Garden city

Foliage is fashionable again in Medellin as eco-conscious architecture spreads its roots

- RAINBOW NELSON

After decades of drift, of architects losing touch with their local traditions, foliage is fashionable once more in Medellin. Colombia’s most innovative city is going through a green (r)evolution, a return to its tropical modernism roots with a flurry of high profile hotels, high-end apartment blocks and holistic offices that put plants very much back into the picture.

‘It’s like my grandfather always used to say,’ says Felipe Mesa of architecture firm Plan:B. ‘There’s no building that’s been designed by an architect that can’t be improved by planting a tree in front of it.’ Mesa has been leading the city’s powerful, flowery recovery since he arrived on Medellin’s architectural scene with Orquideorama, a towering, beehive-inspired public space built to showcase the Jardin Botánico’s orchid collection in 2006. Since then, Mesa and his team have pushed the envelope with an organic spread of eco-conscious architecture, including his collaboration with Giancarlo Mazzanti in 2009 on a series of green, permeable sports venues in the heart of the city.

The city’s urban planners have been nurturing an architectural uprising along the same lines, laying down 30 green corridors that involved the planting of 8,300 trees and 350,000 shrubs to criss-cross the city and pump oxygen back into the most polluted neighbourhoods in 2019. The new corridors were connected to 20 ‘articulated life units’ (the city’s formal name for parks) by more than 80km of new cycle lanes – all funded by the city’s renewable energy company, Empresas Publicas de Medellin.