Bridging The Divide

Once the center of controversy, El Equipo Mazzantis innovative Bicentenario Park is now the center of Bogots historic core.

- Anna Fixsen

It’s impossible to experience Bogotá, Colombia, without encountering the aura of Rogelio Salmona. Perhaps more than any architect before him, Salmona shaped the urban identity of this Andean city through poetic, civic-minded buildings. From a small balcony in the late architect’s office—set at the top of a tower of his own design—a Salmona tableau unfurls: directly ahead, the torquing volumes of Torres del Parque, a three-tower residential complex completed in 1970; and to the south, MAMBO, Bogotá’s modern-art museum.

Between these two landmarks, just visible through a canopy of wax palms, is a 21st-century response to Salmona’s Modernist legacy. Bicentenario Park, designed by local firm El Equipo Mazzanti, is an artful fusion of infrastructure and public space. At once a pedestrian bridge and social connector, this verdant two-acre quilt of landscaped brick plazas remedies a critical gash in Bogotá’s historic center.

“The park speaks to a new way of seeing tradition,” says Giancarlo Mazzanti, founder and principal of the firm. “It is a proposal to connect us in a more daring way, opening spaces for everyone and for all activities, putting at the center of the tradition a point of reflection, views, and encounter.”