiences the city of Bogotá in the three first decades of century XX, starting point of the great present city, offers to K. H. Brunner the opportunity to extend the applied morphologic repertoire in Chile. While in this one it takes care of the architecture of the public space, the city-planning matter that it develops in Bogotá acts on the physical pieces and their connections.

The architecture of the interstices

Between 1900 and 1930, the Colombian capital triplica its population, of 100 to 300 thousand inhabitants. The physical growth extends convulsamente by jumps, leaving great emptinesses interstitial and triggering an endless number of functional problems: little renovation of the colonial constructions, great subdivision and tugurización of the residential areas; collapse of inadequate a road plot the enormous traffic to vehicular; land urbanization of low urban aptitude for topographic reasons and irrigations of flood, devoid of urban infrastructures and collective equipment; etc. While the new city extends towards the North of linear way following the breakthrough sectors regional, towards the South the infrahouse nuclei scatter on the skirt of hills.

The problems that are derived from this conflicting model of growth, advise the urgent formulation of normative instruments that regulate and order the development of the city. At a first moment, beginning of the Thirties, the Municipal Council orders to the office of North American architect Harland Bartholomew the task of elaborating a city-planning study. The data collected in this opportunity by John Marr, constitutes the basic documentation used by Brunner, as of 1933, to develop its city-planning matter.

The essential urban project that K. H. Brunner conceives for Bogotá, during his first Colombian stage, proposes to recompose the urban weave of the republican, broken extension by the growth model, and to form new morphologic elements that induce the reordering of the original quadrilateral and its relations with the suburbs. This morphologic treatment of the urban spaciality, also proposes the correction of the conflicts caused by the lack of functional coherence between the different pieces or constituent fragments from Santa Fe de Bogotá, a city whose development goes behind the improvements that already short while ago had shown other capital cities of the continent.

This resetting of the urban weave is developed through the treatment of the interstitial emptinesses located between original the inner or square helmet and the republican extension; interstitial emptinesses lazy by the physical growth by jumps that extends throughout the arterial axes. This treatment is based on the layout on the interstitial fragment emptinesses of triangular or radial geometry, uniting as a suture, two consolidated growth. This union allows the city planner to act beyond the own layout of suture, obtaining to affect pieces of great dimension, without radically altering the morphologic structure of the existing city.

In spite of the functional conditioners imposed by the existing plot, these pieces of suture of the broken weave by the type of growth, have a great functional rationality. In some cases, these consider like small districts that are overlapped in the existing grid, complementing the road structure of the inner city and its corresponding relations with the perimeter. Also, these districts or urbanizations set out like self-sufficient units that, as German siedlung, persecute the creation of social structures and the configuration of more or less homogenous constructive and formal tipologics.

Among other aspects, the layout of an urbanization, thought Brunner, always would have to contain a reasoning near ornamental planimetry. But, it can be incoherent if this planimetry reflects that the city is, before everything, a social organism and a place for the development of the society:

(...) The designer of an independent district must become aware of which she is conceiving something like a place for a human community; he must group the houses and to compose these groups forming apples and streets, so that all that, along with the other buildings, constitutes part of a city (...)

In spite of the alterations undergone in the last years, because of the real estate pressure and of the own natural deterioration, the districts El Campín and Palermo , in the North, and the Centenario, in the South, they constitute the full exponents of the idea of city that Brunner proposes to order a growth convulso, that leaves in evidence the capacities and limitations of the municipal administration to orient the urban development.

In the second Colombian stage, the Forties, Brunner concentrate in the resolution of the continuity of the original nucleus with the republican extension and the outer territory. The direction the North-South, adopted spontaneously by the growth, generates a city linear that it requires of great infrastructure investments and their displacements are long and expensive. The city satellite El Salitre, that Brunner conceives to correct this tendency, persecutes to generate an alternative axis of growth towards the western sector or savannah, with grounds level and next to the civic-commercial center, to articulate the city with its rural context.

Surrounded by a forest belt, this nucleus satellite presents/displays a city-planning structure based on an axis that structures the different constituent pieces and lodges the equipment of the set and the greater functional and volumetric densities. Between this axial strip and the outer ring, locates the residential sector of low density, articulated by means of cross-sectional routes. With an extension near 500 has., El Salitre had allowed to lodge about 60 thousand inhabitants and gotten to define an alternative centralidad to the axial centralidad of the city.

Brunner remains in Santa Fe Bogota between years 1934 and 1948. In this last year, Le Corbusier prepares the formulation of Plan Director of the city. Meanwhile, KHB is in charge to write up the plan of reconstruction of Vienna, Austria. It could not affirm that between both city planners theoretical differences exist substantial. Nevertheless, the city of LC always is a machine of new creation; for KHB, it is an organism in permanent recognition.

Bibliography

1. Karl H. Brunner. - Santiago of Chile, its present and future formation. La Tracción, Santiago of Chile, 1932.

                           - Manual de Urbanismo, first volume. Imprenta Municipal, Bogotá, 1939.

                           - Karl H. Brunner. Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, in charge of arqtos. F. Cortés and K. Brunner, 1989.

2. Revista de Arquitectura Nº 8. Monographic K.H.Brunner, in charge of M.I.Pavéz, FAU - UCH, Santiago, 1996.

page dedicated to the urbanism professors

inicio - top