Returning to Center: Two Views of the Centro Internacional of Bogota (1959–1982)

Abstract

In the present–day city, both the architecture and the quality of its urban spaces are key issues for defining urban strategies that are aimed at improving the livability in the city, in its new metropolitan state. Given the inevitability of the changes that the city itself demonstrates, implicitly and explicitly, a return to the center, to the places with relationships between men and things and with humanized space, offers a possible solution. In this light, the Tequendama–Bavaria complex (1950–1982) within the International Center of Bogota is a center that reveals a series of urban values that may be used as reference points in the challenge of building a polycentric city and in the configuration of livable urban spaces. By analyzing different views since the origins of the city, we can appreciate the consolidation of a project based on the values of territorial and urban “mediation”, which are able to assemble rather than disperse, to integrate rather than segregate, invite rather than repel, and open up rather than close in.